The Final Billion Years

Don't forget Buglers there is a Bugle ticketed live stream live show on the 27th of March, Saturday the 27th of March, 8pm UK time.

Chris, is that correct?

Roughly, I mean yeah.

Yeah that'll do and where can people find the tickets other than just generally on the internet?

Thebuglepodcast.com.

Well where you can also join our bugle voluntary subscription scheme to make a one-off or recurring donation to the show to keep it free, flourishing, advert free and independent.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4185 of the Bugle.

Those were the exact words of historian Andrew de Cricket Zoltzmann as he began the episode of the Bugle that marked the 5th of March 2021.

500 years ago this week.

This This was of course in Zoltzmann's podcasting phase, three years before the bugle was banned by the United Nations for being, and I quote the ruling, too true to handle.

Zoltzmann went on of course to become the inventor of the reduced gravity sandwich for slower digestion, as well as the most influential trombone impersonator of his generation on the underground brass scene, and of course, the great-grandfather of World Emperor Zoltzhammer the Merciful.

But back to the 5th of March 2021, when, recording in his shed in South Zaltinium, then still known as London, of course, deprived of sleep after some arduous cricket watching, he continued by saying, Audio newspaper for a visual world.

I'm Andy Zaltzman.

It is Friday, the 5th of March 2021, and I'm joined this week from various parts of the planet Earth.

Let's begin in Australia and a, well, very early, early good morning to Alice Fraser.

Good morning, Andrew Zaltzmann.

Good morning, Buglers.

How are you feeling?

Well, I'm tired, Alice.

I've been getting up the last couple of nights,

very early, the last couple of days, to watch England slowly humiliate themselves at cricket.

But I'm contractually obliged to do that, as well as spiritually obliged to do that.

How's things in Australia?

Things in Australia are about 12.09am

and will continue apace at that rate probably

about a minute per minute into the future.

It's not great time travel, but it is functional.

And joining us from the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean, from New York City, it's Josh Gondelman.

Hello, thank you for having me.

It's still eight o'clock in the morning here, so there are some stories that I might not know about yet.

I do, every time we have a three-continent bugle, I feel

like genuinely like some kind of uber-powerful Time Lord.

It's incredible.

I think about it, it's like, wow, all this technology spanning space and time, and we're using it for podcasts.

Well, we're using it to hold the mirror up to

the world and satirists and then smash ourselves in the head with the mirror, saying, Why did I bother looking in that?

It's only upset us.

We are recording on the 5th of March 2021 on this day in 1616 on the revolutions of the heavenly spheres.

The smash-hit astronomy classic by Nikki Copernicus, the pin-up boy of 16th-century heliocentrism, an all-round Renaissance smart arse sorry, polymath, was banned.

banned.

It was added to the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books.

Now, obviously, the still unproven theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun did not go down well with old Percy Pope at the time.

And Nicky Nightsky, as his buddies called him, was devastated that his orbit-obsessed planet-bothering astro cult page turner was taken off the shelves.

He issued a press conference and said, this is the most disappointing thing to happen to me in the last 73 years, since A, the book was first published in 1543, and B, I died in the same year.

Other books on the Vatican's emphatically not-for-reading list included at the time, Why God Sucks by Hieronimo van Schlamphaus, the Dutch atheist and four-time heretic of the year in Steak Burner Monthly.

Duck Quacks Don't Echo because they are the words of Beelzebub by Percy Mallion Snivel, the former royal ornithologist, hence

the tradition of feeding bread to ducks, so it would swell up and prevent them from talking the words of the devil to the easily influenced.

My Story by William Shakespeare, a bit of a cheap and easy autobiography, and Can a Woman Be a Person?

An inquisitive pamphlet by Walbert Philibut,

all band band

at the time.

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

This week, well, we're outsourcing the satire to you, buglers, with your own bugle.

Construct your own satire audio puzzle.

We're going to give you some words and then some sentences to fit those words into to create a waspish piece of satire.

So here are the words that you're going to have to fit into

the piece of material.

A horny hippopotamus, big bucket of sick, the government, shit, Freshly filleted walrus pelt.

The economy.

Revealing negligee.

And f ⁇ .

Now here is the text.

You have to fill in the blanks with those words.

With Crystal Player Buzz, where you have to put in one of those terms.

Hey, what is going on with?

I blame.

How f ⁇

is that?

It's like

wearing a

as an unexpectedly

and screaming into an echoing.

They can all go f themselves.

Am I right?

So I hope you catch the satire bug from that.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week, future of all human life news.

And, well, I mean, it's been an interesting time to be a human being.

I think we can all agree on that.

And, Josh, have you found just

existing as a human over the last year or so?

Oh, gosh.

Well, I've been acutely aware of my own existence and there's been slightly more of it as I've been gaining a little bit of mass basically every day.

So I feel like I've been more human than ever.

And Alice, I know you're a long-standing

advocate of human life.

And I mean, how do you see it at the moment?

Well, you know, things aren't hopeful, Andy,

but nonetheless, as in the face of all contrary evidence,

I will hope for humanity.

Well, that is probably the worst thing you can do.

You'll only end up upset.

Now, obviously, for the past year, much of human thought around the world has been focused on the question, oh, what's the f ⁇ ing point?

And well, in London this week, I mean, something that's really raised that question back into the forefront is the opening of a new till-free Amazon supermarket in London, which aside from offering both added convenience and a free, complimentary, soul-chilling window into a dystopian, corporatised future, is putting the machines that put the humans out of a job out of a job, which is a disturbing landmark in human progress.

So, the future of life on Earth is really up for grabs.

And some disturbing news this week: that according to scientists,

all life on Earth will be killed by a lack of oxygen in just one billion years' time.

This comes from the new scientists, so we're all doomed.

And not a minute too soon, Andy.

Like, actually, the idea that we'd last a billion years at this point

looks utopian to me.

That's really

the way things are going.

I'm skeptical that we'll last out the century.

Do you know, apparently, every year, the level of IQ you need to destroy the world drops by one point?

I think possibly the greatest statistic that has ever been developed.

Have you just made this up, or is this

genuine science?

Yeah, genuine science.

I heard it on a podcast, and never disbelieve anything you hear on a podcast.

Podcasts are the source of all truth.

This makes sense to me when you see the people who have almost destroyed the world recently.

You're like, oh, that checks out.

At this point, all you need is an undergrad biochemistry degree and access to some drones.

By the end of the decade, it'll be a toddler with an iPad.

We're doing.

All we can do is hope to miss the window until it's like you'd have to be so dumb to ruin the world that no one would do it because it'd be embarrassing.

Eventually, someone will just do it by accident.

That's a red.

I think that would be kind of disappointing in a way, wouldn't it?

I mean, you'd think that

the end of the world, you want us to take your agency of it, you want it to be in the hands of some awful, make it worth make Armageddon worthwhile again.

That should have been Donald Trump's campaign.

I think more people would have stuck with it.

But yeah, don't take my word for that.

As I said, take the word of science.

Now, admittedly, the word of science is usually about as reliable as my world.

Sorry, my deal again.

Now, usually, the word of science is about as reliable as my word.

Flat is it?

The world.

Only four elements are there.

Leeches are better than CT scanners, are they science?

Electricity is caused and a worm has sex with a volcano, is it?

You people.

Now, but science has upped its game, to be fair, over the last two to three hundred years, so let's cut it from slack when it says that we're all going to die in a billion years time.

So, I mean, I mean, is this a good thing, Joss?

As a species, we tend to lack focus without a deadline.

And if knowing that the world is going to end in a billion years' time doesn't focus our minds on getting all the stuff done that we really want to because we've been putting off because we've got a job or can't afford a solid gold canoe or our kids don't want to help us build our own space rocket out of old wheelie bins and an old Russian fighter jet or COVID or because we're serving a 30-year jail term for a crime we didn't commit, then nothing is going to focus our mind, surely.

Well, I think we've got to keep our eye on the ball.

I think this billion-year deadline,

that's something that's bad.

Sure.

I don't want the world to end then.

We can't be looking at cataclysmic events that far down the line.

That's so many apocalypses from now.

There's climate change, nuclear war, robot uprising, robot killing horse revolution, COVID's 23-25, alien invasion, mole person reverse invasion.

Then we can deal with the lack of oxygen.

I think like Alice said, that's right, it's optimistic to think that we're going to get a billion years into the future, considering our carbon emissions are cooking this whole rock like a sous-vid flying through space.

And honestly, I don't have children, and I don't know how I could justify bringing them into this world at this point, knowing that they're grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren, grandchildren's

grandchildren's, grandchildren's, grandchildren, grandchildren.

We might have to deal with this.

I don't know how you put it in those terms.

We have actually now been recording for 38 hours solid while Josh was putting that money.

I'm accurate in everything else.

Oxygen, Alice, of course, has been one of the most popular gases in the world for some time now, pretty much ever since life on Earth began.

I mean, it's one of those classic can live with it, can't live without it things like food, water, cricket, and the internet.

But, well, I mean.

Certainly, after the gas aristocracy broke down and people stopped valuing the noble gases so highly.

I've never thought of that in a

kind of Russian Revolution style.

Argon was taken to a forest in Siberia and shot.

How do you think Neon got all those jobs in all those signs?

Nepotism.

It's just some kind of fringe archduke.

Yeah,

we're all lying.

But I mean, oxygen

could be done.

It could be a thing of the past in two shakes of a lamb's tail if each of those shakes takes 500,000 years.

Now, I don't think I'm breaking either of your confidences when I tell our listeners that, you know, when it comes to oxygen, you are both users

in appropriate moderation, of course.

If you are listening, buglers, and you think you have a problem with excessive oxygen use, please seek professional help.

And it is possible to kick that habit.

My great-great-uncle used to get through loads and loads of oxygen, but he managed to quit at the age of 93 after a long illness.

But, I mean,

I'm going to get rock bottom, Andy.

Sometimes you have to think, this is the end of my life before you can bring yourself to give up oxygen.

I haven't really slept in the last week and I think it's starting to show my performance.

Anyway, given that time is finite and everything we do will one day just be dust in the eternal void of a pitiless universe, let's focus on what we can do about it.

Now Alice, you are our practical time travel correspondent.

And there's been some exciting breakthroughs in the sci-fi pipe dream of travelling faster than the speed of light itself.

Yes indeed, and in extremely unlikely news that sounds a little bit like fan fiction, a pair of researchers claim to have created what they are describing as the first general model for a warp drive, which is to say a spacecraft that can travel faster than the speed of light.

And they say that they can do this without breaking the laws of physics, which 100%

I don't understand the laws of physics, but I'm pretty sure they can't.

And even if we have a warp drive, I don't think we should be trusted with that technology until everyone on Earth has watched every season of Star Trek in full.

Yes, including Discovery and the Weird 90s one with the leather jackets.

As a human priority, I mean,

how high do we put travelling at the speed of light?

I mean, it's up there with solving climate change, eradicating poverty, curing all known diseases, sorting out video, replacing football, reducing the unnecessary use of the word like, and trying to create a vaccine against being existentially discompobulated by evolution in the human use of pronouns.

Those are all equally important.

Josh, I mean, in terms of your personal, I mean, how important is travelling at fast and the speed of light to you?

Well, it feels, I mean, humans have always wanted to go.

That's, I think, something that's undeniable.

We've always wanted to get away from where we were, whether it was

rolling on a rock down a hill to

the 19 or the 20th century, Bruce Springsteen's innovation of leaving your hometown forever on a motorcycle.

And this, I think, is just the logical extension of that.

This is humans leaving their hometown of Earth on a space motorcycle last chance power drive.

And I think that's just, that's only natural.

Well, I think it sort of depends whether we want to, like, if we want to do this, it sort of depends on how alien the aliens are going to be.

Like, are they going to be like the concept of blue, or are they going to be fable?

These are the

options.

And I need to know before I launch myself.

I mean, because that's why there was so much disappointment when NASA had its recent landing

on Mars.

You could sort of sense a feeling of just those early pictures came through and there were no absolutely drop-dead, smoking hot Martians waiting for it.

Not even any craters that look like boobs.

What are we doing up there now?

I'm.

Hey, hey, hey.

All craters look like boobs if you're open enough to the different kinds of boobs there are, Josh Contellman.

A-C-A-B, all craters are boobs.

That's what that's looking history.

I'm skeptical of the specifics of this, honestly.

You said they said they can do it without breaking the laws of physics, and that it certainly sounds like

they've found a loophole in the laws of physics, which I don't like, because the laws of physics are the only ones that govern my body not being torn apart by the gravity itself.

They say that they can exceed the speed of light if basically they bend space-time, right?

And I think maybe we don't need to go that fast if that's how we're doing it.

How about we go just under the speed of light, which is still pretty good?

What are we, drag racing light?

Then maybe we don't need to twist the universe into loops and pretzels like a coat hanger we're using to break into a car.

Just let the universe be and go pretty fast.

I mean, what do you say then?

But, you know, I mean, we in Britain, we're pioneers of everything, obviously.

That's why we were put on this planet by God all those billions and billions of years ago when he made Britain.

So, I mean, why not break the laws of physics?

I mean, we are prepared to break international law, but surely that should be giving encouragement to these, you know, scientists saying you can't break the laws of physics, these Jobsworth law-abiding boffins who doff their hats subserviently to their great Lord Physics.

About time we stop being so subservient, isn't it?

I guess the only thing I know for sure about this warp drive spacecraft is that the crash test dummies they use to test it are going to look like shit when they're

just obliterated into a billion pieces, falling to Earth back in the 1800s somehow

confusing citizens and terrifying animals I think that's actually how tomato ketchup was invented and

time travel experiment

but I mean and also you know it is it's a long shot as you say given that at the moment you know we're sending things to Mars and getting overexcited about it quick update on the the latest Mars landings the NASA have received a full mission report from its lander that landed just a couple of weeks ago and it reads and I quote f all here folks as per.

Chinese lander that landed on Mars recently sent a message back saying I think someone got here before us and has taken all the Martians away for re-education and the United Arab Emirates Mars probe just sent a report back saying it's just like Dubai without the buildings and with a little bit more salt

obviously one of the great challenges of

you know intergalactic travel is that it you know it takes light fing ages to get anywhere.

So, humans, even if we do beat light, unless we absolutely smash it, it's going to take us ages to get there as well, even if we do bend the universe like a fing coat hanger.

But some progress.

Chinese students in an experiment have spent over a year

sealed away growing their own food and generating oxygen from recycled materials

in an attempt to create a similar habitat that will be maybe maybe usable on the moon, I mean, you can question the timing of this experiment, locking people away for a year with no contact with the outside world.

I don't know how much it's cost China to do this experiment.

There's no real need to pump money into that research with hindsight when the whole world was about to do it free of charge.

I mean, this

I mean,

how big a breakthrough is this that we you know we can we can do a whole year with it with our own with our own stuff?

Well and it's 370 370 days.

That is four more days than the last post.

And I

and halfway through the year, we had to start taking Sundays off.

This is such, I don't, like, I don't know if I can just wrap my head around the kind of humanity of this.

These are not like scientists, these are students.

And to people questioning whether this is a humane use of students, Xi Jinping has replied, wait till you see what we do with Uyghurs.

Just kidding, you'll never be allowed to see what we do with Uyghurs.

They're working on this, right?

They're isolating in hopes that the science will let people live on the moon.

And I can't wait till after a year of isolation, our modern science gets us to a place where we can eat at restaurants again.

Honestly, I think we're all prepared, like you were saying, Annie, to live on the moon psychologically, if not agriculturally.

I do think I'm a little less impressed than maybe some people are with

this experiment.

Sure, the people of China are having students grow crops with recycled material in isolation.

But recently, for a week, thanks to American leadership, the people of Texas learned to live without electricity.

So I think thanks to Ed Cruz, you know,

he was just teaching his people to be self-sustaining.

They could do without electricity and they could do without him and his family.

It's like off to Mexico.

He's always talking about how we're falling behind China.

Well, now he's doing something to catch us up.

And look, this is true.

This is a true fact from the story: they brought in 2% of what they need, right?

They didn't, it wasn't 100% self-sustaining.

They brought in 2% of the materials they needed, including toilet paper, which is smart.

That's a product you don't want to be reusing.

You don't want to get thrift store toilet paper.

You're not trying to

recycle, reduce, reuse, maybe bring in some new toilet paper.

Well, I feel like this is...

This is a real shame that it's China who's doing this moon mission because if I know anything about the moon and I do not, it's that the moon is made of cheese and there is a far higher proportion of lactose intolerance among ethnically native Chinese people than in other

populations.

Oh, right.

That's well, maybe that's why they're putting so much effort into

researching the feasibility of the.

They can send the French up.

They can just eat the floor.

Well, I think maybe that's that has been happening, that they send a new load of French people up every month and they just nibble it down until there's none left and then they have to let it regenerate and send some more French people there.

But

I mean possibly the reason China's looking to build a colony on the moon is looking for somewhere even further out of A sight and B mind to keep their re-education candidates.

And because yeah there's talk of a boycott of the Winter Olympics

that are due to be held in China in 2022.

But we're not going to need an Olympic boycott if all their human rights abuses are 230,000 miles away.

I mean no one's no one's going to be that fussy.

That's so far away.

You can't even see it with a decent telescope.

They can do it.

And no one's going to bother telling athletes to abandon their lifelong dreams of Olympic glory so we can assuage our collective guilt whilst keeping those conveniently cheap electrical goods coming over if the human rights abuses are taking place off a million kilometres away as the crow flies if the crow, of course, is in a rocket.

State surveillance news now.

Alice, you've been keeping an eye on all the organisations that are keeping an eye on the whole of humanity.

Bring us up to date with the latest in exciting state surveillance news.

Yes, indeed, Andy.

The latest Chinese state surveillance is called Sharp Eyes.

It is aiming for 100% surveillance of all public spaces in China, putting the old shit into, oh shit, a panopticon, putting the terrible into what a terrible dystopia, and the scape into futuristic hellscape full of technologically targeted scapegoats and corruptible data.

Which of the two scapes was that?

That was the second scape.

The first scape just was self-contained.

Okay, right.

The problem with this, Andy, is not just that it's happening and that it's terrifying and that it's definitely going to be misused, it's that the people support it.

Apparently, an analysis of more than 76,000 government procurement notices said that

in 2018, officials spent as much on surveillance as they did on education and more than twice as much money on surveillance as on environmental protection programs.

And in some instances, Chinese citizens even crowdfunded these surveillance programs,

which is

mind-bogglingly sad.

Like

this is sharpening the dildo they're going to you with, Andy.

Family show.

I think

mind-bogglingly sad is this decade's

Tinder profile so far.

And this 100% surveillance, that's going to just be,

like you said, they've crowdfunded.

Sometimes people have crowdfunded it.

This is managed to achieve in 15-second increments via TikTok, right?

That's the surveillance that we're talking about.

Just self-surveilling, opting in.

Sharp Eyes, the name of the program, Sharp Eyes, does sound like an HBO prestige drama about a far-sighted assassin.

So congratulations on your future, Oscar, Nicole Kidman, or more likely if it's about the country of China, Scarlett Johansson.

Congratulations on your future, Emmy.

Here in the United States, the government has the decency.

I'm a little disgusted by this plan.

And here in the United States, the government has the decency not to announce programs like this until the Freedom of Information Act reveals they've had one for years already and we've all been subject to it.

That's so much surveillance footage.

There's so many people who live in China and they're going to surveil 100% of public space.

That's just so ambitious.

I haven't even seen the Sopranos yet.

And they're watching everyone all the time.

That's so ambitious.

You're saying the Sopranos was just a load of surveillance videos that they strung together.

I'm not saying that's just what Italian people are like.

No.

I'm just saying they've got all this footage.

If I were doing all that surveillance, I would never get around to monitoring the citizens.

I would just be like, I've heard it's great, but I'm going to re-watch 30 Rock again.

Well,

isn't this a sign of hope?

Because there's been all this talk about, you know, with COVID and with robotization, you know, what jobs are our you know kids of my kids generation going to do and surely you know you know if china is surveilling all one and a half billion people in china then yeah my kids are going to have a steady line of work watching videos of chinese people going about their daily business and telling the chinese government all about it they're going to have to outsource their espionage and their surveillance.

And then we're going to have to, there's going to have to be another layer of watching the people who who are watching the surveillance video to make sure they're not up to no good.

So it's going to be who watches the watchers of the watchers.

Or as they call it, surveillance goggle box.

But I mean, this is a problem of

an increasingly secular world, isn't it?

I mean, all this work used to be done by God on his own.

But he was all over the place.

Look, if we're automating God, I feel like the rest of our jobs don't stand a chance.

in other

news related to the future of human life.

Conversations,

well, could I mean you'd expect them to end within a billion years as well, particularly after research saying that we're not really good at them.

Apparently, conversations often end either later or earlier than people would like because people are unwilling to say what they really think about the dialogue they're involved in.

This is due to a scientific study in the United States.

Time once again for the Bugle's regular call.

Science, focus for f's sake!

Another piece of totally unneeded research.

But it's interesting this idea they say that people mask how they really feel.

Now, of course, actual physical masks are all the rage these days, very trendy over the last, what, 12 to 14 months.

But let's not forget that the metaphorical mask has been one of the most popular fashion accessories for the entire history of humanity.

And remember, people, the metaphorical mask behind which you hide your true self is not just for you, because when you put up a mask to hide your true feelings in a conversation or just in life in general, you're not only protecting yourself from being infected by other people's toxic personalities, you're also protecting them from being infected by exposure to you being a real prick.

Well, Andy, I have to say, I wish you'd stop talking about 20 seconds ago.

I feel like that was...

Apparently, this is really interesting data.

Conversations either end later or earlier than people want them to because everyone's sort of too polite to say whether they're enjoying themselves or not.

So I've decided to have a constant gladiator style thumb angle indicator, which will tell the people I'm talking to how I feel about any given conversation at any time.

And often it will be at odds with all facial signifiers.

And I will tell you to your face that it is not signaling a thumbs down right now, but it absolutely is.

The idea is that people are too polite to say how they really feel, right?

And to that I say, good.

I would would rather we all linger a little too long in a conversation or hit the eject button a little early

for someone's comfort rather than just saying like, I'm bored with you now, bye-bye.

Or like, someone I like more just walked into the room.

Ta-ta.

I just think, like, yeah, that's how it's supposed to go.

We live in a culture and a society, not to sound like the f ⁇ ing joker, but like, yeah, sometimes you get to talk a little longer or a little less than you want.

They say, oh,

the conversation sometimes ends a little earlier, earlier, sometimes ends a little later.

When should a conversation end?

Shut the fk up, nerds.

Just let people talk.

We're trying to laugh.

We're trying to get laid.

Like, just let the conversations happen and end when they end.

We're not trying to optimize conversation.

This is like this is like what leads us to everyone drinking Soylent for all their meals.

Just like, let us have conversations and eat hamburgers, and sometimes we're awkward, and sometimes we die, and that's how it goes.

A soil is very good if you're lactose intolerant, internet.

But I mean, also, I guess the fact that we mask our true selves during conversations is one of the things that kept f ⁇ ers like Donald Trump out of the White House for 240 years of American history.

And in fact, the fact that the anonymity of the internet has enabled us to drop those masks and be our true fty selves.

I'm interested in this study about people just being too polite to converse the way they want.

But I live in New York City.

I grew up in Boston.

I have not found this to to be the case.

In New York, a conversation that goes on for too long is like when you bump into someone on the street and you're like, f you, and they're like, no, f you.

And you're like, this should have ended after my f you.

Well,

listeners, I'll put this to you.

If I may take the liberty of asking this in a podcast that has now been going for 13 and a half years and issued almost 500 full episodes and around 600, if you include the sub-episodes, is it fair to say that some conversations go on way too long?

Do get back to us on that.

American culture wars now and Josh, no sign of a ceasefire in the culture wars of the woke and the asleep meeting for a Christmas Day football match.

It's going on and on this war.

Yeah,

it's like the civil war between people who are glad the civil war was won by the north and people who think it was won by the south.

That's kind of what's happening here.

Yeah, there are six Dr.

Seuss books that the Dr.

Seuss's

foundation is not going to continue printing because of racist imagery within the books.

And there's like kind of a conservative outcry over that.

And it's true.

If you take all the racism out of children's books and you take the racist children's books off the shelves, how are Republicans going to teach their kids to be racist?

You know what I mean?

It's just like,

how are the racists supposed supposed to instruct their children?

They can't do that with multicultural books of today.

The Republican Party at this point exists like 80% to financially prop up anything that's publicly accused of being racist because Dr.

Seuss is now at the top of the Amazon charts and he's not releasing new singles.

It's just people who are like, we got to hoard Dr.

Seuss in our doomsday bunker

so we can have dubious imagery of Asian people in our in our child

our children's books.

And like, it's just so wild that that's like the Republicans' reason for being right now.

Like, if they were around in the 1930s, they would be clamoring to support the crude amateurish paintings in Hitler's Etsy store.

I mean, you say this.

I mean, they're conservatives.

Conservatives, particularly in America, are all about taking personal responsibility, not relying on other people to do stuff for you.

And, you know, if they're worried about lack of access to some of these more marginal Dr.

Seuss titles, why don't they, you know, take responsibility and draw their own books with which to inculcate racial biases in their children?

It's about time these people took personal responsibility for passing on their prejudice instead of outsourcing it to a dead author.

Yeah, seriously, it's right there, Bartholomew and the Jew black.

Come on, guys.

I feel like you're not even trying.

Well, I feel like no one is really trying at this point.

This is such a confected outrage, and the usual suspects are usual suspecting all over themselves in a real who's who of you knew

don't these people are pretending that they care about dr.

Seuss they do no that none of them has even thought about anapestic tantrabata in the last 20 or 30 years.

They don't give a shit.

They're not happy.

And now they're constantly like they're running around and claiming that people are going to rewrite Dr.

Seuss and change it all and it'll be, you know, it'll be, and today the great Yertl, that marvelous he, is king of the mud.

That is all he can see.

And by mud, I mean mud.

I don't mean to imply that Yertl does blackface.

He isn't that that guy.

Historical harms never he Yertl never endorses.

He's au fae with modern leftist discourses.

It's

then it's not gonna happen.

No one's trying to take away your childhood.

And even if they did, even if they became the cat in the culturally sensitive, non-appropriative hat, it's like who gives a shit?

It's for kids.

You could read them a cereal box in a sing-song voice and they'd be fine.

Well, you are just destroying the children's book publishing industry with that kind of comment, Josh.

Donald Trump Jr.,

the son of the former president, complained to Fox News, of course.

He said that left wingers are cancelling Doctor's Youth.

There is no place that they won't go, which is, I guess, a little ironic given that there's only one place that Donald Trump Jr.

is going, long term at least, and it's hot, very hot, eternally hot, and the boss is even more of a dick than Donald Jr.'s current overlord.

But I mean, it's, yeah, I guess

we do need to re-examine a lot of these old children's books.

I mean, Thomas the Tank Engine, very popular over here, radical anti-bus agenda, fairly clearly signedposted.

Peter Rabbit, well, let's just say the original Peter Rabbi was a very, very different book indeed, even by the standards of the day.

It was too different.

And well, from Zeus's Dr.

Zeus's

Green Eggs and the Ham, was patently

anti-environment,

anti-feminist, and anti-Semitic.

If you read it, well, absolutely hammered.

And the Law Acts, that's obviously about a Jewish lawyer.

In fact, I read in a Guardian article about this.

Dr.

Seuss's first published book was called The Pocket Book of Boners.

Bonus had a different meaning in those terms.

It was a term for mistakes, essentially.

It's kind of appropriate, I guess.

But that's now out of print.

yeah so if you want to if you're like you can't erase history by stopping pub publication of dr seuss's books read that one to your kids read dr seus's boner compendium to your children because everything that happened in the past has to keep happening or else the world ends

Texas update now.

Well, we covered Texas last week with, particularly focusing on Ted Cruz, but more Texas News.

Governor Greg Abbott is opening Texas up fully

in an effort to re-spread COVID, I think, and is repealing the statewide mask mandate.

COVID cases in Texas have been going up recently against the downward USA nationwide trend.

So I guess what better time to give the virus a real boost, just as its morale must have been

beginning to sag?

This is,

I don't know, it's become such an issue of political identity, Josh, in America, hasn't it?

Masks and the politicization of maskedness.

Yeah,

it's such a thing, right?

Like the idea of wearing a mask has become such a

political signifier, which is like, it's also,

they don't, that's not the way it is with other public health, right?

Nobody's like, oh, I'm, I'm, I believe in rugged individualism, so I reject chemotherapy, right?

Like, this is,

it's just this one.

And Greg Hybot opening Texas up, opening restaurants to full capacity, repealing the mask mandate.

I truly can't believe that the citizens of Texas were better off in the Halcyon days when their politicians were just fleeing the country during crisis rather than just abandoning them to the ravages of disease.

Three out of four of Abbott's COVID advisors were not consulted on this decision, which is bananas to me because you

consult four medical professionals for the most minor decisions in this country, right?

Like without three out of four, knowing what three out of four dentists think, we wouldn't know what toothpaste to use.

We'd just be rubbing frosting on our gums as our teeth fell out.

Joe Biden called this Neanderthal thinking, which is a little unfair because I think Neanderthal leaders couldn't possibly have had this much information about the natural disasters that were wiping out their citizens.

So like the Neanderthals, I think were, you know, they were doing their best.

Well, Greg Abbott opening up Texas just as they are starting to release the vaccine in large numbers is the guy on the spaceship with the weak chin who just when they're looking like they might dock successfully despite the damage to the portside engine suddenly lunges for the airlock screaming I've got to get out of here like this is

that guy and calling it Neanderthal thinking I think is kind but watching the confected outrage of the right wing stumbling over themselves to smugly claim that they're offended on behalf of their 2% Neanderthal blood is such a clumsy insult to the very idea of satire that I have officially challenged all of them to a duel to the death.

Like, what is the target of that?

Who are you mocking?

What is the function?

Who's this joke for?

I thought you didn't believe in evolution.

Everything about it is so bad that I just want to gag them with their own overlong Trump cosplay neckties until they give up on human speech.

I think everyone that you would want to duel to the death is currently dueling themselves to the death by refusing to wear a mask and like going to like Joe's spit-in-each other's mouth saloon just to prove a political point.

But it is weird.

I mean all the evidence of the dangers of releasing your lockdown prematurely, particularly as cases were already going.

This is like a compulsive gambler returning to the roulette table saying, I can feel it in my waters.

This one is mine.

I'm going all in on yellow.

Are you sure, sir?

It's been a while since yellow won.

Do you want those stats on yellow?

It's really trailing behind red and black, those two neck and neck, and it's even struggling against green.

F you, you fing snowflake.

I'm I'm all in on yellow!

Screaming COVID test news now, Andy, and a Dutch inventor has now come out with and announced what he thinks is a better method than the old swab up the nose method for testing for coronavirus, which is to step into an airlocked cabin and scream.

Which I just think is such a beautiful, it's such a beautiful everything.

I really want to see this happen, Andy.

I'm going to just get people to scream in booths and not even test them for the coronavirus.

I think it'll be therapeutic.

I can see booth screaming really taking off.

Screaming in a soundproof booth alone, that's just podcasting.

So I am ready.

I feel like I've been preparing for this COVID test for years.

I've been studying without even knowing it.

Isn't it nice to know know that you're doing the right thing by accident?

That's also how I felt this year when they made obesity a comorbidity in New York

and the threshold of BMI, which is like a largely fraudulent diagnostic for health, but now it can qualify for you for the vaccine.

And I was like, I knew I was eating all that pizza for a reason.

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

Thanks very much for listening.

I hope you've enjoyed it.

Alice, you won't.

In fact, as we record, you are about to record another issue of The Gargle.

Just remind our listeners all about The Gargle.

Yes, indeed, Andy.

If The Bugle is an audio newspaper for a visual world, The Gargle is the glossy magazine to that audio newspaper.

And it's a satirical news podcast that touches on everything except politics, and it's a lot of fun to do.

So last week we had

your very own Josh Gondelman from the other side of this screen that I'm looking at right now, and John Luke Roberts, famous of The Last Post.

And then this week, coming, we have Tiff Stevenson and Hari Kondabolu.

So, it's going to be a lot of fun.

Also, if anyone's in Melbourne,

I'm going to be doing the Melbourne International Comedy Festival

from the 5th to the 18th in the Greek Centre.

And if you're not in Melbourne, I will be streaming it via my Patreon, patreon.com/slash Alice Fraser.

How international is the International Comedy Festival this year?

Extremely unternational.

The Melbourne National Comedy Festival of this year.

Well, given that every time we have like three cases, all the state borders close, it might just be the Melbourne-Melbourne Comedy Festival.

Do go to Alice's show then.

And I think Tom Ballard's got a show as well.

Well, just to support it, just support the concept of going out to see things.

It's a great festival I've done in the past.

Josh, Josh, any shows to alert our listeners to?

Oh gosh, I have a podcast called Make My Day.

It's a comedy game show where there's one guest every week and they always win.

So

that's, I mean,

until I move to Texas like

a young Joe Rogan, I'm still waiting for live shows to be safer.

And we will play you out now with some lies about our premium level voluntary subscribers.

Lena Lersch thinks ladders are underused in society, leading to unnecessary expenditure on staircases, escalators, gates and the like.

Lena explains, if everyone was legally obliged to carry their own ladder everywhere, we would not need to build so many stairs in buildings, freeing up much-needed floor space, and we wouldn't need so many doors or gates in walls as we could just whip out our ladders and hop over the top.

Lena adds, it would probably improve overall social fitness levels too.

Daniel Gutierrez is constantly disappointed by rainbows.

They They promise a great deal, complains Daniel, but generally fail to deliver, both in terms of crocs of gold at the end and portents of hope.

They don't really serve any practical function, continues Daniel.

If you could slide down them, of course, that would be a different matter, and they don't pay tax, so I would ban them forthwith.

Colin Platt realised he had probably fallen out of love with modern art when he found himself in a trendy gallery, staring at two smooth white cubes placed at curious angles to each other in the middle of a room and shouting, Come on, you overgrown dice, evoke something.

On being informed by a gallery attendant that the victims of his rage were in fact Natalie designed seats and that the work of art was in fact a single grain of rice hanging from the ceiling, he left the gallery and bought a book about 17th century Dutch landscape painters.

For many years, George Kennedy laboured under the misapprehension that Russian Orthodox was a special religion for medical practitioners from Moscow who specialise in muscles and the skeleton.

The Russians love an abbreviation, notes George, so I'd assumed Orthodox stood for orthopedic doctors.

He realised his mistake when marching into the Trinity Ismailovsky Cathedral in St.

Petersburg and bellowing, what's a guy got to do to get an arthroscopy round here?

before being asked, not particularly politely, to leave.

Sailor Ellen Underwood hopes one day to publish a series of books speculating on what the lives of famous composers would have been like if some aspect of their careers had had to rhyme with their names.

I think Mozart's flowcharts speaks for itself, says Sailor, and I definitely read Handel's scandals, whilst the composer of the 1812 Overtures' attempt to sell Indian tea and other caffeine-rich hot drinks would make Tchaikovsky's Chai and Coffee Scheme an absolute Christmas must-read.

And finally, Christian Andreasson is right on board with this idea and has offered to contribute to the series a tome about a renowned Italian opera writer's successes on the Gulf circuit and a German romanticist's dabblings in the property market.

Christian volunteers, I'll do Verde's Birdie's and Strauss's houses, but I do absolutely draw the line at anything to do with Debussy.

Here endeth this week's lies.

And it was with those lies that Andy Zaltzman concluded the episode of the 5th of March 2021 that proved exactly half a millennium ago such a turning point in humanity's battle against the rising tide of Dolphin civilization.

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.