Boat Got Back (4188)

I will be in Australia for the next few weeks hoping that the cricket can provide the distraction for everyone that it has so successfully provided for me since I was six years old.

If you want to come to my shows there is a Bugle Live in Melbourne on the 22nd of December where I'll be joined by Sammy Shar and Lloyd Langford and I'm doing the Zoltgeist, my stand-up show in Melbourne on the 23rd of December and we've just added a possibly optimistic extra show in Sydney on the 3rd of January.

The 2nd of January show is sold out but please, please, please come on the 3rd. My UK tour extension begins begins at the end of january all details and ticket links at andysaltsman.co.uk

an ancient war its origins lost in the mists of time satire against news news against the limits of the human capacity to sum up the news without getting depressed no quarter all half a glass of water no politics all satire just page after page of pithy witty slick razor sharp often dick jokes and revenge we're a small squad of elite warriors tasked with hunting down the least political news and turning it into this.

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The Bugle, Audio Newspaper for a Visual World.

Hello, Buglers, and welcome to issue 4188 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world, which this week consists of 20 or so prime minutes from the 80-minute extravaganza that was the latest Bugle live stream live show recorded last Saturday, the 27th of March, followed by some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers.

If you want to see and/or hear the full show, you can still buy retrospective tickets via the internet and I assume specifically via thebuglepodcast.com, where you can also buy Bugle merchandise and join the voluntary subscription scheme or make any level of recurring or one-off contribution to the show.

Let's pick up with that live show now, featuring Andy Zaltzman, also known as me, when I'm talking anyway, as well as Alice Fraser and Nish Kumar.

I'm here in Bugle Studios. As you can see, a quick check to find out whether or not I am performing in zero gravity

I'm not take that Neil Armstrong you mean nothing to me I'm in one gravity one gravity buglers just as God intended loved a bit of gravity the old g-dog probably a rebellion against living in space and on clouds all the time I am here in London where there is darkness darkness as far as the eye can see but that's because I'm in my shed which has black curtains if I look this way there is just darkness as far as I can see which is about four feet away joining me from the selfsame time zone that was given by almighty God so that Britain may have daytime in the day and night time in the night unlike some countries I could mention it's the man who to this day has yet to discover even one new chemical element despite being made a pure Nishkumarium it's Nishkumar

hello Andy hello buglers God I hope we're broadcasting

And that's how I start every day. I wake up in the morning, I think, good morning, world.
God, I hope I'm broadcasting today. I live to cast.
That's a shortening of the word broadcast.

Lovely to see you, Andrew. How are you?

I'm all right, thanks. Yep, it's well, it appears to be going.

Yes, it is working according to William on Twitter. And that is

it Prince William? Because surely he's got bigger fing frish to fry.

That's actually the title of his new podcast as well.

Podcast market alongside his brother.

Actually, his new podcast is called How Could It Have Been Me That Said It?

And we'll go no further with that joke for legal reasons. Allegedly, allegedly, Nishkuma.

Also, joining us from an island far, far away from here, off the coast of another island far, far away from here.

If you count Australia as an island rather than a continent or a concept or an experiment or a hoax, anyway, from a little island just off the coast of Australia, it's Alice Fraser. Hello, Alice.

Are you there? No, I'm here. I've caught up.
You were a little glitchy. It took a little while to get all the way down here to Australia.

But I am here. I'm happy to be here.
And I'm recording my end of this conversation.

It may be having a different speed to your end of the conversation, but I figure if you listen back later, it'll all make sense. To Australians as well.

It seems like we're conversing at different speeds. So welcome.
So, Alice,

you are on an.

Is this

an experiment to just gradually move away from Australia to see if there's other islands in the world you might like to try?

I'm on a small island off the coast of Queensland and I'm hoping to island hop to increasingly small islands until I'm just on an island the size of a room, at which point I will detach myself from society completely and just knit or learn some craft.

Queensland is also actually how some sections of the British press are suggesting that the United Kingdom should be rechristened post-Brexit, just to make sure that we,

well, because I'm not sure enough things are named after the Queen in this country. In fact, I was discussing this with my two children, Elizabeth and Elizabeth, just the other day.

We are recording on the 27th. of March, well recording, broadcasting, parts of this will go out on the bugle

as issue 4188. Yesterday, the 26th of March, was World Good Hair Day.
Today, on the other hand, is not. So the show goes ahead.

But

here's a slight potential issue for this show. Earth Hour starts at 8.30 p.m.
UK time. That's in approximately 23 minutes where we all have to turn off all of our lights in support of nature.

This could cause a few issues, but

I'm fully kitted up.

I have the candle. I have matches.
This show is

going to go on.

Thank you to all 7 billion plus people who have decided to prioritize Earth Hour over joining the Bugle live stream

live show.

Those of you huge thanks from me and my hypothetical future descendants for putting the planet first ahead of this

show, not using the electricity, the internets, not cooking your mid-bugle steaks like the rest of you. No rocket launches mid-show.

And for those of you who have tuned in, I can only assume you don't give a shit about the future of the planet. No judgment.
I think it's had, you know, personally, I'm on your side.

I think that the planet's had its chance and blown it too so welcome to the show enjoy strangling your white rhinoceros pups or whatever else you're also doing to uh destroy uh destroy the world

as always a section of the bugle is going straight

In the bin, correct, everyone who shouted that at home this week, we have a jobs section.

A lot of exciting jobs going around at the moment. The Royal Diversity Czar.

Nisha, I don't know.

Did you read about this?

i'm right i i'm i'm in prime position for that job andy and like most of the jobs that i get i'm in prime position to be immediately fired from that job

i i i see the royal diversity job as the latest in a long string of things in which i'm forced to leave in disgrace

but but my first job will be getting some uh undiversifying the source of a lot of the jewelry that's lying around in the queen's house Because

what they lack in diversity of actual skin colour of family members that they're currently speaking to, they make up for in diversity of places they've nicked jewels from to put in their goddamn hats.

Have I been sacked yet? Is it over?

Is it over? Give us that jewelry back, Q dog.

The Royal Diversity Tsar, it's a genuine job, the Royal Diversity Tsar. Now, for a start, if you're in a royal family and you're appointing someone to a new job, don't call it a czar.
That is

asking for trouble, frankly.

It could be that this is a way to finally find a purpose for Prince Andrew to go, of course, with this sideline in furthering the cause of republicanism, of course, a role that must be said he plays with almost every

determination.

Rumours just reaching us here at the Bugle News Centre that as part of his role as the new diversity Tsar, Prince Andrew could be married off to Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, which could, well, that would certainly diversify the royal family in a number of ways.

Also in the job section, the Minister for the Management of Public Disgruntlement is a new cabinet post launched less than one week ago.

And it's open again because the man first appointed to it, the rising Tory hotshot, Ellsworth Nodge Bribben, was tasked with the responsibility of trying to enable the government to disappoint all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.

He resigned just yesterday after three days in the job, citing the impossibility of success under the current leadership. So that is now open once again.

Also in the bin this week, a stoical media section. Now, social media has been a huge hit around the world over the last 20 years or so, but just add one letter and slightly jumble them up.

Stoical media could be just as big. It's started to challenge social media for the affections of the global over-sharing community.

Stoical media sites such as Phlegma TikTok share 10-second video clips of people retaining control of their emotional response to events, whilst the new televisual genre of Marcus Aureality TV gives celebrities the chance to underreact to provocation and the inescapable cruelty of existence.

Also,

we review the new Instagrammophone, which turns your Instagram posts into 12-inch vinyl LPs.

The great thing about stoical media is that you can just schedule all of your posts, and all of your posts say, I'm fine.

It's fine.

Is that not progress, Alice? I think that is progress.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week. Global trade comes to a grinding halt because a ship draws a penis in a canal.

Well, actually, it was not actually in a canal. It was towards the entrance of the canal, which is possibly even worse.
But I mean, this is Nish, you are our

massive ships getting stuck in canals, correspondent. Alice, you are, of course, the bugles things drawing the shapes of penises correspondent.
I mean, this is

very much why you've both been invited onto the show this this week

what a story this is the ever-given uh ship has blocked the suiz uh suiz canal it's uh a 400 meter long ship has got jammed in a canal and now the whole of global trade has stopped that's essentially what seems to have happened yes this is the biggest shipping disaster since the fifth pirates of the caribbean film which was actually the biggest shipping disaster since the fourth pirates of the caribbean film which was the biggest shipping disaster since the third you get the point right the first one was fine we didn't need another sequel frankly so i mean listen one of the largest container ships in the world has run aground in the suz canal causing a jam of vessels uh the ship itself uh is called the evergiven uh which is owned by the company evergreen which all of which is really nicely optimistic terms for a company that has really shat the bed this week.

It's 220,000 tons. It's 400 meters long and it it's stuck because

of some bad weather that happened as the captain was trying to get the ship in through the canal.

Now, just to be clear, before we go any further, the crew are all safe and accounted for, and there's been no reports of injuries or pollution. What does that mean?

It means we're all free to find this very f ⁇ ing funny. It's always a concern with news stories these days.
You're always like, oh, a ship's run aground. Has anyone been harmed?

Has there been any mass pollution?

Did the boat do a string of racist tweets in the late 2000s no the boat's clean the boat's instagram just says hashtag blm so we're fine on that front no one got injured there's no pollution so let's make this very clear it's been a difficult couple of years

for humanity but this is very funny because a fing massive ship has blocked up a massive canal it's astonishingly brilliant information and we should all enjoy it though i would say when a british hurt person hears the phrase problems problems in the Suez Canal, we just genetically assume we're about to get rid of a Prime Minister.

And I want to remind everyone, this is a very, very different climate that we are in from the last Suez Snafu. It's 2021.

And let's face it, if Boris Johnson had driven that boat himself into the canal, there's a chance his approval ratings would have gone up on the basis that people would deem his behavior to be good bants.

Now, for international pupilers, good bants is an English phrase meaning the guy's a but he's posh, so it's fine.

I think that is one of the very few remaining clauses of the Magna Carta that has written into law.

Well, unfortunately, there's a cloud of doubt that's hanging over this whole scenario. The idea that this ship has accidentally been turned sideways in the canal

because of the ship's previous actions of drawing a massive penis in the ocean. It sort of casts into doubt its competence going forward.
And I don't think actually that this was done on purpose.

I think as with many people who draw large penises in public places, it has proven not to be skilled at actually navigating the canal when it is at hand.

Family, show on it.

But I'm enjoying the fact that they're all sticking together. They haven't pointed any fingers at any individual who's responsible.
They're blaming the weather.

Because you know, this is one of those f ups that is such a big fk up that the person who f ⁇ ed up isn't even going to get fired.

You know how there are like normal crimes where you go to jail? And then this one's costing $7 billion a day.

Just like the GFC, everyone just stands around astonished at how big the crime is, and nobody does anything.

I mean, it is a truly wonderful story that the ship, as you said, Nish, is owned by Evergreen, a shipping company that has a green logo

with the word green in it.

So let's assume it's basically saving environment with every breath of the wind in the sails of its ships and breeding endangered ocelots inside its green painted containers.

Containers, the evergreen, the ever-given ship, 399 meters and 94 centimeters long stick a fing pencil on the end of it for f sake

what is wrong with you

the ship ever given is actually short for no fks are ever given

um it can take 20 000 containers which is one container for every lie donald trump told in the first three years of his presidency if only they could have been contained uh 90 uh 79 500 horsepower packed into that ship now i don't know if that's horses on land or horses in the sea, which presumably makes quite a big difference to horsepower.

That's why boats exist in the first place, because horses don't work in the sea generally, or certainly not for very long.

And the 79, 20,000 containers is also sufficient for all the bugle merchandise that you can now buy from thebuglepodcast.com.

So it is

so the key part of this story, obviously, Alice, is what happened before...

before the incident with this the the route that the ship took which eagle-eyed people in in their millions around the world spotted bears more than a passing resemblance to the male um prongulum and uh gonadulas um

and look i mean

this is not the this is there's a great nautical tradition of uh of such uh events in fact um one of the most famous sea battles of all time the ancient greeks flummoxed the persians in 480 bc in a key naval battle near athens by sailing their ships in a series of unmistakably phallic shapes distracting the notoriously childish

Persians who, whilst trying to then add the shapes of nagils to the Greek prongs, left themselves vulnerable to a pincer movement.

Anyway, the Todger-like shapes described by the Athenian and Spartan ships gave the battle its name, the Battle of Salamis, often mispronounced, of course, as Salamis, coincidentally, the name of the nearby island.

But in summary, that degree was four years well spent. But

it's, I mean, it is,

it is just

extraordinary.

The ship, though, is only... Can we blame the ship? It's only two and a half years old, so it's quite an inexperienced ship.
You can understand the ship making mistakes like this.

You've got to give them a chance at this level. Otherwise, you've never know whether these ships have what it takes.
It's holding up $9.5 billion of goods a day.

Now, to put that in context, that is equivalent to 68.5 million smart robot dog toys or 150 million legs of decent quality ham available from motorway service stations in the Basque country, which are an absolute bargain.

And there are now 300 ships stuck either side of it, some of which have had to reroute around Africa. That is one hell of a diversion.

That is nearly as bad as the one I got stuck in on the M4 once that took me around half a summerset at the dead of night for no discernible reason. But I guess there's not too many options, are there?

Other than the Suez Canal. There's no cheeky little cut-throughs that you can hope your Google Maps.
No, I mean, yeah,

I mean, I imagine that has led to the mother of all rerouting situations on various people's sat-navs. And you never want to be in a situation where your sat-nav is saying, turn left at Africa.

I just don't understand why they don't put wheels on the ships and push them up onto land.

Well,

that's that's I mean it's a good thing. The fact that I don't understand that is why I'm not in shipping logistics.

It's gone in at a terrible angle. When you look at the photographs, you just think, it's like somebody's parked a car whilst wearing a blindfold as part of an elaborate dare.

I've just had a tweet from Hugh who suggested that actually it was 30,000 lies that Donald Trump told.

I was actually just focusing on the first three years, which he had about 20,000, and he already rammed it up in year four. So thank you for picking me up on that.

There is still no vaccine for pedantry. That is next on

the lists of

the world's scientists. So there are alternatives for this

ship. Now, if they can't move the ship it's going to cause you know possibly weeks of of delays and more things having to chug around the cape so the alternatives are just released now a stunt ramp

if they can get container ships up to 300 miles an hour they should be able to cannievel their way over the evergiven and splash down on the other side one way at a time though but you don't want a mid-air collision between 200,000 ton metallic ship hunks

you know some archaeologists actually believe that the pyramids were in fact originally designed as a four-way stunt ramp for ships.

Another alternative, levitation, the freight magician, the amazing bull cargo, has offered to levitate all 20,000 containers off the Evergiven so the ship will spontaneously refloat itself.

An emergency spare canal has been suggested from the top of the Persian Gulf through Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean. A few slight troubles with that.

Nukit has been suggested and just ram it until it moves. So we will.

Has anyone suggested telling the canal it's beautiful? So I I think it loosens up a bit.

Holy shit.

Maybe

put on some mid-90s RB.

D'Angelo's brown sugar. Just try and get things going.

I'll say this for this ship. My God.

This ship has got back.

I mean,

that is a big old ass on that ship

you body shaming a container ship quite quite the opposite Andrew quite the opposite speaking in admiring tones I'm I'm a fan of a ship that's you know

got

dumps like a truck

so only

in conclusion I mean I think there are

lessons to be learned this aren't there because I think there are some good rules for life

and I'll share this these with you buglers one do not sleep in a suit of armor. The clanking is awful.

Two, if you want people not to panic, never at any point say the words, there's no need to panic.

Do not think too carefully about the existence of the phrase social media influencer, it will only upset you.

Another piece: good rule for life on issues of science, trust the wisdom of science more than you trust Gary from the pub. And never unnecessarily goad a shark unless you are both on land.

But above all, do not ram a 400-metre-long container ship into the side of a canal, thus blocking a globally critical trade route.

I hope we're all listening and learning. Chris, you had some stats on the boat.
Do we have time for that, do you think?

I thought, Andy, that you would struggle with a boat story, so I tried to break it down

into a language that you would understand for you.

The size of the boat we're talking about. So the Suez boat is 400 meters long, 59 meters wide.
The maximum length for a cricket bat is 96.52 centimeters

so that ship is 414 cricket bats long right 61 cricket bats wide right the ship at 20 000 tons that's 20 million kilograms three pounds is heavy for a cricket bat but many of your favourite batsmen have gone big like that yeah that's 1.4 kilos yeah so the ship can therefore hold 14 million two hundred and eighty five thousand seven hundred and fourteen cricket bats

stretched out all those bats continuously would make 14.8 kilometers of bats

now you're i'm guessing around five foot ten which is 1.778 meters yeah so the ship holds 242 424 zaltz men right in a queue but lying down

or

or 170,000 Zaltzmen gently lifting their bats, but not enormously to celebrate a 50 laid down. 170,000 of of you.
Are you sure? I think it's more than that, isn't it?

Because if you've got 20,000 containers on, I reckon you can fit more than more than 10 of me in a container. If you want to dispute my maths, I'm happy to share my working out at a later point.

I'm not going to interrupt this mathematics. I'm just saying my bed is right there.
I couldn't stop.

There you go. Thanks to everyone who joined us live last Saturday.
And don't forget, you can still buy a retrospective ticket to see the rest of the show.

We're back at the weekend with a full regular Bugle featuring Tom Ballard and David O'Doherty. Until then, here are some lies about our Bugle premium level voluntary subscribers.

Tina Papaki wonders if Erwin Schrödinger's famous cat theory that a cat could be simultaneously alive and dead inside a box sprang from a simple misunderstanding.

It's quite possible, speculates Tina, that Schrödinger's cat was simply asleep inside a box, which is sort of the same as being simultaneously alive and dead when you think about it.

If the cat was a deep sleeper, well you can understand Schrödinger getting a little bit confused if his is my cat alive or dead gong didn't get completely accurate results.

Someone known as the sixth Muammar Gaddafi is disappointed that athletics stopped at the triple jump.

The sixth Muamma Gaddafi explains, I can't help feeling that crowds would love to see an octuple jump, featuring a hop, a step, a star jump, a scissors jump, an aerial pirouette, a double-footed pogo, a froggy-style froggy jump and finally a belly splash into the sandpit.

I would certainly watch. The sixth Gaddafi adds, my unofficial personal best is 12m 74cm, but I wasn't really trying and I ended up crashing through a greenhouse in the garden centre.

Richard Nephew is the proud owner of the world's largest collection of envelopes stamped return to sender address unknown.

Richard tells the story, I thought it would be an achievable world record, so I started sending post to made-up addresses like 424 Spandalin Guava Terrace, Jabbertown Pinkshire, and 13B Mayhem Crescent, South Snutterbridge, Dakota.

Inevitably they would be returned. I always wrote a letter in the envelopes though, to make them worth opening when when they returned to me, usually with a memo to myself to do something boring.

Tim Parsons wonders whether renowned music composer Johann Sebastian Bach and champion skier Lindsay Vaughn would have gone on with each other if they'd ever met, instead of being separated by centuries.

I'm not really sure, concludes Tim.

Lindsay's obsession with flying down hills at high speed and Joey Sebb's unremitting schedule of baroque out on various musical instruments aren't really compatible activities for me.

There's a reason you don't see pianists playing whilst flying downhill at 70 plus miles an hour. Also, there might be a language barrier.

Graham Kirkpatrick would like to see world leaders, instead of making speeches, forced to communicate with the world wordlessly, using ballet.

I think it would be a more universal form of communication, says Graham, that ends the risk of translators just completely making up what is being said at important meetings.

It would also result in younger, fitter, and more progressive world leaders. So ballet for leaders is my first request for the world.
If you will, my plea A.

And finally, long-term follower of the show, Kenders Rule, thinks that traditional parenting techniques should be applied to leading politicians.

Parents know that small children, with whom world leaders have so much in common in terms of attention span, focus on the self, and inability to think long-term, can be easily coerced into say eating something they don't like by the promise that it will lead to being given something they do like, as per Einstein's famous broccoli then ice cream theory.

So I say that world leaders should be forced to do something actually useful before they're allowed to tell an obvious lie or shut down a much needed facility in order to look tough to the right-wing media.

I think we would all benefit. Here endeth this week's lies.
Goodbye.