Daddy Daddy, Please Don't Leave

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4180 of the Bugle, the last bugle of the Trump presidency.

I've missed out a word there.

The last bugle of the first Trump presidency.

Only joke, of course, by the time some of you listen to this, all 50 states will have admitted they were in on the steel, and our great leader will be announced as Emperor of all the Americas, Guardian of Universal Justice, bracket solar system, and Sultan-elect of Swing.

Maybe not.

I'm Andy Zoltzmann, or am I?

Yes, I am.

Can we retract that

last one?

Thank you.

I'm here in London just 25,000 or so miles away from London.

If you leave my house turn left and travel around the world in a straight line until you get back.

Significantly less than half the distance away from me than I am from myself then from Sydney, Australia.

Please welcome Alice Fraser.

Hello Andy, now I don't know where I am.

I...

surely that's good Alice in this time of lockdown.

Anything that makes you not know exactly where you are and where you have been for the last X months, you should be welcoming, shouldn't you?

Yes, well, Andy, I can be wherever I want to be now because I've bought a Shiwi.

Oh, congratulations!

Yeah, yeah, I was on a road trip recently.

I went to a service station and they did not have a toilet, thus breaking the essential social contract that there should be a toilet at a service station.

You buy a bar of chocolate and you're allowed to do a wee.

And in my outrage, I ordered a shewi on Amazon.

I have not used it yet, but I feel so free.

Yeah, but every time you use it, you will be urinating into Jeff Beasles' pockets.

It's not up to me whether that gives you satisfaction or not.

That's entirely each of their own.

Also joining us from the parallel universe that is the United States of America in New York City, to be precise, to give us the final verdict on the four-year experiments with putting a wind-up toy idiot in the White House and seeing what happens.

It's Josh Gondelman.

Hello, thank you for having me.

The thing about science is it's not about getting good results, it's just about what the results are.

So

when you put it that way, the Trump presidency sure had results.

Absolutely.

We're all very much the wiser for it, apart from those who choose to be considerably less wise for it.

So, well, I mean, it's just, as we record, a couple of days, we'll touch on this in greater detail later.

A couple of days until the inauguration, or I think I'm not sure it's right to call it Joe Biden's inauguration.

It is very much Donald Trump's deauguration.

It's kind of an out-inauguration.

An inauguration.

And, you know, I've heard some people saying they're looking forward to it like they look forward to Christmas, but it's more looking forward to Christmas if your Christmas present was to have a 10-cubic meter pile of shit removed from outside your house.

Which I think if you had a 10-cubic meter pile of shit outside your house, that would be a terrific Christmas present.

So let's not overlook that.

I feel excited about it as a Jewish person, how I feel excited about Christmas.

It's just nice to see other people excited.

And I just feel kind of

like...

I'm going to order some Chinese food and hope people don't pay too much attention to me.

You know, Josh, if you like to see other people excited, there are swingers nights for that.

I feel like I live in Brooklyn.

We're going to get people that same level of excited over the Biden inauguration.

I'm reporting to you live this week from the BBC's Test Match Special Cricket Commentary Box.

Well, I mean, to be precise, from my shed.

Now, I've had an odd week in that I've been getting up at 3.30 every morning to be part of the BBC's cricket coverage.

Now, as a child, I used to lie in bed at night in the winter listening to cricket commentary from overseas, and I would dream of being part of the test match special coverage of an overseas test match one day.

What I did not imagine was that it would involve watching a test match, wearing a bobble hat to keep warm because it was three degrees and pissing with rain in the pitch blackness of the night at 3.45 a.m.

on a bitter winter morning while sitting alone in a shed.

The latest bastard love child of Mr.

Covid and Mrs.

Internet was a cricket commentary team in five different places in England.

And my journey to work at the test match in the magical city of Gaul, Sri Lanka, where the cricket ground sits beneath an old historic fort by the sea and the temperature hovers around the 30 degree mark involved switching on the outside lights, putting on my slippers and walking 10 yards across my garden to an emergency commentary box in my shed.

And

I mean,

it was great fun as things that involve getting up at 3.30 in the morning go.

It was a huge amount of fun.

And what I discovered, and this is a key piece of scientific research, to add to the scientific research we've already had this episode,

and I say this as someone who's skillfully constructed an entire portfolio of overlapping pseudo-careers solely for the purpose of never having to get up early in the morning, is that getting up at 3.30 in the morning is a fuck of a lot easier when cricket is involved.

And you should all try it.

Apologies to any coffee traders whose business plans I'm hereby destroying, but cricket is the one true caffeine.

Amen.

We are recording on the 18th of January or T-minus 2 or TTTT TTT minus 2, standing for Toodaloo to Trump the Tantrum Throwing Tosspot.

It's 18th of January, which of course is Blue Monday this year, which has been scientifically proved the third Monday in January to be the most miserable day of the year, unless you are a massive pessimist, in which case it's a lovely day that proves that everything you believe is entirely correct.

Also, the 18th of January is World Thesaurus Day, also known as Global Lexicon 7th of a Week.

Wednesday, as well as being inauguration day, is International Day of Acceptance.

And I'm not sure absolutely everyone in the USA is going to be observing that.

And it's also International Penguin Awareness Day.

So do try to spend at least some of the inauguration at Buglers thinking to yourself, if America had been led by a penguin for the last four years, A, how different would things be now?

And B, yes, we would be looking at a re-inauguration for President Beaky Flipperwing.

And also try to think on Wednesday about all the times that penguins have saved humanity by distracting aliens who landed in Antarctica and thought, what the f ⁇ is this place?

Do we really want to waste our time with a planet where the birds have let themselves go to the extent that they can't f ⁇ ing fly anymore?

So thank you to all the penguins involved.

As always,

before we start, a section of the Bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week, it's the start of our new What is Humanity's Greatest Invention knockout competition.

Here at the Bugle, we've chosen 19,683 things invented by humans, and we will go through them three a week to find a single best invention of all time.

Will sliced bread retain its title?

Bearing in mind it won the title before the invention of the the internal combustion engine, the internet, the macarena and all items of Bugle merchandise, so it might not be quite so easy this time for the longtime champion.

And to kick us off, the first of our first round matches, it's the shoelace versus marmalade versus the harmonica.

And what a clash this promises to be, the shoelace's superb contribution to the practicality of footwear, which has helped our species overcome our lack of pedal grip, talons, hooves, claws and other accoutrements beloved of so many other species.

Will the shoelace see off the challenge of World Marmalade, one of Breakfast's most enduringly popular spreads and methods of preserving citrus?

And can they both see off the brilliant little portable musical instrument, the harmonica, that has lived quite literally a hand-to-mouth existence throughout its time as a key contributor to blues, folk, and other musical genres, and which has decisively outlasted other pocket-sized instruments such as the micro trombone, the nano-tympani, and the minicello, which I believe is still used by some athletics coaches.

Any predictions for that one?

What would you go for?

Shoelace, marmalade, or harmonica?

What's the best of those three?

I'm going to take a strong stand for shoelace.

Right.

I feel like it's the one thing that is the least replaceable of those three, right?

You've got a marmalade, you can switch it out for a jam, a jelly, a preserve.

You've got a harmonica.

Just play the guitar louder.

But when you need a shoelace, nothing else but a shoelace will do.

I should disclose, according to the FCC, I must say, I am sponsored by shoelaces.

Just personally.

Alice,

have you got a favourite for that one?

I'm going to go with the harmonica as the one of those three that you can truly enjoy in prison.

They take the shoelaces away, they leave the harmonica.

So that's the first round.

Let me quickly explain how this competition is going to work.

Obviously, with 19,683

inventions, there is going to be 6,561 first-round clashes.

The winner of each goes through to the second round, whilst the runners-up go into a repertage against two other runners-up and the winner of each of those 2,187 contests joins the first round winners in a group stage in which four inventions meet in a round-robin with 2,187 groups.

Then the 918 lowest ranked qualifiers play off against each other leaving 1,728 inventions who then proceed to a direct knockout.

After five rounds of this, only the 54 best inventions of all time will be left, which will then be split into nine categorised conferences of six inventions each.

The The winners of each of these nine conferences then proceed into four groups of three to be made up with the wild card playoff winners from three three invention contests involving the conference runners-up.

The inventions in the four groups of three then play against each other.

I know it's not ideal.

The winners of these groups then go into a final four-invention round-robin, from which the top-placed team goes straight into the final against the winner of a play-off of the second and third-placed inventions.

And da-da!

We have a winner.

Anyway,

that section is in the bin.

Top story this week: inauguration time.

It's happening.

It is finally happening after all the non-existent doubt about the result.

All the absolutely pointless court cases that could have changed things so dramatically were it not for the fact that they were the groundless thrashings of a petulant lunatic.

After all the fears that the Mexicans and Canadians would invade at this moment of American weakness and install Wayne Gretzky and Salma Hayek in an interim dream team dual regency, it is happening.

The inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th and absolutely definitively not the most appalling president yet of the USA is happening on Wednesday.

Josh, as our

inauguration of new president's correspondent,

what are you most looking forward to in this one?

I feel kind of I'm looking forward to it in the same way I felt when I saw that George Clooney was going to take over playing Batman from Val Kilmer.

Just a deep, abiding relief that the other guy was done.

That's what I'm looking forward to.

Take Take that camera.

Yeah, he's at it too good for too long.

Look, I'm a little nervous about the inauguration overall, considering what happened two weeks ago, right, when the Capitol was stormed by people who liked the president they had at the time.

That's a very rare kind of

occupation.

They were like children clinging to Trump's legs, saying, Daddy, daddy, please don't leave.

And he essentially responded,

off.

I don't even like my actual kids.

I'm out of here.

I mean, it's, it's, we've all had jobs, haven't we, Josh, where we've had to serve out a notice period and thought, ah, what the heck, let's have a bit of fun.

But, I mean, for most of us, that involves making paperclip effigies of Jane Austen and trying to make a colleague ask it out for dinner, not bringing the entirety of our democracy to the brink of collapse.

I mean, it's been,

he has had a fun time since he got sacked.

Oh, yeah, he's he's really been

nailing it in, which is ironic because that's what he doesn't think you should be able to do to ballots.

And I mean, what are you expecting?

Because I mean, it's going to be an unusual inauguration.

Trump is not hanging around to watch himself being ceremonially fired.

And

the last time a president did not attend the inauguration of his successor was 1963.

And that was John F.

Kennedy.

And he had a very, very good reason for giving Linden Special Moment a bit of a miss.

Certainly much better than Trump's.

Instead, Trump is going to FRO on Air Force One to Florida, and the presidential plane has been specially tantrum-proofed for the occasion.

I mean, it's quite odd, isn't it?

It's always one of the fascinations of an inauguration is seeing the departing president desperately trying not to give away too much with their face about how disgusted they are by who's taking over from them.

It's like if you had to go to your most recent ex's wedding, no matter how badly you broke up or whom they're marrying.

I mean I think it's very appropriate that Trump is going to Florida to become the Florida man we all knew he was in his heart at all times.

I just, you know, I just think, fine, let him go early, whatever.

Just make sure you turn his pockets out for silverware before he's out the door.

He takes, like, Trump takes the phrase sore loser and then jacks it open to fill in the full derangement of a spoiled tennis brat smashing a racket with a cartoon hammer after fumbling a match point.

Except in this instance, the match point is a half-cocked catapult full of coo soup.

Impeachment to the inevitable sequel was launched

over the last week or so.

And, well, as Oscar Wilde himself says, to be impeached once may be regarded as a misfortune.

To be impeached twice looks like you are a certifiable.

And there's an interesting stat on this, and I've spent the entire week doing cricket stats, but here's a politics stat.

Donald Trump has now had the same number of impeachments as the number of middle fingers that the Statue of Liberty would hold in his direction if she ever finally comes to life as originally planned.

So there's a little stat for all you numbers fans.

Joe Biden's intra, and I mean obviously it's, you know, it's a...

He's got a lot to do, Josh, isn't he?

I mean, rejoining treaties, writing some strongly worded letters of apology, using an Archbishop as a mop to cleanse the White House spiritually and retraining staff to speak incomplete sentences, as well as finding the TV remote control in the White House so that more more than one news channel is available.

People are upset about this.

100 days, the first 100 days of a president.

So what are the achievable goals do you think that Joe Biden might be looking at?

I mean,

there's going to be...

He's going to have two days of solid afterglow, the honeymoon period.

A quick, a mini-moon, as they say.

And then people are going to get mad because it's like, you're not supposed to travel right now, Joe Biden.

So

they're going to get very upset.

I do think...

I'm nervous about the start we're getting off to, right?

The band, The New Radicals, is reuniting to play at Joe Biden's inauguration.

And when people said to push Biden left and embrace more radical ideas, I don't think they meant he should learn the fast singing part to the song, You Get What You Give, from 1998.

So I am a little worried.

I do think there's a lot of good he can do, like rejoining the Paris Accord,

for breezing the White House bathrooms.

There's just achievable goals that one man can do that aren't controversial.

Alex,

what are you looking forward to?

The initials of Joe Biden as president?

Ideally, from my perspective, the first works of Joe Biden's presidency will be incredibly boring and I won't have to write jokes about them.

That's my goal.

It'll just be bureaucratic, administrative, basic stuff that governments are supposed to do.

Governments are not supposed to be interesting and their job is to do the boring shit that no one else wants to do.

That's why we elect them, you know, to figure out, you know, fencing bylaws.

That's the goal of politics.

And if politics can get back to that stage where I can make jokes about, I don't know, celebrities or whatever, I will be very happy.

And what interesting on Trump's departure from the White House, as he leaves for the final time, there will be a little ceremony, even if he's not going to be part of the inauguration.

He will chuck Teddy Roosevelt's favourite stuffed baby moose and Dwight Eisenhower's original 1959 Barbie doll out of Thomas Jefferson's presidential 1806 horse-drawn reclining snooze carriage in a ceremonial throwing of the toys out of the pram.

It would be a beautiful way for him to leave.

He's planning up around about 100 pardons,

presidential pardons, which I'm just a topic that we keep coming back to on the bugle.

It is one of the more inexplicable facets of the American political system.

And there's rumours that they've been hawked around for money which um

which it if that were not true that would be the most surprising thing of the trump president if he had not been trying to profit from presidential pardons then you'd start to think the whole thing was some kind of uh hoax a gross oversight you'd think his staff has been asleep at the wheel they're leaving money on the table

he already pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the governor, who basically is accepting money for a gubernatorial, or excuse me, a senatorial appointment so it's you can tell he's like priming the pump to just take money for pardons and honestly uh this seems like the this seems like why he was president right just he's like i at the end i'm gonna make millions of dollars by letting criminals be criminals

remember kids crime does pay rich criminals

yeah

there was one uh story that um might even be the trumpiest story to have come out of Trump's America over the past week, and that is the story of a manatee in Florida, which was graffited with the word Trump.

It was etched into the algae on its back,

the word Trump.

Rudolf Giuliani, the former...

human, claimed a vote carved into the flesh of a water-based mammal is equivalent to 8 million normal human votes.

And it is the closest that they've yet come to some evidence of electoral wrongdoing, a manatee with the word Trump written on it.

And it just seems so emblematic of the terrible suffering of America these last four years.

Oh, the huge manatee.

Well, Trump is demanding that the manatee be counted as a valid ballot.

And if that works, he's asked for 7 million monogrammed manatees to be delivered to the White House by Amazon Courier.

By the way, 7 million monogrammed manatees was the follow-up fail to the best-selling hit single, Neune Neutsch Luf Belongs.

Oh, I remember it that was

going back to my...

Alice, I think that is the first musical reference that one of my Bugle co-hosts has used that I've actually understood.

Well, given the amount of Trump's outstanding debt and how rare manatees are becoming, this might be the most valuable thing with the Trump name on it.

We can't discount that.

To be honest, something has felt a bit fishy about this election ever since the Super Tuesday porpoises last year.

Boom.

Well, I think that might be my last Trump joke of the Trump administration, and I feel that is, you know, an infantile, unnecessary pun.

Might be the best way to go.

Britain news now and well, another exciting week in Britain.

Boris Johnson's been criticised for taking a bike ride to the Olympic park seven miles away from his home in Downing Street.

People saying this is not the kind of lockdown example that should be, that the Prime Minister should be setting.

And it's also, you know, Boris Johnson has been known sometimes to throw his darts of hypocrisy into the treble 20 of political expedients.

You can't blame him.

He's just taking a leaf out of Dominic Cummings' book, which is the only way he ever finishes his homework.

He was just going on the ride to test his thighs.

Look, when you look at Boris Johnson, you know, this guy doesn't miss a day of rigorous exercise.

So,

you can't think he's going to stop

bike riding any more than you think he's going to take a day off of chest presses or leg extensions.

This dude is a brick house.

He doesn't take days off.

In other Britain news, and very exciting news, this is, I guess, you know, related to the glorious new British age of Brexit that we're all enjoying so much

over here.

News has broken that Britain is leading the world in the use of language learning apps on on our mobile phones.

I mean, this is huge because we have a reputation for not bothering to learn other languages.

But this shows the number of reasons why we are learning more languages than

other countries.

Well, we're broadening our horizons as we're fitting a global nation.

We are possibly plotting our escape.

We might be plotting our empire.

It might be just because there is nothing else to do in this godforsaken f ⁇ ing world at the moment.

Or it might be E, because of new scientific research revealing the ineffectiveness of just saying things louder and more slowly in English.

We have suspected this science for a while but until it's proven people are not prepared to believe it.

It's like climate change but more so and still some denying it.

The EU has declared that yellow mealworms are safe for humans to eat and we're going to miss out on this and that that stings.

These high protein maggot like insects are now approved for consumption across Europe but we Brits,

we can't enjoy this delicious, delicious worm.

I mean if we'd been told this before, I don't think we'd have voted for Brexit.

I want to be part of the EU to find out what they're going to do with mealworms.

I want to know what the Italians are going to make.

I want to know if this, you know,

Spain can make the hacked off leg of a dead piggy into something soul-meltingly delicious.

I want to know what they're going to do with mealworms.

And imagine how tasty French mealworms will be once they've been forced fed for their entire lives and or kept in lightless, windowless rooms to tenderise them with delicious despair.

But we're missing all this because of the internal party politics of a sclerotic Conservative Party after a procedurally questionable referendum.

And we're being denied the right, nay the duty, to eat maggoty squibble grubs.

I am disgusted.

When will the heartbreak end, Brexit?

When will it end?

I'm slightly worried that the EU is putting the EU back into EU.

With this news about the approval of mealworms as safe to eating, just because you can doesn't mean you should, and just because you probably should doesn't mean you will.

It might be good for the environment, but I, for one, will only eat yellow mealworms if they're presented in a way that I understand, which is to say, hidden in gelatinous nutrition blocks by a sinister committee in a creepy post-apocalyptic utopia that turns out to have dark secrets it'll kill to keep hidden.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should, should have been the campaign slogan of the Remain campaign.

I think the result could have been very, very different.

Look, we can eat yellow mealworms across Europe now, which I think we're overlooking that this is great news for fish.

Maybe this is why the fish are happy.

People leaving us alone eating mealworms.

We were so desperate for a win in 2021 that we're like, okay, look, the bad news, there's a pandemic, international turmoil, the global rise of the far right.

But good news, everyone.

Legally, we can eat bugs now.

They've been approved.

where was this news when i was five years old i was ready to eat bugs

this came too late uh you know people uh people eat similar similar creatures all over the world i think that makes sense they're dense in protein and low in carbon to produce and i have to say uh maybe they are the future of nutrition but the future looks different than i thought it would i was focused on flying cars and time travel but what we're getting is mealworm cupcakes for your birthday.

And I don't remember that episode of the Jacksons.

Are they kosher, Josh?

I think one or other of us should find out.

Sex news now, and this is a British-based podcast, so I'm going to pass this section over to someone from another country, Alice.

Yes, Andy, in sex hacking, non-consensual, not having of sex, but in a sexy way news, a hacker took control of people's internet-connected chastity cages and asked for a ransom, a Bitcoin ransom, in order to release people's junk from these auto-locked cages.

Did you say internet-connected chastity cages?

Yes, indeed, Andy.

I feel like this might need a little bit of explanation in that.

Yeah, I feel it does need quite a lot of explanation, actually.

I mean, particularly if you are waking up from a, well, I don't know, either a a 30-year coma or a 700-year coma, then the internet-connected chastity cage needs a f ⁇ of a lot of explanation.

So please explain.

I took a 40-minute nap yesterday, and I feel a little bit behind.

Well, Andy, for some people, not having sex is the sexiest thing of all.

And

even sexier than that is not being allowed to have sex by someone they know.

But in this case, they were not being allowed to have sex by someone they didn't know, which is not sexy, but in a not, not sexy way.

This is sort of an Escher sketch of obscure but specific kinks, a metaparophilia of polynonamory.

Just lock this story up and throw away the key, Andy, but not in a sexy way, please, and also not in an unsexy way that someone else finds sexy in its unsexiness.

This is worse than the time that I found out hay fever is flowers fing in your nose.

I am so upset by this story.

I mean, it's it's it I mean, we are an odd species.

I think you know, just the news of the last four to ten thousand years proves that.

But I mean this is

the internet connected chastity cage.

I don't think I can it means that someone doesn't even have to be there not to f ⁇ you Andy.

Right, okay.

I've had that deal quite a few times.

Yeah, I mean it's opening up whole new worlds of

not having naughtinesses with people.

I think, look, big tech has gone too far.

All the old-fashioned, But if you want to lock my penis in a cage, do it by hand, okay?

Justify!

This is just, where has the common touch gone?

Where's the craftsmanship?

I just feel like, look, we don't need all these smart devices.

Whatever happened to a humble wicker penis cage

or a metal chastity cage done by just some hand soldering.

This is just, when I see this news, I just think how far we've strayed from our humble roots as people.

And I don't mean no chastity penis cages.

Again, I just mean maybe one that you've whittled yourself on the porch like Nana did.

I mean, Tim Berners-Lee is turning out to be arguably the greatest sexual

in the history of the human race.

And

that is a hotly contested title.

But I mean, he's if this is what he planned all along, then he's got a lot of questions to answer.

To be fair, Andy, it was a longer journey than I thought it would be from the Internet of Things to the Internet of Dongs, but it has got there.

But there's only really one moment in my life when I'd I mean other than yeah, when I play cricket and I do encage

but there's only one other time other than the protective arena of sport, where I've really, really wanted

a cage around my gonadulums.

And that was when I was eight days old and someone was coming out of all my life.

Look,

again, this

not to not to harsh anybody's joy or yuck anybody's yum, but I will say for years of my life,

I had a lot of success not having sex with a free-range penis.

I didn't have to factory farm caget.

And what an appropriate phrase to use in this final episode of the Trump years, a free-range penis.

Sexy hippos news now.

Alice,

obviously the hippo is renowned as one of nature's sexiest beasts

and they've been busy in Colombia.

Yes, Andy, this also requires a a little bit of historical knowledge.

If you didn't know,

you are not up on your hippo history, but in the 1980s, famous drug lord Pablo Escobar smuggled four hippos into his private country estate because that's what a lot of Coke will do to you.

Why not?

But it was three males and one female, and they got it on.

No cock cages for the hippos.

And they are now roaming wild and in large numbers in the wetlands north of Bogota.

Apparently, a study is forecasting that these hippos will swell without the sort of natural predators of their native homeland.

They're going to become about 1,500 hippos by 2040.

This is cane toads in Queensland all over again, but unlike cane toads, you can't run them over in your car.

Apparently, they are trying not to kill them.

There was an outrage among the population when they were talking about putting them down.

They put one down and there was a terrible protest.

So they are trying to castrate them.

And apparently, Andy, I don't know if you know this, but castrating hippos is hard, quote, harder than you would think.

Oh, right, okay.

I can't imagine that's true.

Yeah, I mean, I think probably I assume it's going to be, you know, logistically awkward.

But I mean, why specifically that much harder than you might think?

Well, I mean,

I imagine you can imagine it is hard to castrate a hippo that doesn't want to be castrated, but they also have what scientists call spatially dynamic testes, which is to say that their balls can hide from you.

Well, if scientists have tried to castrate these hippos, they found it impossible to make the females infertile because, quote, we didn't understand the female anatomy, which is a complaint that many scientists have made,

but I don't want to play into that stereotype because I think science is hot.

So, I mean, look, I'm not an expert on the logistical

procedurals of

hippopotamic conceptualisations.

But I mean, this

must be

tricky for the hippos.

I mean, one assumes that the male hippo may be, well, from an ego point of view, not necessarily

an enthusiastic recipient of

oral stimulative and gobular fellatorial indulgios.

If it has these, you know, retractable

bollocks.

And, And yeah, because whilst their hippo plonkers may be, let us put this as considerately and unjudgmentally

as we possibly can, without embarrassing our river dwelling friends' masculine pride, that their plonkers are

elusive.

But set against that,

the hippo mouth is f ⁇ ing massive.

I mean,

this has got to cause some kind of psychosexual

issue, surely,

for the boy hippos.

One would think.

Well, they don't like being castrated.

The scientist, the researcher.

Right with you there, boys.

Right with you there.

This scientist, David.

I've never felt closer to hippos than I do now.

So my heart goes out to the scientist in charge of this mission who clearly knows nothing about hippos.

If you read the article, his name is David Etreberi-Lopez, and he has been leading the sterilization effort since 2013.

They don't know how to find the lady bits.

They've been trying to lure the men into pens, but when the men feel enclosed, they smash the pens.

They jump out and crush the walls of the pens and run off out into the forest.

Not only does he say, We know nothing about the female reproductive organs, he also said, I didn't know they could jump.

I feel like someone's about to cut your balls off.

You learn how to jump.

And currently, his rate of sterilization.

Currently, his rate of successful sterilization is one hippo a year.

This man has no idea what he's doing.

One a year.

This is the hippo's country now.

I could castrate more men than that.

And probably more hippos.

That could be your follow-up podcast to the last post, Alex.

Alice Fraser attempts to castrate men.

Not judging it, not saying, anyway.

Let's move on from hippo castration news.

Super yacht news now and Josh as the owner of several super yachts, more I believe than all other Bugle co-hosts combined, you are our super yacht correspondent.

And

well,

it's been really COVID has forced super yacht owners to adapt just like it has

ordinary human beings.

We're all in this together.

Super yacht owners,

the other 99.9999999% of people who have to continue living on land around other folks.

Yeah, it's the same for all all of us is what they like to say.

They've needed to adapt because you don't, if there's one thing that ruins a yacht party, it's easily communicable diseases, right?

Communicable diseases.

Just ask anyone who's hosted a yacht orgy.

It's terrible.

So they're coming up with systems of how to

test and isolate on super yachts.

One system is by adding kind of an auxiliary vehicle that people can that can be piloted up to the side of the super yacht and you can stay in there isolated while you wait for your test results.

This is all very interesting to me because for one thing, there's no one I want to have COVID more than the owners of super yachts.

So I am of mixed feelings about this.

But honestly, if you own a super yacht or you have to be close enough to someone else where you could get coronavirus from them.

That's just a regular yacht.

Sorry, loser.

You're not super rich.

You're just regular rich.

Reckon with that.

The invention is so the support vessel, right?

Where people can take their COVID tests.

And

that's like what they're considering this new development in super yacht safety, which means rich people are so out of touch, they think they invented the idea of smaller boats.

That's wild wild to me.

They probably don't even know the word boat.

They're like, what if we had a yacht, but like smaller?

What can we call it?

Like a yachtette?

A yachtini?

What is the word for this?

It's a hard time for the super rich, I think, between their yacht troubles.

And I read that millionaires have been forgetting their passwords and getting locked out of their Bitcoin accounts, which must be terrible news if their penises are currently locked in internet access chastity cages.

But not having access to your millions of dollars in fake money, it's like waking up and being unable to remember a beautiful dream you just had.

Honestly, I'm going to start saying, because no one can check on it, right?

Like how much Bitcoin you're locked out of.

I'm going to start saying that I forgot my password and locked myself out of my Bitcoin account full of millions of dollars.

And it's a shame, too, because I promised my Canadian supermodel girlfriend I was going to buy her a Tiffany bracelet for her birthday.

I'm a fan of this small side yacht because it was invented in Sydney.

It's a Sydney yacht firm which has invented this side boat, which they are calling a protective layer between the shore and the vessel.

Having forgotten the word for ocean,

it's a moat made of boat.

I mean, you've got an emotional support catamaran.

I think things have gone a little bit too far.

I mean at what point in your life do you think, oh, I've just ordered a massive luxury boat purely in order to enable me to staff my much more massive luxury boat at a time when the soul of humanity is crumbling to jelly?

Am I helping?

Do I maybe I need another luxury boat to quarantine the staff working on the staff quarantining luxury boat?

And then another, when will the pain end?

A series of smaller boats until they event just living in your house.

Just a trail of tinier and tinier boats back to the shore.

I think that's how the Russian Navy works.

That's all the way out.

Well, that brings us to the end of this final bugle of the Trump regime.

And if you average out all the stories that we've discussed, you have a Randy hippopotamus with an internet-linked chastity belt being airlifted out of the White House in an unnecessary catamaran.

And I cannot think of any more appropriate way to end these last four years.

Well, that does bring us to the end.

Enormous thanks to Josh and Alice.

As always, any other shows you'd like to tell us about, Josh?

Oh, yeah.

I'm doing a show to promote voting rights because in America, not everybody gets to do that.

So I'm doing an online show, information on my social media at Josh Gondelman on Twitter and Instagram.

And as always, Make My Day, my comedy game show where there's only one guest, so the contestant always wins.

My podcast.

Alice?

Yes, I have a special on Amazon, my Patreon.

I do weekly salons every week on Tuesdays in different time zones.

I have merch on my website, these little necklaces that say no one's gonna die, we're all gonna die, which are less whimsically fun than when I first created them.

And other than that, I think there may be a show coming up, but I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk about it yet.

Right.

Well, let's leave that little trailer hanging in the air.

With a smaller trailer to service it.

You can hear me, Andy, download me, hosting BBC Radio 4's The News Quiz for the next few weeks.

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

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

Eva Lunda is sick of corruption being hidden away from view.

Why not get it out in the open?

asks Eva.

Instead of these shady behind-the-scenes deals, let's have high street outlets where you can walk in with a suitcase full of cash and walk out with a seat in the House of Lords or other non-British equivalent and planning permission for a casino.

We could all see who's doing what and we'd know where we stood.

I mean, who are we trying to kid anyway?

We all know it exists.

This is like the underpants thing all over again.

Michael Kopp and Carol Johnson, despite never having met, are united in their view about buildings that take way too long to build.

On hearing that the smash-hit Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona is still not complete almost 100 years after the death of its celebrity architect Anthony Gowdy, Michael announces, well this is obviously what happens when you don't set a hard deadline for something.

By coincidence Carol was having exactly the same thought at exactly the same time.

If people like Gowdy knew that work would stop on their buildings the moment they popped their clogs, she says, they'd probably get a bit of a shoftie on instead of waddling around obsessing about every single sodding gargoyle.

It works with contestants on TV cookery shows, so I don't see why it can't work with cathedrals.

Ngvi Bowie, and I hope I pronounced that name even slightly correctly, pitched a sci-fi movie to numerous Hollywood studios featuring extraterrestrials who turn up on Earth with a chaotic spaceship full of miscellaneous equipment, random souvenirs, accessories and assorted odds and sods.

Ingvi explains, it's provisionally entitled, The Paraffin Aliens.

I'm just sick of aliens always being organized and tidy.

I reckon they're probably just as hapless as we are and with an even greater tendency to hoard.

Eric Escobedo agrees that aliens might be disappointingly unimpressive, but is nonetheless excited by the prospect of human encounters with beings from other planets and or galaxies.

Eric explains, I'm particularly interested to see what kind of sports aliens play.

If they're like we see in the movies, they must have some absolutely sensational ones, probably violent, high-paced, skillful and tactically intricate, like a cross between rugby, cricket, American football, snooker, motorbike racing and ice hockey, but with more green slime and incredible commentary.

Andrew Cheeseman is worried about the Yellowstone supervolcano erupting and causing major havoc for all humanity.

I think we need to run a practice eruption, states Andrew, using maybe a load of spare rocks from building sites melted down into lava, a special funnel and a controlled nuclear explosion of some sort.

We need to know what we're dealing with and when we know that then we can deal with it.

Andrew admits that he has not entirely thought through the logic of his proposal but adds, well it would make a cracking TV documentary at the very least.

And finally, Peter Dew could not argue with being banned from his local chess club following 124 consecutive defeats.

It wasn't that I'm pointlessly bad at chess, explains Peter.

Actually, I'm okay, but I deliberately lose just so when my opponent says, check mate, I can reply, actually I'm Slovakian and I find that very offensive, before storming storming off shouting, I told you that after your last move and yet still you insist on denying my nationality.

Peter adds, I'm not actually Slovakian, and the real problem was that there were only four other people in my chess club.

Here endeth this week's lies.

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.