Bonus: Sochi and The Gargle

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to Bugle issue 4182 sub-episode A for AAA.

I am Andy Zoltzmann still and we are taking a week off the bugle this week as part of our ongoing negotiations with the World, the G7, the bilderberg group the illuminati and all other interested parties to try to reach an agreement on sorting everything out forever still no concrete progress to report i'm afraid but at least things have stopped getting actively worse for the first time in a while so maybe in two or three thousand years it will all be fine do keep tuning in to the bugle in the meantime to find out instead of a full bugle we have a sub-episode featuring some or indeed all of the following a delve into the archive for some exclusive winter olympics action from sochi Exclusive because no one is still covering the Winter Olympics in Sochi in the year 2021.

We also have some Britain news that you weren't allowed to listen to at the time because you'd all been too naughty and or because it was simply too damn true to release into the wild.

Some further buglaceous musings on the final days of the mega glitch, also known as the Trump presidency, and we have a trailer for something new from the Bugle Stable and a trailer for that trailer plus some lies about our premium level voluntary subscribers to join them or to make a one-off or recurring contribution of any size to help keep the Bugle advert-free, independent, alive and digesting and regurgitating everything that is and is not happening in the world so you don't have to, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Also, we have some news about a forthcoming Bugle live stream live Bugle show at 8pm on Saturday the 27th of March.

Tickets are £7 plus a booking charge, so let's call it £8.31 for you lot, available by clicking the live link on the Bugle website or by finding the Bugle Live on the Citizen Ticket site.

There are discounts if you are a premium-level voluntary subscriber.

In fact, let's start with that news about that show, which I've just given you at 8 p.m.

on Saturday, the 27th of March.

There will, as I just said, be a Bugle live stream live Bugle show tickets available on the internet, which also contains the Bugle website via which you can buy those tickets, or specifically go to citizen that's ctzn.tk slash bugle, and you can chuck an http://slash on the front of that if you want to look really cool, or simply ask your local warlock or military military junta very politely.

Coming up later.

A trailer, but not just any trailer.

A trailer for the gargle with Alice Fraser.

The trailer you always knew you wanted to hear, without knowing that you knew you wanted to hear it.

That's coming up later in this sub-episode of the Bugle.

Which we now begin with some Britain news.

Driving license and potentially fatal virus news now.

Nish, you are, of course, the Bugles driver's licensing correspondent,

as well as a veteran of the COVID-19

era.

Tell us what's been going on with the British DVLA.

Well, listen, Andy, I feel uniquely qualified to speak on this subject, given that I do not have a driving license.

So, if anything, that positions me in this post-expert world that we now live in in Britain.

That positions me ideally.

Yes, look, it's all well and good.

America has got its president in inverted commas who believes in science in equally inverted commas.

But I'll be honest, given what's happened with our government's response to COVID and the most recent outbreak of terrible news, it is starting to feel like

in the UK, it's starting to feel like America has reneged on our suicide pact the second after we downed the Kool-Aid.

Like, it really is like,

the special medicine is still swilling in our mouth as America looks at us and goes, you know what?

I think I'm probably okay.

You know what?

F you, America.

Louise didn't jump out of the car and leave Thelma and shout, good luck with that Grand Canyon, bitch.

This is.

It's a terrible state of affairs.

It's been a week of horrific COVID news.

We've been regularly hitting a thousand deaths a day.

And more than 500 new cases have been recorded at the driver and vehicle licensing agency office in Swansea.

And employees are claiming that people with symptoms were encouraged to return to work, and vulnerable workers have had requests to work from home denied.

Now, a lot of this has landed, a lot of the blame for this has landed at the desk of the Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps.

Now, here's the thing about Grant Shapps, all right?

The man is addicted to failure.

He is absolutely addicted to failure.

It's his drug of choice.

He's jonesing for his latest hit from Sweet Lady f up.

Shutting chaps down shot after shot of shit show source.

He's forever chasing the dragon of defeat and disgrace.

To give you some background on Grant Chaps, these are some of the controversies listed in the controversies subsection of his Wikipedia page.

Now that is an accolade that is largely reserved for disgraced former presidents and male comedians, but let's not go into that now.

He was

he at one point in his career, he had to deny that he had a second job while he was an MP, a second job that he did using the pseudonyms Michael Green, Karine Stockheath, and Sebastian Fox.

So not only was he using pseudonyms, he was using shit pseudonyms.

Okay?

At least Anthony Wiener went for Carlos Danger.

Chaps is both corrupt and profoundly unimaginative.

In 2012, The Guardian reported that he was editing his own Wikipedia page.

He was sacked originally from his job in the Conservative Party due to allegations that he ignored allegations of bullying that were happening under his watch.

So at this point, it's all it's not surprising that he's f ⁇ ing this shit up.

The problem is that Grant Shapps is now f ⁇ ing shit up in a a way that could result in a lot of people dying.

And

Britain needs to deal with this outbreak, not of coronavirus, but of Grant Schaps.

Grant Shaps is the most pressing outbreak facing Britain today.

That's a big claim.

In other British news,

British firms claim that they are being encouraged by government officials to set up subsidiaries in the EU in order to avoid disruption caused by Brexit's new trade rules.

So, I mean, I don't know when, you know, if irony, I mean, we've talked about irony just basically packing up, retiring, saying our work on earth is done.

I mean, this is

this is, I mean, in many ways, this is peak Brexit, isn't it?

This is sort of everything that we hoped would happen and dreamed of happening, the freedom to

negotiate huge, great great swathes of red tape in order to conduct the exact same business that we were conducting previously.

Another Brexit story in the aftermath of Brexit, trading cheese has become a nightmare, according to businesses.

An English cheese firm has reported that £30 gift boxes of cheese sent to consumers on the continent now need a veterinarily approved health certificate costing £180.

I mean, this is, again, this is true freedom, isn't it, Nish?

The freedom to stop other people sending cheese.

100%.

that's that's that's what my vote was all about i was voting leave over cheese

we don't want more cheese for you yes but more british cheese as well that there is no sweeter form of freedom than administrative irritation um

and um you know it it what you know this this this this this sense sense of of national feeling it more than makes up for business becoming unprofitable impractical and or impossible i mean i would ask you this nish i know you're a brexit sceptic you know when henry V was leading the RAF into battle in the skies of Agincourt to stop the Spanish Armada from building unnecessarily straight roads all over Britain, he didn't think why thousands of businesses go under as a result, did he?

He did not think that.

He just thought, we have to win and let's deal with it afterwards.

This food delay is very frustrating because we're seeing things that could affect our supply of meat, cheese, and fish.

And Andy, this is so frustrating.

NATO, as an outsider, you can't understand this.

We had just discovered cooking with flavor.

We just found out that food didn't just basically need to taste like whatever it tasted like when it was alive.

We just discovered.

This is the worst.

We just discovered cooking techniques that weren't boiling.

You don't understand.

This is going to set us back into the 1970s.

There's also a...

absolutely extraordinary and by which I mean f ⁇ ing terrifying article in the Financial Times today about the lead-up to and the initial stages of the fallout from Boris Johnson's amazing Brexit deal citation needed.

And the article, like my attempts at sexting, makes for grim reading.

And there's a heavy suggestion that the principal player is in over their head and has no fing clue of how to get through it.

Now, there's so much to unpack here.

This one section that's particularly.

Which is one of your sexting methods, isn't it?

Oh my god.

Listen, it was a mistake.

It was not a great career move for me to go into writing Mills and Boone style fiction.

The whole article is absolutely incredible.

It tries to highlight all of the sort of paucity of the deal in terms of its coverage for the service sector, which is the biggest part of the British economy.

It highlights the fact that we prioritise the fishing industry, which is a a very small part of Britain's economy, and yet the fishing industry is now finding that the Brexit deal that was supposed to provide for it is actually f ⁇ ing it over in about 11 different ways.

But there's two sections I briefly want to look at.

One of them is that the Theresa May deal, which was actually

seemingly a better deal,

a series of studies suggested that it would leave Britain's GDP almost 5% lower over 15 years than if the UK had stayed in the EU.

And this is from the article.

According to government officials, successive chancellors, Sajja Javid and Rishi Sunak, stopped officials carrying out a new analysis of the proposed deal, which would have come to the awkward conclusion that Britain would be left worse off.

As one official recalls, someone would occasionally propose doing the work, and everyone would say no.

Listen, the British government is basically me in my mid-20s with my attitude to checking my bank account.

Okay?

Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid, if I wanted to deal with a brown man heavily in denial about the state of his finances, I would have just recalled my own fing biographical detail.

The other section that is mind-blowing is an exchange between Boris Johnson and Ursula von Leyen.

Boris Johnson said, we need to defibrillate the talks.

A bit like the scene in pulp fiction with Uma Thurman.

The Commission President was non-plussed by the reference to Thurman's character get an adrenaline shot and this is how von der Leyen replied, Be careful, Boris, he replied, you're talking to a medical doctor.

Now, initially, I thought it was incredibly offensive for the Prime Minister to even bring up the film pulp fiction.

Firstly, because there is an exchange in that where they talk about the fact that in France they put mayonnaise on chips and use the phrase royale with cheese to describe a particular burger.

And obviously post-Brexit we can call anything whatever we f ⁇ ing want, right?

Anyway, we now call a whopper a cow sandwich and instead of mayonnaise we just shave more potatoes onto our chips, just creating the digestive digestive equivalent of the kind of blockages we're going to be dealing with at passport queues in Europe from now on.

But I now realise that this was the perfect Brexit analogy that has been sat in front of us the entire time.

Because if you remember the scene in question from Pulp Fiction, Uma Thurman in the film has overdosed after snorting what she thought was cocaine but turned out to be heroin.

And if you think about it, that is the perfect representation of Britain in the aftermath of Brexit.

Taking something we thought was one thing without really looking into it too much, it turning out to be something something entirely different from what we thought, and now we're all just covered in blood and our own sin.

And all we really wanted was some temporary high rather than addressing the deeper underlying issues in our lives.

It could, I mean, one way that it could backfire is that I read that as a result of the new policies,

trucks coming into England

will have to wait in France

for longer to be cleared or whatever.

And

if my reading is correct, that will allow more opportunities for refugees to jump on those trucks to smuggle themselves into England.

Because

they won't be going as fast through the channel.

So

we'll get not only more, but less athletic refugees.

Lazier refugees

who can't just hop onto a speeding truck in Calais.

That was Britain there.

Well done to everyone involved.

Now take off your headphones and pop a bobsled in your ears.

It's time to plummet down the icy tubes of history.

Back to the Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014.

Top story this week, more cowbell.

It's Winter Olympics time.

Look, it's Winter Olympics o'clock, Andy, and let's be clear right from the start, I'm not in favour of the Winter Olympics.

Not just these Winter Olympics, Andy, but any Winter Olympics.

In fact, I've decided that I'm only okay with the Winter Olympics if they are forced to swap with the Summer Olympics every four years.

So meaning every four years you have your regular summer, your regular Winter Olympics, and every eight years they switch and you have a blistering hot Winter Olympics and a frozen Summer Olympics.

Because that would be a wonderful thing to watch, Andy.

A Summer Olympics featuring swimmers flapping around on the ice on frozen lakes, javelin throwers hands sticking to their javelins, and sprinters waddling awkwardly through a snow drift.

And then a Winter Olympics featuring competitors in the luge awkwardly shifting themselves down the track in 80 degree weather on their ass and justifiably terrified looking ski jumpers at the top of a mountain of sheetrock.

These though, Andy, are the most expensive Winter Olympics in history, reportedly costing more than all the other Winter Olympics in history combined, which is a lot to spend on something that very few people give an even chant tangential shit about.

And it's a little hard to see where that money went other than into some frighteningly furry Russian pockets.

There have been multiple photos released this week from athletes and journalists of sub-par accommodations in Sochi, toilet cubicles with side-by-side toilets, other toilets without a flush function, which, and you hate to be a stickler, which seems key to any toilet post-18th century.

Some things are traditions for a reason, John, aren't they?

Right, right, right.

No one likes a maverick a hundred percent of the time.

Other hotel rooms had no bedding or no shower curtains or no running water.

And the Russian government have been quick to push back on this flood of photos, but in doing so, may have inadvertently revealed something even more troubling.

Because Dmitry Dozak, the deputy prime minister who's responsible for all the Winter Olympic preparations, claimed that these are just stories made up by Westerners who are actively trying to sabotage the Sochi Games.

He said that, and I quote, we have surveillance video from the hotels that shows people turning on the showers, directing the nozzle at the wall, and then leaving the room for the whole day.

Wait, hold on.

So hold on.

You're saying, don't worry, we know that the water works fine in your hotel rooms.

And the reason we know that is that we have secret cameras in the showers.

Well, I'm sure, John, when Russia bid for the games, for a start, everyone would have assumed that would happen.

True, that's fair.

I think Putin's direct enough.

It would have probably have been in the original bid document anyway.

$51 billion,

the cost, apparently.

That's four times the London Games cost.

As you say, more than all previous Winter Olympics combined, including the famous 1924 Winter Olympics in Belgium.

when they had to build a 3,000 metre-high fake mountain out of crushed waffles and frozen chocolate coated with icing sugar.

Between a third and a half of that sum has been attributed to corruption and kickbacks, apparently,

which are frankly as Russian as vodka dying early of alcohol-related illness and assassinating czars.

It's just part of the deal, John.

There's an 18-mile stretch of road between Soshi and the mountain sports base at Krasnaya Polyana.

Apparently, this has cost not two, not five, not 10, not 20, but $8.6 billion.

That is over half the cost of the entire London Olympics just for a stretch of road I mean apparently it's got a lovely service station with at least two of those automatic coffee machines but you have to ask is that value for money and if you do have any spare winter olympians please send them to any country near the equator let's make this world a fairer place right let's have that uh trailer that i trailed earlier on now chris fire up the bugle alerting listeners to forthcoming things machine uh it's balft time

That man is looking healthy.

What would it sound like?

Ah, I mean,

probably like the bugle, but you know, the good news?

No, no, no, not the happy news, the interesting news.

No offense to the news, but I am sick of making jokes about Brexit and about stupid politicians saying stupid shit to make stupid people angry.

Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, like tech news and arts and fun stories about animals and like science and

life advice and who's in style and Hollywood.

Yes, I guess I can do celebrity news if I have to.

Sure, I'll mention flamingos, but I won't be nice about them.

Cool, cool.

Cool.

So when does the first episode come out?

Ah, I better get writing.

Okay, and what's it called?

The gargle.

The gargle?

The gargle.

Gargle.

Alright, sure.

The bugle presents the gargle with Alice Fraser.

America now, and yes, you did not dream it, Donald Trump is indeed no longer president of the USA.

Instead, he is a mere unavoidable resounding echo of and portentous warning of the eternal fragility of democracy and human progress.

But still, at least he's not also president.

American news now, and the Republicans have still not given up on

the election from 2020, which, as

buglers may remember, did not go terrifically well for them.

Mike Pence, the vice president, has welcomed an effort by senators to refuse to certify Biden's victory.

Ted Cruz is leading this faction.

They want an audit.

They want to audit the allegations of electoral fraud.

This audit has in fact already been carried out by numerous courts across the USA, but only that has escaped the notice of Cruz and

his hench people.

I mean the Republicans are heroically in many ways refusing to bend the knee to the combined forces of mathematics, law, democracy, sense, ethics, reality or dignity.

And continuing to dry hump the bottom of the barrel in the hope that their metaphorical wang chafes on some splinter of evidence.

And Donald Trump still

won't give up.

His defenestration is, I mean, it's basically he's now looking like he's taking the entire window, the curtains, and the wall of the White House down with him into the mega pile of shit that he himself has deposited out of that window over the last four years.

And

there was this extraordinary recording that came to light just in the last 24 hours or so of him telling Georgia's top election official to find 11,780 votes to overturn the 11,779 vote margin that Joe Biden holds after

counting, I believe is the technical term for the process.

And

I'm a bit disappointed by this.

He's only wanting to win by one vote.

If you're going to fraudulently steal an election,

do it properly.

Win it by a couple of million.

I mean, who's going to be impressed by that?

To Trump supporters, winning by one vote is as good as losing to Vladimir Putin.

I mean, he wouldn't even take enough notice of this to lift his thumb off the hamster he's currently torturing for fun.

I mean,

do it properly.

Swamp the swamp.

No, I mean, Andy, I don't think this is being quite fair to Donald Trump.

He's not asking them to make up the votes.

He's asking them to find the votes that are written in invisible ink and then trace over the invisible ink with his name.

Oh, right.

Oh, sorry, Martha.

The ones that look like empty ballot papers.

He's just asking them to, you know, rectify that.

Right.

The role of things that look like empty ballot papers that's sitting next to the toilet he spent most of the last two months on.

Yes.

Those ones.

I did something, I guess, slightly strange.

I listened to the entire phone call

last night.

Oh, right, not as it was happening.

No, no, not as well.

Yeah,

I was doing the minutes.

I, for some reason, listened to the entire phone call last night, and it is the biggest load of bullshit I've ever spent my time listening to.

And bear in mind how many hours of this f ⁇ ing podcast I've listened to,

either as contributor or audience member.

Andrew,

Donald Trump's commitment to bullshit makes you look like a fair weather friend of the fecal concept.

I'm on it.

It's quite an extraordinary thing.

I was quite surprised at how soothing I found it.

And partly, I think the reason I found it soothing is just because

it's a whale song from the 21st century.

Yeah,

it was, in every sense, white noise.

And I think part of the reason I found it soothing is because, look, ultimately, does this phone call make a difference?

No.

If anything, it would probably animate Trump supporters even further because they would see it as him continuing on his righteous, nonsensical crusade.

But he.

it is quite reassuring to just hear his the sort of ice sculpture of his total horseshit meet the steely flame of basic fact

and

there is quite an extraordinary moment where there's there's quite a lot of silence on the tape and it's quite fun in your head to imagine the

the people on the other end of the phone call just looking at each other going, what the f are we supposed to do now?

how the f are we supposed to deal with this horseshit um the the main sort of focus of his i uh is uh the george secretary of state brad raffensberger um who is a republican um which is sort of one of the themes of the whole thing is trump continually reminding him that he's a republican and all this kind of stuff but this one after one particularly bullshitty tirade there's a sort of long pause and raffensberger replies well mr president the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong.

And I did just realize as I was listening to it that it's sort of one of the first times you've really heard him come up against sort of basic facts just being restated by someone within his party.

Now obviously the Republican Party as a whole, I think we can all agree is a toxic entity that needs to be surgically removed from the American political sphere at this point because they've absolutely enabled Trump.

And we're now in for, I imagine, in the run-up to the next election in 2024, an embarrassing amount of people trying to distance themselves from all the things that they themselves have done and said for the last

four to eight years.

But there is something like vaguely reassuring about the whole thing.

My other highlight is that at one point, Trump says that some of the evidence that's been presented in favor of the election being fair doesn't pass the smell test.

and that is pretty extraordinary acclaim, the smell test, to come from a man whose signature fragrance would almost certainly be called criminalité.

Don't you do a good

smell test when you've had COVID?

I don't know.

Well, that's it for this sub-bugle.

Don't forget to book your tickets for the Bugle Live Stream Live Show, a ticketed live stream show on the 27th of March via the website or via the internet in general.

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

To join them, or to make a recurring or one-off donation to the Bugle, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

David Reinatson thinks economists dress wrongly.

David postulates Davidically, we will pay far more attention to economists if they ditch the tedious business suit and actually dress like the wizards they claim to be.

Strange capes and pointy hats, and they could paint their faces with pagan-style daubings as well if it's not too much trouble.

It would make people pay more attention to them, but it'd also give them less credibility, which I think is the right way to go on both counts.

Inspired by the Sharknado franchise, Elise Sipos pitched a film to Hollywood Studios entitled Earthquack, in which giant feral ducks roam the planet, quacking at a frequency that causes the Earth's crust to vibrate uncontrollably.

After some early rejections, Elise's idea was taken up by a studio who did, however, change the idea somewhat.

Instead of giant ducks, archaeologists, and instead of seismic tremors, digging up an old Saxon ship, Dux fans Ray Fienes and Kerry Mulligan reluctantly agreed to put their their beaks away and appear in the film anyway.

Leo Herzog has never understood the need for spring-loaded slalom poles in professional skiing.

If they're so good, says Leo, these gravity-goading lunatics should be able to miss the sticks entirely, not have to bash them out of the way with their arms.

Put up concrete bollards instead to see what they're really made of.

In fact, I just have a sheer drop off the side of the course.

That would separate the sheep from the goats, says Leo.

Not that either sheep or goats particularly like skiing, he concludes.

Simon Reed, however, is absolutely incandescent at Leo's use of the phrase, separate the sheep from the goats.

Come on, Leo, blast Simon, you're suggesting that either sheep or goats are innately superior to the other, but without telling us which of them is good and which is rubbish.

Besides, adds Simon, even if I was a shepherd, I wouldn't be that fussed if a goat got mixed up with my sheep, or vice versa.

They're two species who have evolutionarily plateaued big time and could do with trying to learn from each other instead of constantly being kept apart by people like you.

Vir Asan chips in on the great goat-sheep debate and advocates not separating sheep and goats at all.

If I was a really visionary farmer, says Vere, I would not only not separate the sheep from the goats, but I would also chuck a couple of hippos and an orangutan into the mix as well, and maybe an ostrich.

Yes, definitely an ostrich, concludes Vere.

Christian Hovey is right on board with this idea.

Give it time, reward the sheep, goats, hippos, orangutans and ostriches for good interspecies collaboration, maybe give them achievement tokens which could tot up to earn them a tasty snack, or for the farm animals, a non-trip to the abattoir, and soon you will find yourself with an extremely fast but powerful source of wool and feathers that is equally at home home sloshing about in a river as climbing a mountain or jumping from tree to tree.

Vere nods sagely at this suggestion.

Yup, Christian, this should surely be commercially viable.

Let me make some calls.

Here endeth this week's lies.

Goodbye.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.