Texas(shole) Ted

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4184 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a world that mostly just looks at things on screens these days.

I'm Andy Zaltzman coming to you live, albeit no longer live by the time you hear it, so not really live, from my shed in South London.

And I'm joined today from just up the road in Brixton, also South London, by Nish Kumar.

Hello, Nish.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Buglers.

Good to see you.

Good to be here.

How have you been the last few weeks since you were last on?

Any massively exciting news of exciting walks in a park?

No.

Yeah.

I mean, I've been leaving my house habitually.

Andy, I've been alerted to a slightly alarming trend.

Regular listeners to this podcast will be vaguely familiar with two characters in the southern hemisphere, namely

my teenage cousins, who opened the Pandora's box of bugle Wikipedia vandalism when they encouraged bugle listeners to demolish my Wikipedia page a couple of years ago.

They actually showed me something slightly alarming.

There are people doing lip syncs to my stand-up on TikTok, Andy.

Now, I'll be honest with you, when they said that to me, I understood about three of the words in that sentence and none of them in the context in which they were being delivered but they showed me short videos on the short video sharing website TikTok where people are lip-syncing to me doing some stand-up about Monopoly and I'm all for it Andrew.

I'm all for it.

I think the only logical extension is for this is for the next series of RuPaul's drag race to feature drag queens lip-syncing to my full hour-long stand-up show.

I'm ready for it.

It's a new world, and I've been accidentally thrust to the forefront of it.

Well, that's a very exciting development in your career, isn't it?

Yeah, well, I've got fall else going on, Andy.

This is pretty much all I can cling to.

Well, you don't technically have an inadverted commas job at the moment, but some teenagers are mouthing along to things you said about four years ago.

well I think that's how Jesus started wasn't it that sort of kicked off for him

and

like Jesus I'm a bearded brown man who's been somewhat controversial in the realm of whitey

and fully Jewish as well of course Nish aren't you so

Also joining us, and I don't know if he has ever been lip-synced on TikTok, a huge welcome back to Baratundai Thurston.

Oh, this is where I express gratitude and excitement about being here with you.

Insert gratitude and excitement module.

It's good to be back here with you, Buglers.

I too am coming to you from a shed, this one in northeast Los Angeles, and I know what I'm spending the rest of the day doing.

I am going to find all previous appearances of Nish Kumar on the Bugle podcast.

I'm going to lip-sync them on my brand new TikTok account.

My life has purpose.

Thank you.

uh how how have you how have you been uh barretton how's how's 2020 2021 feels like 2020 the overtime edition i'm not fully acknowledging that it's a different year because so many things feel the same but so far so okay

uh i think

yeah we'll take that anyway

i remain covet free and a bit able to pay the rent uh which are massive signs of uh life success uh these are the hashtag life goals we've all been seeking.

And yeah, I'm relatively healthy of mental and physical types.

I'm glad to be here with y'all.

And, you know, we got rid of the befouling president we had since the last time I appeared with you.

So that is most definitely progress.

And I'm kind of relieved to not be obsessing or fearing news headlines quite as much as I did.

It's a strange thing to feel stalked by the news.

We are recording on the 26th of February 2021.

Today, apparently, is Carpe Diem Day.

Now, if my study of Latin at school and university serves me well, Carpe Diem means complain and then die, which is good advice for life and also for doing satirical comedy.

On the 27th of February, 1951, the 22nd Amendment of the U.S.

Constitution, limiting presidents to two terms was ratified.

Recent evidence suggests that, well, certainly in some cases, that was two terms too many.

And possibly a re-amendment of that is due.

Also, we're going to discover on Monday, this is quite exciting, whether the 29th of February, the renowned once every four years leap year bonus day, will happen or not this year, because generally the 29th of February happens in Olympic years,

and the Olympics was delayed from last year to this year.

So 29th of February has taken place in 2016, 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000 and indeed all years with the Summer Olympics back to 1904.

So

we will soon know if leap years are related to Olympicses or just

the calendar

or any other crazy theory you may have heard.

Anyway, watch this space for your ears.

On the 28th of February 1939, the erroneous word DORD was discovered in Webster's new international dictionary, prompting an investigation.

The error, apparently, was caused by a note

being wrongly interpreted.

It was included as a word meaning density, as opposed to density being one of the words for which the uppercase D or lowercase D was an abbreviation.

So it got into the dictionary, and it took about 15 years to fully remove it from the dictionary, the word DORD meaning density.

But what other words could have slipped into the dictionary by mistake?

We investigate uh here at the bugle could now common words such as sausage be similar printing errors sausage could very well be an abbreviation for sa usage with s a being an acronym for surplus arses are words like pelican cucumber and janitor accidental forgeries does putrid actually mean the lace of a tennis shoe and should kettle actually be waswick and vice versa you decide as always a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin this week a corporate business section um and we're all about corporate business here at the Bugle.

And while we're looking at, well, the corporate world and fake reviews on

big corporate websites, amidst growing concern about the number and sophistication of fake reviews for products sold by large online retailers, we're going to help train you to spot the bogus review, Bugles.

Now, obviously, not all reviews can be trusted, as readers of the Observer newspaper in August 2000 would no doubt testify after reading about a young British stand-up comedian who is described as grindingly mediocre and yet who has gone on in just two decades to develop a moderately adequately successful career in radio, podcasting and cricket statistics.

So don't trust all the reviews that you read.

So the challenge for you buglers, can you spot the fake review of a teapot from these reviews?

Is it review A?

This is a nice looking teapot which does the job and looks the part.

The tea comes out hot and wet, which is all you can ask for.

Is it review B?

Disappointed, the instructions did not specify that you're not supposed to drink directly from the spout.

Is it review C?

This teapot changed my life.

After just two brews, I became four times as attractive to all sexes.

And one week on, I can now bench 580, speak 12 languages, communicate with the dead just by offering them a cuppa, and know all the lyrics to the entire oeuvre of British rock legends Def Leopard without ever having listened to their music.

Or is it review D?

At last we're allowed to use teapots in Britain again after four decades in which Brussels made us brew our tea in colanders.

The answers will come next week.

And can you spot the one review of the children's book Spot the Dog that is actually a review of Spot the Dog?

Is it review A?

This is easily Joseph Conrad's most depressing and unsettling book.

Is it review B?

Recommended.

Instantly improved my ability to identify what is and what is not a dog.

Is it review C?

My JL41 Badonka Donk tank was delivered promptly but proved unsuitable for combat use.

Two stars.

Or was it review D?

I needed a book about STDs.

Lesson learned.

Always read beyond the first letter of words.

Spot the dog was no help to me whatsoever.

Answers next week.

Top story this week: vaccine rollouts begins.

Well, globally, this is very exciting news.

COVID, the virus, which has proved such a disappointingly tenacious little shit over the past year and a bit, so stubbornly reluctant to give into the kind of short-termist grandstanding political bombast that so many countries have come to depend on to work their way through difficulties, could be set to face its toughest opponent yet, belated global cooperation, because the COVAX scheme has begun a global initiative aimed at achieving something vaguely approaching equitable-ish access to COVID vaccines for the less economically advantaged nations of the world, provided, of course, there's still enough for some countries to get one over on other rival countries, for example, Germany, by finding one aspect of the virus we cannot spectacularly f up more than anyone else.

So, I mean, Nish, you are our global vaccination correspondent and have been since the very first time you appeared on this show.

Indeed, I have.

I've been waiting for this portfolio to bear fruit.

This is

interesting news.

This whole project tells us quite a lot about the world in general, both its good points and its bad points.

Yeah, I mean, the positive headlines, which we should open with under the current climate of general pervading gloom, is that 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have arrived in Ghana and making Ghana the first country to receive coronavirus vaccines through the COVAX vaccine sharing initiative.

Now, my first question is: Guys, why are we giving them the vaccines and why are they not coming from Wakanda?

I've seen Black Panther.

There's absolutely no way that that guy wasn't able to knock up some sweet viruses and put them in vibranium vials.

Secondly, Andy, let's take a moment and enjoy the fact that this is a good news story that involves the West bringing viruses to Africa and it not ending in everyone dying.

That is not historically

the direction of travel that that has gone.

White people turning up with viruses has not traditionally ended well for people of my skin hue and darker, frankly.

It's been an absolute shit show.

There is a sort of story that's been bubbling under in the last couple of weeks in Britain about how certain black and minority ethnic groups are having a lower than expected vaccine turnout.

Now, obviously, as a member of a minority ethnic group living in Britain, I want to to make it clear that I will absolutely be taking the vaccine when it's offered to me.

I can't wait.

I'm just going to shove it up my ass and hope for the best.

Okay.

I'm excited to receive the vaccine.

However, white people do need to understand that we are not exactly crying wolf here.

And there is something ancestrally concerning about a white guy approaching you saying, I'm just going to put some disease in you.

It will definitely be fine this time.

Well, you know, all trial schemes have a few teething troubles, even if they were a couple of hundred years ago.

What, Pox?

No, remember that?

Yes.

Oh, that's great.

I've been concerned about the language of the COVAX situation.

And maybe it's an English English to American English translation, but when I read the COVAX scheme, that doesn't inspire a load of confidence.

It sounds conspiratorial, nefarious.

And I sense a bit of backpadding by British press about this rollout.

Ghana, a nation of 30, 31 million people, is getting 600,000 doses of the remaindered vaccines.

And it's just, I think, for any colonial power or former, real progress is when you start with the former colonies and work your way back rather than waiting to give the leftover vaccines to those who you ruled over and determine the fate of and in some ways destroyed.

On the side, aside from this this this scheme to spread vaccines around the world, rich and powerful countries have been tying up and stockpiling their supplies first because, well, I mean, let's be we were far-sighted enough to have become rich and powerful in the first place.

And what would have been the point of that if we don't cash in our membership benefits at Club Global Privilege and Club Iniquitous Legacies of History when we need to?

You know, that's just that how these things work.

The World Health Organization has warned that the inequitable vaccine distribution could extend the pandemic and cause avoidable long-term economic and travel disruption for years and years, as well as potentially facilitating the rise of more funky and fruity new COVID variants.

But still, from a British perspective, we're winning.

We are winning.

Go, Team, eat our syringe-laden dust world.

We are winning.

Team GP.

That is the most enthusiasm I've seen from a British person outside of a football arena in quite some time.

True emotion.

Amazing.

I guess one question is,

why are generic versions of these successful vaccines not being manufactured all over the world already?

And I guess the answer to that would be, we won the f ⁇ ing Cold War.

So free markets.

That's actually the answer we give to quite a lot of questions, actually.

What will you be having for lunch?

Anything I f ⁇ ing want, we won the f ⁇ ing Cold War.

How many roads must a man walk down before he could go, well I'll walk down any roads I want, Bob Dylan, because we won the f ⁇ ing Cold War.

It is very depressing because I would have thought the one lesson we would have learned from this entire,

let's call it what it is, shit show, is that we are all interconnected and our success and relative health surely depends on us at least taking an interest in our fellow man's success and relative health, whether that be at home or abroad.

You know, in a world where we travel more and more, the fact that we might not be able to do that should be a sort of real stark lesson learned.

But we are basically like a cross between Ebenezer Scrooge and Guy Pearson Memento.

We just keep being visited by ghosts, but we cannot remember what the ghost said.

Every Christmas morning, we wake up and think, you know what?

This year, I'm going to tattoo it on my body next year.

I'm going to tattoo it on my body.

I think it might have been something about

be less generous and that way you'll become an absolute legend but I think that's what that's the gist of it anyway I'll keep going with that and then next year somebody remind me to write it

down

yeah we do tend to get in our own way a bit and if of all of this you know I remember the beginning of the pandemic it was so naive sounding where COVID's gonna bring us all together This is the alien invasion we need to unite our disparate tribes.

And now it's just like every person for themselves, just flinging babies to the wayside to get a hold of that jab.

It doesn't matter.

We have forgotten all of that.

And it doesn't bode well for the climate change cooperation.

Climate change is like, you have no idea what I am capable of.

If you couldn't handle a little flu, what do you think I'm going to do to you?

In other very exciting vaccine news, a man from Liverpool was offered a COVID vaccine vaccine after a clerical error and an automated computer system led to his local surgery thinking that he was significantly overweight.

Well, more than significantly overweight.

He was 1,000 times over the recommended weight for his height, which they had recorded as 6.2 centimeters and not, as it should have been, 6 foot 2 inches.

I mean, I think this is one of the greatest stories to have emerged from this crisis.

Probably the most extreme case of small man syndrome in recorded history.

It gave him a body mass index index of 28,000, which is a thousand times the recommended healthy level.

For a man of six foot two, a BMI of 28,000 would work out, if I've done the maths correctly, which I might have done, as weighing approximately 90 tons,

or in everyday parlance, five shipping containers full of marshmallows, four luxury motor homes, three elephants, two Lancaster bombers, and the partridge family in a pear tree.

Yeah,

this is a story.

There's very few, and I think maybe this is the first unequivocally funny piece of COVID news.

There is just no downside to this story whatsoever.

The whole story is basically a guy nearly got a vaccine because everyone thought he was basically a whole bunch of tanks.

And

no one's getting hurt by this story.

It's really, it's a real relief that no one at the doctor surgery at any point had gone down and gone, oh,

is one of our patients a man or a small planet?

I admit, I read this story and I had a different response, though I like your take, Nish.

I was more concerned about the massive intelligence failure, which allowed one of MI6's most notorious experiments to go so wrong.

A tiny little feature man, six centimeters tall, made entirely of tungsten and neptunium and other heavy metals,

a key asset in the war on terror, a war for freedom, outed by the British tabloids

in an attempt to undermine the strength of that great nation that won the f ⁇ ing Cold War.

So

I'm pouring some out for the lost military asset.

The queen got jabbed this week.

Which suggests we do not have a lot of faith in our national anthems.

That's it.

That's a wrap.

You have to cut right there.

There's nothing more that can be said ever in the United Kingdom.

That's it.

That's really good.

The end.

The UK.

The UK is,

well,

we're making our way

towards the other side

of the crisis.

And Boris Johnson, our Prime Minister, published what he described as a roadmap

out of lockdown.

Lockdown's going to be lifted in four stages.

The code names names of the four stages are, oh shit, f ⁇ ing hell.

Jesus and God f ⁇ 's sake.

And hopefully we'll be at full gaff f ⁇ sake by the end of June.

Nish,

I know you're a massive fan of roadmaps of all sorts.

How do you see Johnson's roadmap to a post-COVID world?

It's a very interesting roadmap because it's one of the few roadmaps that involves the direction turn left at the massive f ⁇ ing pile of dead bodies

and try not to look too hard at them or think too much about the cost and toll that this is taking on the entire country.

Yeah, look, obviously, I am trying to see the upside to all of this, and there is a definite upside.

We have a roadmap that in four stages leads us from June the 21st to being fully out of lockdown.

And I'm trying to be more positive about this if for no other reason other than last week my agent said to me, I have to stop calling you because you're really bumming me out.

And there was then a pause on the line, and she said, oh, on second thoughts, you never answer emails.

And that is a very sobering conversation to have to have with someone where your own administrative incompetence is so pungent that it's causing someone to have a really negative impact on their own mental health in order to do the basic tenets of their job.

It does not reflect well on me, quite frankly.

What about

in California?

What's the

path to the future looking like, Baron?

I think we're going going to recall our governor.

I don't know.

We have a different sort of roadmap in California.

It involves no one being able to afford a place to live.

It involves a remaining contingent of Trumpites who don't believe in anything except mass death and destruction.

And it involves an embarrassing loss of discipline.

by our governor some months ago, which he will never escape, when he went to a fine dining restaurant, technically outside, looked like it was inside.

And that one move is getting people signing up to recall him from his office.

So a little different in California.

A lot of money, not evenly distributed.

We're going to do just fine, is what I'm saying.

For the remaining Californians who haven't fled to Texas, that was a strange move given what's happened in that state recently.

It's interesting times.

And I have to say, I had ridiculed your prime minister.

Well, since I ever heard of him, and I thought there's nothing Bojo can do right.

And maybe that's true, but the idea that he exceeded my very low expectations and you actually have this roadmap and he's not yet in real jail jail,

I've got to eat my words a little bit.

Like he's done less horrifically than I anticipated, at least from over here.

Texas News now, and well, Ted Cruz, Baratunde, a living, breathing insult to everything good and precious about life, has found himself under criticism once again because firstly i mean there's a couple of sides of this story whilst the uh the big freeze was happening in in texas the state of which he is for whatever reason a senator it was in the grip of an enveloping icy catastrophe and he in layman's terms f right off uh with his family for a few days in sunny mexico um not really sort of projecting the we're all in this together vibe more the f you i'm ted cruise vibe um and also during the opening testimony of the senate hearing into the capitol riots riots he was not only wearing an I helped facilitate a deadly assault on my own workplace t-shirt and a democracy bandana but he was also dicking around with his phone suggesting his mind was not entirely on the job I mean is this all part of his his early campaign for 2024 presidential election to project himself as being so much of a

that he could even supplant Trump in the affections of the the Trumpite supporters here's here's what's happening in the United States We are more divided than we've been since the actual Civil War.

We have different views of truth and reality, the Fox News universe, the actual universe.

We've got violence at our U.S.

Capitol.

We've got families that have been ripped apart ideologically, spiritually.

And despite all that, the one thing we can come together around is Ted Cruz.

It's a universal truism.

Even his friends hate him.

Even his constituents, like,

why did I vote for that?

I really, I really hate Ted Cruz.

And what's beautiful about Ted Cruz, he's not so much a man as a sort of opportunity for us to find that common ground that is so inaccessible of late.

And just when you thought it can't get any darker.

in America, we can't get more divided, we can't get more hurt, he goes and reminds us that we can unite against him.

So

I'm somewhat grateful for his commitment to tomfoolery and embarrassment and shamelessness.

And atop all of that, with his trip to Mexico,

he blamed his daughter.

You know, at the end of the day,

like that's when you realize, like, oh, father of the year also.

just said my daughter wanted it.

And like a good dad,

he had blamed it on on the institution of fatherhood uh as opposed to his own choices so that's um i'm grateful for for ted cruise's existence because it gives me something to agree with insurrectionist over

that's a very positive i gotta i gotta find that silver lining when i can the clouds are dark

One aspect of the Mexico story, I particularly like, was apparently when

neighbors of his hired a mariachi band to play outside his house.

Maximum trolling.

oh that's good that's good and that's the sort of civic engagement and community spirit we've been missing in this country

it's it's all incredible it's all incredible and barritto what you you hit the nail so aggressively on the head when you said that everybody hates him because obviously the only reason We have had this confirmed because obviously people saw him at the airport and were like is that f ⁇ ing Ted Cruz getting on a plane to f ⁇ ing Mexico?

So immediately took photos of him because they all hate him.

the reason that we've had it all confirmed is because

one of his wife's friends leaked the text messages.

So

even people who, even people who he's friends enough to be in WhatsApp groups with think he's an arsehole.

And what's amazing about it is Ted Cruz's hypocrisy at this point is one of the naturally occurring wonders of the world.

Because the man's capacity for self-awareness is almost minus 1,000.

He went on a conservative podcast and said of the decision of his wife's friends to leak the text, he criticised the action and said, just, you know, treat each other as human beings.

Have to some degree some modicum of respect.

And that is like Jack the Ripper accusing someone of making a sexist joke.

That is thermonuclear hypocrisy from the cruisemeister.

Which is a very,

it's arguably the most sustainable energy resource in the world.

It was self-perpetuating.

We found cold fusion through Ted Cruz's hypocrisy engine.

Just on his phone while someone was talking about what it was like to police during the riots that he started, and then immediately afterwards going on a podcast and saying, guys, can we just what RIP decorum?

There's going to be a revelation, maybe through one of Nish's government panels, that Ted Cruz is in fact the greatest actor of all time.

He's been spending his whole life in the method acting role of a lifetime, and he never was a real thing.

He was sent here to troll us all and somewhat bring us together.

I can't imagine during the 9-11 hearings,

any member, elected member of Congress or the Senate, not paying full attention.

Like that would just be it.

That'd be your career would be over.

So we've grown clearly as a nation in our capacity to tolerate inhumanity it's yeah

oh he was accused of having zero respect uh but by scrolling through his phone during this testimony which to be fair to cruise would be a career best um having uh never managed to get above active disrespect for other people before so that would tell you at least that's progress getting up to zero um uh before before you uh you go barretton there was uh here's a here's a question for you so can you explain these words um i'm going to give you a kind of of multiple choice question.

Only the strong will survive and the weak will perish.

Are they?

The tagline for a new action movie, Hornslayer, starring Matt Damon.

Of course, it's a movie, Matt Damon's in it.

Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Helen Mirren, a deep fake Greta Garbos, an alien robot, and the unborn child of Harry and Megan as D.I.

Fetus.

Are those words, only the strong will survive and the weak will perish, the post-match comments of cricket pundits analysing England's latest defeat to India?

Are they C, the fullback tattoo found on the body of Charles Darwin in the new TV series Celebrity Exhumation?

Or are they D, what the mayor of Colorado City in Texas said to people wanting help amidst the cataclysmic winter storms?

A, B, C.

I'm going to go with all the above.

Because I want all of them to be true, but sadly, it's D.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, this was

an unsurprising moment.

I think what's remarkable about my nation, and I have to, as I criticize the United States of America, fully embrace it because I was born here.

I'm a product of this place as well.

So my country, Tis of The,

sweet land of something,

we have done such an effective propaganda job that people who are elected to government, which is like a collective will of the people, rant against the very premise of government.

People whose job it is to extend assistive hands to their neighbors, tell those neighbors, f ⁇ off, pick yourself up with your own damn hands.

It's someone who works at a social service agency yelling at the people in line, why are you asking for help from the social service agency?

Go get a job.

And so the rant of this now former mayor

against the people of the Republic of Texas, who always want to think they're a little bit something special, a little bit something one apart from the rest of us, and they were in a sad way last week.

just said what a lot of the propaganda has been teaching us that you know you're on your own we have no pity for you it's your own fault if you don't have power or drinkable water.

And you must not love your family enough if you can't figure out how to unfreeze a natural gas refinery and get power flowing to your block.

Jesus must not care for you enough if you can't figure out how to move that Arctic wave back up to Canada where it belongs.

I'm sorry, I don't make the rules here.

So, good luck, citizens.

We've reached the point of the podcast, Barton, where we have to talk about cricket, and therefore, we are going to cut you off.

I accept your discrimination, which is actually rather compassionate.

Thank you very much for joining us up to the cricket part of the show.

It's been an absolute delight to have you on.

Have you got any other shows that you can alert our listeners to?

Yeah, I'm looking forward to a new series called Only the Strong Will Survive and the Weak Will Perish.

It is the great contributions of Nish Kumar to the British people and the entire United Kingdom.

If anyone's on the Clubhouse app, you can find me there.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, congratulations to you for having a life.

And I will be on the Brian Williams program on March 4th in the United States, and I'm sure versions of it will end up on the global advertorial platform and democracy undermining service known as YouTube.

So you can also find me there.

Otherwise, Barratunday.com is the best place to locate me and my digital wares.

Great.

Thanks.

Lovely to see you again.

Thanks for watching.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you, buglers.

Long live

the bugle.

I guess I'm going to.

Thanks.

Thanks.

Well, yeah, that's the one thing it is quite good at, to be fair.

This is classic Brexit, Britain.

If you do not show interest in things we're interested in, we will deport you from podcasts.

Don't like cricket?

Sling your hook, brother.

Great.

Well, now we've got rid of Barretton and we can move on to the story that really matters.

Cricket.

Nish.

The Zaltzman Kumar Derby.

Well, actually, to be fair, the Nish Kumar Derby.

It's India v.

England.

How do you fare on the Tebbit test?

Now, there was a famous thing in the 1980s, Norman Tebbit, who was a

pretty right-wing Conservative

Home Secretary, talked about the Tebbit test and how immigrants from

cricket playing

former colonial partners, shall we say, now living in England, should support England at cricket.

And this was described as the Tebbit test.

Now, obviously, it's patently ridiculous because it's cricket.

It doesn't really matter.

It's sport.

You can support who you want.

It's part of your family heritage.

You don't have to abandon everything about a country when you move to another country.

And also, supporting England cricket in the 1980s was a f ⁇ ing bad idea because England lost to countries that didn't even fing exist, I'm pretty sure.

Though, we managed to lose.

We lost, I think, to

probably to the Vatican.

I think that's some rematch from Henry VIII days.

We definitely lost to

the Netherlands.

It was

absolutely.

Let's say no more about the 86-87 test series against Narnia.

Boy, oh, boy.

Boy, oh, boy, can Aslan back.

Wildly egotistical propaganda adult politicians debase themselves in the greatest sport ever invented news now because in Ahmedabad, it was played in a brand new stadium, 110,000 capacity cricket stadium, the second biggest stadium in the world, after I think the Rungrado 4th of May stadium in Pyongyang, which claims 150,000 capacity, although it's North Korea.

It could just be two benches next to a pond.

It was named the Sarda Patel Stadium after one of the founding heroes of independent India.

And it became on the morning of the first cricket match played in the stadium it was

rebuilt, this vast new arena on the morning of the India-England third test.

It became renamed as the Narendra Modi Stadium, and the capacity was miraculously bumped up to 132,000.

They managed to find 22,000 extra seats somehow, according to Wikipedia.

And I think they might have even tinkered around with the Wikipedia page.

Now, the biggest stadium in the world, because now the Run Grado Stadium in Pyongyang is listed as 115,000 official capacity.

And it's

this, I mean, Nish,

essentially what we've got here is a part-time incidental sports facility and a full-time giant propaganda tool for a religious nationalist takeover of a once secular country.

And as a result, clearly England were off-put and didn't play very well at all and lost the game in a day and a half.

Yeah,

England really took their protests against Narendra Modi, I would say, arguably too far for their own good.

They really refused to play.

It was an interesting protest in that they steadfastly refused to play one reasonable shot across the two innings.

And that's, you've got to admire that level of protest, Andy.

The stadium, like I said, it's now, well, it's either first or second in your list of biggest stadiums in the world.

Numbers three to ten in the list are college sports stadiums in the USA.

And then

suggests maybe America takes students playing sport a little bit too seriously.

Why are they bigger than the professional stadiums?

I don't understand what is the logic behind that, America.

They're obviously worse.

And next is the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the MCG, home of the first Test cricket match ever played in 1877.

Coincidentally, that's exactly 52,580 days ago.

And that's four and a half billion seconds for our younger listeners.

The new Ahmedabad Stadium previously hosted the Namaste Trump event a year ago this week when Modi's fellow scrapey from the bottle of democracy's surprisingly deep barrel, Donald Trump, visited India and mispronounced cricketers' names like the irredeemable that he is.

And that's really when you hopped off board, wasn't it?

When he mispronounced such Intendulka's name, that was really when Solzman was like, you know what, I was on the fence, but now

Trump.

Yes, I mean when you name a brand new stadium after a current serving politician, it does suggest that its quality as a sports video is not absolutely number one in your priorities.

Well, before we wrap up, since we mentioned Boris Johnson, he's an interesting thing

this week, Nish.

He expressed feelings of guilt about his previous life as a journalist.

He said that he felt a little bit guilty for some of the things that he'd written.

He was speaking to school children.

He said, when you're a journalist, it's a great, great job.

It's a great profession.

But the trouble is that sometimes you find yourself always abusing people or attacking people.

Now, Mr.

Johnson, without wishing to tell you how to do your former job, that's not really journalism, is it?

That is being a with a column.

Those are very, very different jobs, very different skill sets.

And as someone who has occupied the second of those two jobs, I can tell you it bears no resemblance to actual journalism.

Yes, it was a very strange thing that Johnson said.

He was at a school talking to children about careers.

And I mean,

statistically, putting Boris Johnson in a school classroom with some children, it is likely he fathered at least one of the children in that classroom due to his, I believe,

medically diagnosed sexual incontinence.

I think that's the name of the condition.

He said, I was a journalist for a long time.

I still am, really.

I still write stuff.

When you're a journalist, it's a great job.

But the trouble is, you sometimes find yourself always abusing people or attacking people.

Not that you want to abuse them or attack them, but you're being critical.

Maybe you feel sometimes a bit guilty about that because you haven't put yourself in the place of the person you're criticizing.

And so I thought I'd give it a go.

So what Johnson seems to be saying, certainly the way that this has been interpreted in the press is it's more an attack on journalists, you know, doing the bare minimum of their jobs in holding the government to account and scrutinizing the Prime Minister's conduct since the start of the coronavirus thing.

But, okay, so even if we take that as as what Johnson felt that he wanted to get in the game and he felt that he was criticizing people in power, so he needed to take power, how does that relate to any of the following comments?

In his 1998 column in The Telegraph, Boris Johnson described gay men as tank-top bumboys.

Writing in The Spectator in 2000, he spoke of Labour's appalling agenda, encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools, and all the rest of it.

In a 2002 column in The Spectator, he wrote an article entitled, Africa is a Mess, but We Can't Blame Colonialism.

And perhaps most memorably, in 2002, he wrote a column in The Telegraph, which described black people as piccaninnies with watermelon smiles.

Now,

how the f does that have the first

thing to do with anything you were talking about?

You ridiculous, vile.

Another couple of things to alert you to.

The Gargle launched this week, the Bugle magazine supplement show,

hosted by Alice Fraser.

The first issue features Tom Ballard and Alison Spittle.

Also on the 27th of March, we have another Bugle live live stream live show.

Tickets available from all reputable internets.

And

well,

we're sorting out apparently, I've been reliably informed, some new merch for our premium voluntary subscribers.

So if you want to get a chance to get the old merch before the new merch comes in, uh subscribe now uh uh if you want um uh nish anything to plug uh yes uh i andy i finally realized my eventual dream of becoming a recording artist

i am releasing two albums on march the 19th uh finally realizing my

My dream.

They are the two albums are the recordings of the last two touring shows that I did one in 2016 and one in 2019.

And they're called It's In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves, parts one and part two.

And that's available on the internet.

I think it's available and this is going to be a real change of pace for bugle listeners around the world legally everywhere.

One other thing to alert you to, I'm co-hosting another online sports quiz for Muscular Dystrophy UK on the 11th of March.

So, do tune in for that, it's a fantastic charity.

And I will be asking questions about sports.

What more do you people want?

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

To join them and to book tickets for the Bugle Live live stream show on the 27th of March, go to thebuglepodcast.com.

Kieran Castellino feels sorry for non-migratory birds and wonders if interspecies jealousy between birds which toddle off somewhere else for the winter and birds which stick it out through the dark and icy months is one of the reasons that birds did not evolute into the world's leading supercreatures instead of apes.

Someone known as Dunn Talk concurs as a long-standing avian disappointee.

They've got all it takes to rule this planet, says Dunn, the ability to fly, a hugely efficient means of giving birth, a more open-minded attitude to eating plentiful food supplies such as insects and worms, and an inbuilt capacity for aerial bombardment that took humans tens of thousands of years to replicate.

But they just can't stop whinging about each other's travel plans, can they, the birds?

Sarah Morwood once startled an attendant at a major art gallery by telling an entire tour party about an art movement called penguinism, which she claimed involved Renaissance artists painting pictures of penguins as a form of protest against institutional corruption in the church, then painting over them with a picture of the baby Jesus.

The entire movement was only discovered recently, Sarah explained to her audience, thanks to X-ray technology and a newly found receipt signed by Caravaggio for a barrel of herring.

Peter Scott briefly toyed with becoming a rapper after accidentally rhyming the word agriculture with the two words angry culture and instantly penning a fierce polemic about the global impact of corporate agribusiness.

However, when writing a verse about a corrupt policeman who fought baby farm animals for sport, Peter found himself rhyming Combine Harvester with the cop swine calf wrestler and rightly abandoned the project.

Phil Ridley used to be convinced that time travel would never be invented, but then again, that was when he lived in the year 35-39 in the British capital city of Zaltston on Thames, so cut him some slack.

I mean I used not to believe in intergalactic travel and yet here I am, earthlings.

And finally Jay Burks firmly believes the world needs more paradoxes but thinks it's now become impossible to create them.

Oh, hang on, just hang on there, everyone.

Yes, there it is.

Oh, but hang on again.

By concocting that one, Jay has disproved the second part of it, thus leaving the world still in need of more paradoxes.

And Jay once more believes it has indeed now become impossible to create them.

Hang on again.

Oh, no.

Hang on again.

Oh, no.

Hang on again.

Oh, no.

Hang on again.

Oh, no.

Hang on again.

Oh no.

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.