Emojency! 💼⚽💥🇺🇸 (4189)

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Starts Wednesday, 7th of April.

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The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, Buglers, and welcome to issue 4189 of the Bugle for the 4189th consecutive bugle, allowing for the 3707 or so episodes that we skipped in the middle.

I am Andy Zaltzmann, and when all is said and done, I'll be out of a job, I guess, if no one's saying or doing anything anymore.

This is going to be a very quiet podcast.

Luckily, people are still very much saying and doing stuff, so the bugle lives on.

And two guests join me today to say stuff about the things other people are saying and doing.

Firstly, from Dublin, in what we in the uk now call the long-forgotten continent of europe it's david o'docherty it's been a tough year andy it this was the year i was going to try and qualify for the olympics at uh twister right and of course i couldn't train uh because you can't spin the thing even if you're just on your own and then the olympics were cancelled and who knows they're going to happen this year so just let's just try and carry on as best we can sorry sorry to to to intrude intrude on that and i mean in terms of selection for the irish twister team obviously there's you know a great heritage of the sport

in Ireland.

But how close are you to the top of the Irish Twister rankings?

I'm number one.

Right.

They're my rankings.

You'll find them on my Twitter account.

So that's.

That's the best way to get to the top of rankings, isn't it?

You just make them up.

I mean,

that and the other hope was this was the year I was going to become a street magician.

But it's been a difficult year for that too, because you approach anyone with a deck of cards on the street, they're just like, get lost.

It's been it's been a tough time.

I mean, in in fact, when you think of the history of sport, essentially, it was largely a way to get Britain to the top of world rankings.

And then we've made the mistake of teaching other people uh how to play them and that uh rather undercut the whole project.

Also joining us from Melbourne, Australia, where he is currently, what's this bizarre phrase, performing live stand-up in front of a three-dimensional real human crowd.

I don't understand those words.

It's Tom Ballard.

Hello, friends.

Hi, everything's everything's going great down here.

Why?

Do you guys read the news?

What's happening up there?

Oh, disgusting.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm solidarity with you all.

I miss you.

And I'm working on the vaccine, a Ballard-branded vaccine specifically for Europeans that's coming your way.

If you guys want to be my guinea pigs, I think it'd be good.

Happy to.

Happy to.

But I'm a natural-born guinea pig.

How's the festival going?

It's great without all you stinking internationals taking away our sweet sweet.

Well, Tom, I would like to say, when I was one of the stinking internationals, I didn't take many tickets away.

Count me out of this.

I'll talk to you.

You've got a legitimate quibble with.

That's true.

I'm getting a lot of weird heckles this year, like, play your little keyboard.

Do you want observations about cricket?

This sucks.

And I say, no, you're getting ballard.

That's all you're getting.

All right, it's a bit of tough here, everyone.

We are recording on Friday, the 2nd of April, 2021.

On this day, in 1912, the Titanic began sea trials and absolutely cruised through them too easily if anything even didn't look the loop perhaps got overconfident for its subsequent trip across the Atlantic on this day in 1800 Ludwig van Beethoven led the premiere of his first symphony in Vienna LVB of course very much the Taylor Swift of his day but different in many ways before having chart success with smash hits such as the Eroica Symphony the Moonlight Sonata Furry Lisa not what it sounds it was in fact a touching tribute to his his pet gerbil, Lisa, and Push It, later covered by hip-hop duo Salt and Pepper, of course.

LBB wrote advertising jingles for popular products of the day, including So Long Syphilis, Dr.

Haubgartner's Shame Assuaging Serum, Packs Off the Pox.

That was a sonata for String Quartet.

Snout It Premium Snuff is simply never enough.

No no says no to snout it snuff.

That was a cantata for four voices and trombone, arguably the greatest musical sneeze ever composed.

And Frulein Frufru's frilly fancies.

Your nethers have never had such fancy frolicles.

That was a concerto for bassoon and orchestra.

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

You've got to keep laughing.

You've got to hang on to your sense of humor.

That's Tom Ballard says that while sitting under a palm tree with people all dancing around him in paradise.

No, guys, enough flow jobs.

I'm doing the bugle.

I had a pound for every time I've had to say.

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

Great questions of modern philosophy is going in the bin, including: can staplers feel pain?

If free will is an illusion, how come I've just eaten 53 lettuces in a supermarket without being asked to leave?

If gods are obviously rubbish at their jobs or bunking off from work, should we still worship them?

If the universe is expanding faster than we thought, does this make us smaller?

And if so, do we need to raise the minimum height for fairground rides?

If is morality relative?

And if so, at what level of wealth or political power does it become so relative that it ceases to exist at all?

If an artist can tell you that a piece of used kitchen towel they've glued to an empty jar of marmalade is art, can you claim that saying, f often learned to paint, is in fact a poem?

Is torture justifiable if it helps advance the plot of a TV drama series about terrorists, which would otherwise become a 12-series courtroom procedural in which nothing much happens?

And finally, the big questions of the day we address in our section in the bin: is it possible to be partially right and partially wrong about something?

And if a politician says something in front of a flag, does that become more or less true?

That philosophy section with all the answers in the bin this week.

Top story this week, it's Easter.

It's Good Friday.

That is a day that cost my team a lot of market share back in the day.

How are you

celebrating Easter this year?

Well, it used to be the only day of the year that all the Irish pubs were shut.

But they changed that law in 2019.

And was the Lord displeased?

You'd have to say yes.

Oh, now we know.

Now we know why it all happened.

Tom,

what does Easter mean to you on a deeply personal level?

On a deeply personal level?

Well, I mean, you know, it's booming this year.

Apparently, people are going nuts for Easter.

They're buying everything that they possibly can.

Egg sales are through the roof.

And some are saying it's a response to the pandemic and people want to come together and celebrate with one another and sort of reconnect with human beings.

Others are saying that, you know, it is a sign that more and more people want to stick it to the likes of Andy Zaltzmann and his people.

You know, you can kill our Messiah all you want, Andy.

We will not let you place downward pressure on sales figures.

All right, mate?

Okay.

Well, I see that.

And for me, Easter is that special time of year when we all commemorate the smooth running of the judicial system as it's time.

Let's not judge things by modern standards.

That's what we keep being told.

It's also, and yesterday was April Fool's Day.

And of course, I mean, that was the origin of April Fool's Day, was the first Easter itself on the 1st of April.

I think it was 33 AD.

The whole, I'm dead, I'm not dead, give me five, ow, I'll still saw thing.

But

I mean, wow, wow, never let go.

Awful stuff.

I mean, people say it's got too commercial, the whole thing, especially with Easter wreaths this year.

But I mean, I see

the Christian context in everything.

The Easter wreath reminding us of the wreath of thorns put on our Lord.

You know, the Easter tree reminding us of the wood used to build the cross.

And then the Easter egg, which is in the shape of a big fat zero, which is what they found when they roll back the tomb.

Yeah, you go, girl, Jesus.

I mean, there's different ways of inter.

I mean, the Easter tree, that's, I've not really noticed that before.

That seems to become more prominent.

One One of the leading British supermarkets reported that searches for Easter trees are up a thousand percent

on last year.

I mean,

what the f is an Easter tree?

I can't keep up now.

Easter involves a bunny rabbit, chocolate eggs, chocolate bunny rabbits, hot cross buns, four-day weekend, crucifixes, and now I've got a tree.

Easter is becoming Game of Thrones at this rate.

Every year, we're going to need a previously on Easter recap just to keep up.

Well, hot cross buns, of course, for those of them, that's

a really British thing.

Of course, Easter is a very British festival.

And because the Brits were one of the very few people who didn't actually crucify Jesus.

But hot cross buns, they are fruity buns with a cross on the top.

They are now also available with other forms of brutal execution decoratively piped on the top of the bun, including hot guillotine buns, hot electric chair buns,

and for fans of British imperial history, hot strapping a local to the front of a cannon and blasting him to pieces buns.

So you can get a lot of different forms of execution on your buns.

I've got hot buns all year round, if you know what I mean.

I just, guys, the reason I've come on today is just to make sure that we do remember...

the true meaning of Easter, commemorating when Jesus went to an island in the southeastern Pacific and carved some giant stone heads.

Why did he do it?

We're not supposed to know how, but we commemorate by eating our own head size in chapel.

And I, just to let you know, I have a personal relationship with Easter Island that goes back to the 70s when I was the head of the Easter Island Tourist Board.

And they tried to promote the island not using the giant stone heads.

Just emphasizing some of the other stuff there is, such as the great transport links and shopping in downtown Hangaroa.

But we went back to the heads then.

I think it's good to see that Easter being as commercialized as Christmas.

It's like this is what Jesus the Socialist was going for.

Okay.

Everybody knows God sent him to earth in the fourth quarter of the financial year to help corporate stock clearance, then had him killed and reincarnated in between the first and second quarters to boost consumer confidence.

And I think as part of everyone's COVID economic recovery, business is actually going to be pushing for a third Jesus-based holiday/slash consumerist orgy just to further boost economic activity.

It's going to be around October.

It's going to be in celebration of Jesus by mitzvah, which we really don't hear anything about at all.

But to celebrate,

you could celebrate by buying every single one of your relatives a traditional Jesus bar mitzvah Amazon candle set.

Now just $25.99 free delivery.

How about that, Andy?

It's true, Tom.

It's often overlooked.

Well,

there's discrepancies between the Gospels.

Did Jesus throw the traders out of the temple, or did Jesus say stay and emphasize trickle-down economics and how ultimately it would help the guys at the bottom?

Big questions.

We're celebrating 50 years of the Cadbury's cream egg in this country, and we're celebrating,

frankly, anything

sitting alone

in our houses.

And

I guess this explains

the increasing popularity of Easter trees that people are now searching for.

Absolutely fing anything to break the crushing monotony of COVID life, even if it's making up a tradition of having decorative trees at a traditionally sombre festival that marks the death of someone who is quite literally nailed to some tree.

The cream egg, for those who've not come across it, is a renowned confection.

It has a chocolate outer coating or shell, a white made from the

milky sweet liquid found inside dragon's eyeballs, and the yellow yolk concocted from sweetened unicorn pus.

I think I haven't read the ingredients list for a while, and I could have gone a number of different ways with that bit.

But

there's been an advert featuring a same-sex kiss on a Cadbury's cream egg advert, and it has caused all manner of holy meltdowns.

Tom, you are

contradicting the laws of Almighty God correspondent.

Just

bring us up to date with that.

Thank you, Andy.

A pleasure to finally fill the segment.

I've been waiting for my chance.

Send me in, coach.

Yes, look, this was an advert.

This sort of kicked around in February.

Basically, two men are sharing a cream egg.

They're celebrating the 50th anniversary by both kissing kissing each other and sharing an egg between their mouths uh while a voiceover says we are down with that uh of course bigoted zealots like andy zoltzmann would rather voice ever simply say down with that but uh that's not how his edits didn't get through but 30 000 people signed a petition to try and have the ad withdrawn saying that it was offensive to members of the christian community which you know i thought it was pretty kind of tame and

It's just two guys kissing, you know, I think if they really wanted to offend the Christian community, they could have shown five guys f ⁇ ing each other's holes with giant chocolate dildo eggs while dressed as giant bunnies, shoving covered crucifixes in each other's buns, shooting their cream all over each other's, as well as furious fucking the f out of each

balls and out their own

Easter trees.

You know, I mean, that was just like a tradition

that maybe could have worked.

So, I mean, so but I honestly, I mean, I do ask this, you know, respect, respectfully as a Jew, uh, Tom, but why do your people hate Jesus so much?

I mean people who disapprove of that ad will have welcomed the news this week of the incredible quantities of sugar that there is in a Cadbury's cream egg.

Somehow there is more sugar in a cream egg than there is cream egg and weight of cream egg.

It's like a black hole of sugar.

But I have to say it's not that surprising.

I mean the the what you telling me Easter eggs they have a a lot of sugar in them?

Nothing about that.

I don't understand why I'm so healthy at the moment.

I've been sticking rigidly to my 12 cream eggs a day diet for a month.

What I'm saying is, those

godless homosexuals will probably die soon from too much sugar.

Hallelujah.

It's an Easter miracle, everybody.

I mean, I don't know.

I mean, why do we think that

the Christians who are being told that they're offended by this advert were so...

I mean, was it because of the kiss or because it was an egg?

If it was a raspberry-flavoured sherbet crucifix being nibbled from either end by a 1970s priest and a terrified child, would that be better or worse, do you think, from

an evangelical point of view?

I've not.

I mean, is there evidence that when Jesus betrayed Mr.

Christ with a kiss, there was a chocolate egg exchanged between their mouths.

Do we know?

I mean, is this one thing that's half chopper?

They did kiss, didn't they?

Judas betrayed him with a kiss there.

Maybe there was an egg in there as well.

There was dripping all over.

It was really hot and stuff.

It's quite possible.

From a blasphemy point of view, I see Chris has calculated he can use 30 seconds of his recording so far.

Tough edit this week.

Follow-up question, Eddie's Osman.

What is the 1970s priest exactly?

Can you suppose we're putting that?

Is that one with a priest with amazing sidebirds or stuff?

Or

what does it look like exactly well i don't know it's a i think it's a spiritual state rather than a temporal or fashion state to be honestly um cadbury issued a statement saying we are proud of our golden goobale advert which celebrates the many ways that everyone can enjoy a cadbury's cream egg what does it happen many ways uh I don't know.

A tiny rugby ball, perhaps, to confuse a roosting pigeon by sneaking it into its nest and seeing what happens, or to demonstrate physics to a child who spends their entire life on Minecraft and assumes that everything is cuboid.

A quick Easter fact for you before we move on to the next story.

The word yeast is in fact an abbreviation for Jesus Christ, who seemed to be dead but then came back to life and rose.

There's a little fact.

Moving on now.

Wow.

Hang on.

I just need to state one more thing, which is so some nerd forensic anthropologist recently made a picture of what Jesus would have looked like, actually, because he's not the blonde-haired, blue-eyed person that appears in the Renaissance paintings we know.

And he is a Palestinian man in the year,

Palestinian Jew in the year zero, and he looks exactly like me.

Somehow, I mean, this is a common face that I have.

You'll notice it in the man who invented Tetris.

He's a Russian man, Chris O'Dowd.

There's a ceramic lion in Edinburgh Museum that somehow, once a month, someone tweets me and says, We saw a ceramic lion, you won't believe this, but there's a, and I'll be like, Is it a ceramic lion in Edinburgh Museum?

Yes, that looks exactly like you.

So, what I'm saying is, the next few weeks when the J-Man has escaped from the J-Cave is when I really start to startle people by wandering into churches in my white gown.

I mean, it's it's often that you always say people saying, Oh, I saw the face of Jesus and a slice of toast,

but generally, it isn't not the face of Jesus, it's actually the face of the 1970s Argentinian footballer Mario Kempez.

People get easily confused.

Well, you are hearing the voice of Jesus right here on the bugle.

What do you make of the state of the world, Jesus?

How do you think we're going?

All good.

Smoke weed.

Moving on to a partially related story.

Well, on the subject of blasphemy,

the well, huge eruptions in the world of shoes.

The

musical acts Lil Nas X.

Is he Lil Nass X or Lil Nas X?

Look, I was looking forward to doing this story just to see the Andy's ultimate take on that particular rapper's name.

I'll just check the etymology online.

Hang on.

Oh, no.

So, just say, well, it is Lil Nas X.

He's named after the Australian cricketer Dennis Lilly.

That's the Lil Bit, arguably Australia's greatest fast.

Former England captain Nasser Hussein.

That's NAS.

And the X is from the 1930s South African All-rounder, Xenophon Belascas.

So a massive cricket fan, of course.

See, that surprises me then because there were two ways he was going to go with that.

Either the cricket route, which in retrospect was obvious, or I thought he was going to go where X is a value determined by the following formula.

Have you ever listened to any hip-hop in your entire life, Anthony?

No, I'll be honest, not a great deal.

Although my son does spend about 90% of his waking hours singing the musical Hamilton.

I don't know if that counts.

Oh.

Anyway, Lil Nas X has tried to sell 660 pairs.

Even when he says it, oh, God.

666 pairs of modified Nike's with a drop of human blood in the soul.

That's S-O-L-E.

Nike has launched legal action to try and prevent the sales.

And I mean, this is

one of the great stories in the history of modern footwear, isn't it?

It's a pretty incredible promotion.

He's got a new song out as well, in which he gives a lap dance to the devil himself.

He's sort of playing with this whole game.

We've all done it.

We've all been there.

We all went to Yudi.

But yeah, he just basically sold modified Nike and Nike are annoyed because they had nothing to do with the promotion.

Plus, they're quite good friends with Satan.

He's actually on the Nike board and he invented the whole sweatshop thing.

So they owe him a lot.

They're worried about the bad press, I suppose.

But yeah, it is genuinely a drop of blood from the company that made the shoe in each in the soul of each, which I guess is a selling point if you want to have some blood and run around.

But but there is a bit of controversies over whether the blood becomes the real blood of Lil Nas X when it's put in a shoe or if it's merely symbolic blood of the Old Town Roads star.

Andy, if you knew anything about the footwear industry, you would know that they are no strangers to using controversy to sell shoes.

For example, in the last few years, we've seen Nike Air Jordan Peterson's.

And

that's his own.

The wage gap is a myth.

There's Air Maxwell,

sponsored by Gelane Maxwell, at the center of the Jeffrey Epstein controversy.

And then, going back to my youth, there's, of course, the Adidas Predator.

And we don't really need to go into them.

So I was reading...

Jelaine wears those shoes every time she's running away from authorities, I believe.

She's always promoting.

And it's helped her keep on the run this so long.

But it is interesting

from a footwear point of view that these shoes retailing for $1,018,

which is a price linked to the biblical verse Luke 10:18, which is emblazoned on the side of the blood shoe.

It does slightly make you wonder why they didn't go for Matthew 28.20, which is the most expensive gospel verse available to

us.

Or even Luke 17, 16, which mentions feet in it.

Of course, I did not have to look that up.

But

Luke 10:18

says, So he told them, I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.

And well, as you mentioned in Lil Nassex's current music video,

Tom, he does a lap dance for Beelzebub.

And I mean, he's quite an extraordinary musical artist.

He's an openly gay black rapper who stormed the country music charts.

And that is a sentence that you would not have predicted existing just a few short years ago on numerous levels.

I also wouldn't have expected the sentence, Andy Zoltzmann knows what Hamilton is.

Here we are.

These are strange times.

Unprecedented stuff, I'd say.

Also, I mean, David, I know you're a huge fan of sport in general, and it's unclear yet if these shoes make athletes run faster because they have human blood

in the sole, or if the blood, if you put steroid-infused blood in the sole of your shoe, would that be even more effective than the new naked, blatant cheat range of spring-heeled athletic shoes that are shattering world records?

Are you saying that in the future they'll have to take a urine and blood sample from the athlete and then from the shoe after that?

Yes.

Yeah, I am saying that.

Yeah, I mean, if you've got

the blood of Lance Armstrong and the urine of Ben Johnson all over your shoes, you're going to absolutely fly around the track, aren't you?

The company tried this once before, the company that's made these shoes for Lil Nas X.

They launched their Jesus shoes in 2019.

This is genuinely true.

They contain 60 mils of water from the River Jordan.

And they should have been called Air Jordans.

So, as well as the 60 mil of water from the River Jordan, do they also have large nail holes in the top and sole of the shoe?

All right, Andy, we get it.

You got him, okay?

God.

I know you're all hemped up on the anniversary, but Jesus, literally, Jesus.

Other generally doom-laden global news now.

And well, let's start with a slight glitch in the global vaccine rollout.

I mean, there's been various problems.

British suppliers have been hit by bizarre decisions of some suppliers not to put Britain first, despite Britain having been,

despite Britain being a magic nation chosen by God to lead the world into a new dawn.

I can tell you what, that new two and a half million pound government propaganda room in Downing Street is really working on me.

But Europe, of course, well, David, the vaccine rollout in the EU has been stymied by things going really shitly.

And well, now in America, 15 million vaccines have been ruined

due to an error.

Yeah, I mean, the old saying that laughter is the best vaccine has been disproven this week by Johnson and Johnson, which is a collaboration between Dwayne the Rock Johnson and...

Do you know which other Johnson?

Gassa Johnson.

Oh,

L Johnson.

Was it

still Sammy?

Sammy, the dictionary guy?

No, it's actually Holly Johnson, the former lead singer of Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

And these two tribes of Johnson's nearly did go to war this week when they found that they had ruined by confusing a key ingredient 15 million shots of the vaccine that was probably destined for this country, seeing as you Brits have taken all of the rest of the world's supplies.

Just 15 million, though.

I mean, that's just, you know, the population of Zimbabwe.

It is.

Who's the taster?

Who was supposed to be opening the lids and just giving them a little sniff before they sent them off to Ireland?

That's what I want to know.

I think the employee that screwed us up has been demoted from Employee of the Month.

I think that he's been stepped down and taken these photos, been taken off the wall.

So, you know, some heads are rolled.

So it's fine.

Maybe it was a prank.

Maybe they were putting a tiny bit of Viagra in everyone, which wouldn't be much use because you've got, obviously, two weeks after you take the vaccine when you can't bone anyone.

I actually had a vaccine

and

a couple of weeks later.

So far, it seems not to have had any significant probing effect other than the fact that I feel amazingly vrimno and a lublio Vladimir Putin.

Plus, for Daniel,

so nothing to worry about for vaccines.

It is the thing about vaccines, though.

You have to get...

It comes down to the small things, the ingredients, you know?

A little mix-up is enough to really ruin that vaccine.

It reminds me of the time that I mixed up KFC and UFC

and went training and wrestled a load of kids to the ground while they were trying to eat their lunch.

I read about that.

My new children's book is coming out in two months.

And And finally, in our other general doom-laden news news, a child has very nearly started a global nuclear war.

This was caused by the Twitter account of US Strategic Command, which manages America's nuclear arsenal, essentially.

And

a child tweeted some a few incomprehensible letters.

Well, semicolon, L, semicolon, semicolon, colon, M L X Z S S A W

and I mean that still put it in the top 27% of most coherent tweets according to the social media representability index but but but I mean this this essentially I mean it was like the Cold War all over again in a single a single tweet luckily it you know the crisis was was averted but what happened was the Stratcom social media editor was working from home

quotes momentarily left the command's Twitter account open and unattended,

which in layman's terms is went for a shit.

And his young child played with his computer and unknowingly, tinkering with the keyboard, tweeted this, which could easily have been assumed to be the code for a nuclear strike.

But luckily, we're alive today.

Okay, the Amazon man has just called to the door.

I realize this is a horrible piece of capitalism happening during the vehicle.

I have to get this parcel.

I'll open it live in the podcast.

Oh, an unboxing video.

Here we go.

Unboxing audio.

I don't know if that's something that could be a...

It's cycling kits.

If anyone can make it work, it's Donald's.

Is it something to do with your little bike, David?

How dare you?

How dare you?

Just because I have 14 bikes and I had a traumatic breakup at the start of the pandemic and bought another three.

Yes, here is a parcel.

I genuinely don't know what it is.

So let's just open it.

Live on the bugle.

God, this never used to happen when John Oliver did this.

Here we go.

Oh, it's tires.

Oh!

Oh, they're good.

They're semi-road semi-I got the, I bought them on eBay last week.

Oh, they've come from.

They don't look round enough, David.

Are they supposed to be round?

As a fair amount of wobbly, you have to put air in them.

They don't send them fully inflated.

Well, that's something to look forward to after the podcast.

What a peek behind the curtain.

He's just like you and me, guys.

With 14 bikes.

I was glad.

It was a beautiful, it was a really humanizing moment with the Stratcom Twitter account, I thought.

And really, is the child any less qualified than anybody else in the American military-industrial complex to be firing off codes?

Does that make any less sense than anything

Donald Trump said as president or that Joe Biden is regularly peeking on a regular basis?

I think that kind of message, colon, colon, L, colon, G, M, L, X, S, S, A, W, that just pops into Joe Biden's brain every now and again.

With memories of his time as a lifeguard in the 70s, you know, good time.

I couldn't look at it and not think that maybe it was a Scrabble game.

I know there is 10 letters, and that's too many, but I had a little think.

You've got smalls is there, and that's worth a pretty measly eight.

Slags, that's worth six.

But the big dog is Zags with a 14.

I couldn't get one with the Z and an X in it, but I'll keep working on it.

What about X slags?

Like, which is a particularly raunchy kind of slag.

And that's slags with a Z on the end, too, which is like...

Street, hot, sexy slags.

Street Scrabble is not a thing, Valentine.

You could also have Zed Wax, which is part of the new range of Bugle Beauty products that we've been available.

for sure.

I'm trying to monetize it.

What struck me most about this story was this, that US Strategic Command has a social media editor

at all

that exists that could then leave his computer unattended for a child to type nuclear codes on.

But

why does US Strategic Command need social, and what godforsaken emojis do they have up their sleeves for future use?

Is there an emoji?

An emoji.

This is an emoji.

Is there an emoji?

The world is going through an emoji.

Is there an emoji for the smoldering remnants of a city or radiation sickness or for an uninhabitable planet?

Or maybe more optimistically, just for decades of political brinkmanship?

A kind of Cold War emoji.

But this seems just unnecessary, doesn't it?

Social media editor.

Well, I give you suitcase, football, boom, American flag.

Throwback Thursday to the Cuban missile crisis.

So I can spend a time and a place for Take Your Child to Work Day.

And obviously in Trump's White House, it was every day.

But I just, I don't want a child in charge of keeping up with the nuclear football.

Bugle archaeology section now.

And well, I mean, the modern world is a bit of a mess but the ancient world was arguably even more so and most of what they've left us is itself a mess and it needs archaeologists to put it together and well it's a fascinating world archaeology some amazing discoveries have been made recently and also some amazing pieces of thievery in the past now we touched on this briefly in the live show last week for those of you who were watching it the British government has ruled out returning the Parthenon marbles to Greece.

The culture secretary Oliver Dowden supported Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who ruled out their return because it would be, because they were legally acquired at the time.

That was Johnson's argument.

And bearing in mind all the laws he's currently happy to break.

It's interesting that he's an absolute stickler for early 19th-century laws about what you are and are not allowed to steal from other countries and bring back to put in your museum.

Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said if we gave them back, it'd be like pulling on a thread and lead to us having to give back a f of a lot of stuff.

I guess sometimes, you know, it's good to pull on a thread.

You know, if, for example, the thread is in a tapestry of

a hungry lion and it's hanging outside a home for zebras with confident issues, pull on that thread.

And also, I mean,

with regards to the Parthenon marbles, which have been in British possession for a couple of hundred years now, there is a fantastic specially built museum in Athens with views up to the Parthenon itself and where, as the name suggests, the marbles came from and where the bits that Lord Elgin couldn't fit in his suitcase already already reside.

So, I mean,

it's difficult, isn't it, with museums?

And because here in Britain, you know, we need stuff from overseas because artefacts from the same time, you know, 400 or 500 BC,

British artifacts from the same equivalent time period include a stick, a stone,

and some pointy things.

So it's understandable that we want to

borrow for hundreds of years

other people's creations.

I mean, David, what's your view on returnism, which is a word that's been sort of invented to

justify not returning things?

Well, Andy, I would like to take the moral high ground here, obviously, but I've just received delivery of the famous tires of Budapest.

And if those people think they're getting the back, they've got another thing coming.

Even with eBay's excellent return policies, I'm going to be hanging on to these.

You're right.

It's a thread.

And if you start to pull it, do you know what happens then?

Justice.

And that's what you people hate.

Yes, I mean, what's next?

Giving back Australia?

We can't have that, for God's sake.

Football news now.

And, well, Joanne Luigi Buffon, the legendary Italian goalkeeper, has recently cocked one of football's weirder bands for blasphemy.

And

also, we've had protests by the the Norwegian national team and various other national teams against the human rights abuses related to the Qatar World Cup, which is due to happen at the end of next year.

David, as our football blasphemy and protest correspondents, bring us up to date with these stories.

Well, it's interesting because it's shown that there are actually many medieval laws still on the statute books of Italian football.

We remember that in 2011, Andrea Perlo received a two-match suspension for eating a swan at halftime.

In 2009, Gennaro Gattuso was banned for a month for leading a cow while drunk in a post-match celebration.

And in 2014, Zlatan Ibrahimovich declared himself god of all men and

received no sanction whatsoever.

And that actually happened.

I mean, there has been some, is backlash the right word?

To the fact, the news that 6,500 workers, it's estimated, have died while building stadiums in Qatar in extreme heat for the 2022 World Cup Germany the Netherlands and Norway all wore pre-game t-shirts protesting about this Ireland though made the ultimate sacrifice to the cause by losing this week to 98th in the world ranked Luxembourg in a qualifier for the World Cup and selflessly sacrificing their chances of qualification

Yes, they followed it by drawing with Qatar in a friendly and not doing any protest whatsoever when that would have actually been shown on TV in Qatar.

But the lads knew that they'd committed the big act the few days before.

Heroes.

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

As I said earlier on you can see Tom Ballard at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival until when, Tom?

Until April the 18th.

And where are you on?

I'm on the Melbourne Town Hall.

It's going to Sydney Comedy Festival for two nights as well in May.

All the details on my little website, tombella.com.au.

And I'm sorry.

I give a tribute to both you and DOD every night on stage where I steal your material to round up my show.

It's a bit hard to fill the hour.

So yeah, that's my tribute to you guys.

You can also see Alice Fraser's show, which starts this weekend, I believe, for the rest of the festival.

David, any shows to plug?

Yeah, I'll be crying under bridges around Dublin until you decide to give us some of your vaccines until you've all had 30 vaccines each in the UK and then maybe I can get back to doing gigs.

Check my website for full details on which bridge I'll be crying under tonight.

Is your

book due out soon or is it already out?

It's coming out in about a month.

They haven't announced it yet, but I'll announce it right here.

It's called The Summer I Robbed a Bank and it is my first attempt to write a novel for 11 or 12 year

Well, my

trial audience of 11 or 12-year-olds absolutely loved it.

So, if you have an 11 or 12-year-old, but no other age, do you buy David's fourth government book?

Great.

Thank you for that.

Thank you for listening, Buglers.

Thanks to Tom and David for joining us.

We will now play you out with some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers.

To join them and to make a one-off or occurring donation to the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme, go to BuglePodcast.com and click the donate button.

James Boothroyd thinks waterfalls are overrated.

People go on and on about your Niagaras, your Victorias, and the like, but seriously, if it wasn't water falling over these things, but animals or crockery or bicycles, we would be very critical of them and demand they were shut down.

It would be, oh my god, look at that writhing pile of badly injured armadillos, twisted BMXs, and commemorative royal wedding side plates.

How absolutely awful.

But we cut water too much slack because it's supposedly vital to all life.

Really annoys me, concludes James.

Patrick Moynihan expects one of the legacies of the current global situation to be a surprising number of homemade tunnels and subways.

Patrick explains, I expect people will have been living out exciting fantasy lives just to keep things interesting, and I would expect one of the most common of these to have been imagining they were having to escape from a jail or prison camp.

Did you know that sales of vaulting horses have gone up by 700% in the last year?

Or at any rate, I haven't heard that they haven't gone up 700%, so they might well have done.

Frankly, concludes Patrick, if I didn't live in in a third-floor flat, I'd definitely have dug a tunnel just for fun.

Emma Locke believes doodling should be considered an art form in itself.

We give way too much credit to artists who put lots of thought and effort into their work, says Emma, and not enough to those who just absentmindedly let their subconscious mind express the true feelings of their soul.

Anyone could hack out a Sistine chapel ceiling if they had enough time in the right sort of scaffolding, but the doodle is a true window into the unguarded human id.

Look at one I just did.

It looks like a pigeon, but it is not a pigeon.

Make of that what you

And finally, Lewis Needle often wonders how many hauntings by ghosts should, in fact, be marked down as accidental hauntings.

I imagine, says Lewis, that when you're a ghost, it can be quite hard to get the information you need on exactly who lives where and when they're going to be in.

So I reckon as many as 65 to 68 percent of hauntings could be of the wrong people by the wrong ghosts.

And don't get me started on poltergeists, they're just common or garden troublemaking hoodlums for me.

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.