Everything Is Fine

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers, and yes, it does appear that 2020 has spilled into 2021.

Apologies for that.

I'm Andy Zolton.

This is issue 4179 of the Bugle.

It is now the 42nd of December 2020, or the 11th of Trumpemba, the 19-day tribute supplement added to 2020 by the Dates and International Calendars World Advisory Directive or DICWAD.

I literally have not moved since the last bugle recording.

In fact, if you listen now very carefully, you can probably hear the echo of the end of last week's show.

Please send oxygen.

Here in London, word is just reaching me that in order to make people abide by the latest anti-movement COVID regulations, the government will be reducing the temperature to minus 272 degrees Celsius so that no errant particles in your body, mind, or soul even contemplate wobbling around dangerously.

And joining me this week, well, to pick over the smoldering remnants of the American dream,

it's from America, Hari Kondabolu.

Hello, Hari.

How are you?

Well, let's say, how are you?

Let's just say, how are you?

Fuck off, Andy.

Off.

How am I?

How am I doing?

I know you read.

I know what you know what's going on.

It's terrible.

I'm terrible, Andy.

Everyone's terrible.

We will flesh that out further in due course on the show.

And joining us from here in the United Kingdom, where, well, we have a little bit to tell you Americans about the decline and fall of empires, so do pay attention.

It's Mark Steele.

Hello.

Hello, how are you, Mark?

Well, terrible.

I just, I the only way to be is terrible.

The most annoying asses are people who go, oh, well, you've got to stay cheerful and it don't matter.

We had worse than the blitz.

Just got to have a laugh, aren't you?

Fing off, you miserable.

Just, it's terrible.

And

I don't know, there's not a purpose to living at the moment.

You just get through the day, a bit like if you're a millipede.

You know, if you're a millipede and somebody says, how are you?

The millipede thinks, I'm just f ⁇ ing wobbling around on my bloody indeterminate number of limbs until the bloody bird comes down and eats me.

And that's pretty much what we're doing here isn't it

just oh i've got through another day without ending up on a bloody ventilator

let's let's cling to those but and of course crystal palace got knocked out the cup as well so yeah yeah yeah although that could all be made up couldn't it no one's allowed to the games it could just be a load of really well well sort of really brilliant software and they've just got all these little players running around on computer games

I am starting to think when it comes to COVID, that you know, if it is a hoax, it's a fucking good one, isn't it?

I mean, you've got to give them credit, the hoaxmongers.

They've gone in big.

This isn't just

making up a load of obviously unfeasible dinosaur skeletons to try to hoodwink the gullible into thinking the world is more than 6,000 years old.

You know, it's not claiming that Lenin was a mushroom.

Lenin was a mushroom.

That was a conspiracy theory.

Genuinely, look it up.

That was news.

I was really sceptical of the conspiracy theory that the vaccine was just deployed by Bill Gates to put microchips.

Right.

But in all seriousness, I'm actually thinking of it might there might be something in it because the other day a woman of about 93 crossed the road to tell me to buy a Microsoft Word Excel package for $69.99

every three months renewable

so I think there might be something in it.

Yeah.

And it's, you know, I mean, to be honest, if this is a hoax, it is making the moon landings, sorry, the so-called moon landings look like a school nativity play.

We are recording on the 11th of January.

On this day in the year 1567, the first ever lottery in England was held, part of a great national tradition of undeserved randomised rewards that lives on today in the form of the honours system.

And the lottery was to raise money to help England expand its influence, wealth, and power around the world.

How times change.

All ticket holders were promised, this is extraordinary.

The tickets were, I think, 10 shillings.

And all ticket holders were promised freedom from arrest for all crimes except murder,

felonies, piracy, and treason.

I think Trump might be 0 for 4 on those now, I think.

And the winner got £5,000, which is a massive

sum at the time.

£5,000.

Now, of course, a cubic centimetre of the glute of a mid-range Premier League left back.

But £5,000 back in 1567 was serious wedge.

It was paid partly in money and partly in tapestries and good quality linen, which is coincidentally how we pay our Bugle co-hosts.

Did I not let you know that before?

Anyway, there's some absolutely top-end tapestries coming your way.

On this day, in 1759, 1759, the first American life insurance company was incorporated in Philadelphia under the catchy title of the Corporation for Relief of Poor and Distressed Presbyterian Ministers and of the Poor and Distressed Widows and Children of the Presbyterian Ministers, or as it was, of course, known, CRPDPM, PDWCPM.

But this was before America learned about branding.

That's a tough sell, isn't it?

The Corporation for Relief of Poor and Distressed Presbyterian Ministers and of the the Poor and Distressed Widows and Children of the Presbyterian Ministers.

That's not how America would do it now, is it?

That is not a catchy title for a company.

What would they call it now?

Well, I think it's part of some

bigger

insurance group.

Dead Prez?

But I think, you know, we need to learn about Branny.

You look at petrol stations.

Apple Green is an Apple Green petrol station

that by putting the words apple and green in its title I think means that your car no longer pollutes

and Doris the Happy Frog is a major dealer of arms to Saudi Arabia.

As always, the section of the bugle is going straight in the bin and it's a phrases section.

With the world changing so fast, many of the old phrases are no longer appliable and have had words changed by the International Language Committee.

The old phrase with power comes great responsibility is now with great power comes great social media profile profile and a deluded sense of personal incorrigibility.

The darkest hour is right before the increasingly dark subsequent four years and repercussions spanning potentially decades.

Fools rush in where no longer where angels fear to tread.

Fools rush in where their fool leader tells them to rush in.

That's been updated in the last week or so.

If it ain't broke, smash the f ⁇ ing thing to pieces.

The pen is mightier than the pencil.

That's really all that's mightier than these days.

And honesty is the last refuge of the vice president uh so uh that's a phrase section in the bin

top story this week the american uncivil war

um it's uh

well hari you are our um collapse of american civilization correspondent um a role which you've embraced with great enthusiasm over the past uh four and a bit years um

uh talk in fact you were you you were on the first bugle after we relaunched, just before

the election of President Trump.

So just bring us up to date with the

last recent events in Trump's America.

I mean, let me first say,

will the aliens get here already?

This is the time.

We're weak.

We're diseased.

We're destroying ourselves.

This is the time.

You know, there's a lot of things one could say about Trump, but the man can make an exit.

I mean,

he leaves with a bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

Wednesday started great.

You know, it didn't start out all shit.

I actually felt optimistic for about an hour

because the Democrats won the Georgia runoffs, which gave them control of the Senate, the House, and the presidency, which is a huge paradigm shift, right, in American politics, because it changed the question from how are Republicans going to prevent anything from being done to how are the Democrats going to f this one up?

That's huge.

Very big victory also.

It was Raphael Warnock

and

John Osoth, and they beat

Kelly Loffler, who's the most racist NBA owner since Donald Sterling, and David Perdue, who is

just a generic rich white guy from casting.

American politics needs more of them, doesn't it?

Yeah, I mean,

he'll be back.

He'll be fine.

They're currently bathing in gold coins, so both of them are fine.

But Warnock and Osoff won again, which is exciting.

I wish the headlines read: Republicans get knockoffed, but nobody decided to.

That was for you, Andy.

I don't write jokes like that.

I'm much appreciated.

That's that's been the best thing that's happened to me this year.

A black man and a Jewish man are now the two senators of the state of Georgia.

Which, to explain how likely that is, the only thing less likely is if they became senators in the country of Georgia.

So I was in a good mood

until I put on the

news about,

you know, sometime in the afternoon, and I saw the capital under siege.

The colonizers were getting restless.

They were, the capital was raided by Trumpers, Proud Boys, and what appeared to be extras from Mad Max Fury Road.

Also, potentially some tourists who saw a line and just gotten it.

I think that's how the British Empire started, actually.

We go back to the very beginning of this sorry story, of course.

After months of claiming the election was stolen and years of being a piece of shit,

Trump released the Kraken.

They smashed through the doors of the Capitol and went onto the Senate floor.

They went into Nancy Pelosi's office and sat in her seat.

Things were destroyed and stolen.

People took selfies of themselves, or as they're now known, self-incriminationes.

Some were armed.

Some had handcuffs.

Two IEDs were found.

IEDs, of course, are improvised explosive devices.

You might be familiar with those since they were found in Iraq during the most recent war we had had with them when we claimed we were trying to bring democracy over.

If the people of Iraq had seen this footage from last week beforehand, they probably could have said, don't worry, we have that here already.

It was true.

I mean, I think one of my favorite points, if you can have favourite, that seems the wrong word.

But at that rally that you mentioned before the violence kicked off,

as Trump Stilton was throwing his toys out of the pram and by toys I mean violent supporters and out of the pram I mean directly up the road to storm the Capitol building.

He called the election result bullshit and at which point the crowd then started chanting bullshit, bullshit.

And I think that might have been peak irony.

In human history, Trump's crowd chanting bullshit, bullshit at Trump might, I think that in fact might be the basic the moment that all civilization essentially ended.

It's over.

There's nowhere for the human race to go after this.

Especially as, I mean, what surprised us all was that it was Trump doing this.

You'd think, well, it's just so out of character.

I mean,

it just shows you it's always the ones you least expect to end up causing trouble, isn't it?

All his neighbours, well, he keeps himself to himself, usually.

Oh, it's so

it's it is it is as bad as you could.

I know people said, Oh, what can you say at Satya Dead and all that sort of thing?

But when you've got like a bloke dressed as a buffalo Viking man, and others dressed as Nazis, and then they're in the Capitol building, and

like Harry was saying, they're just the police are just pretty much just letting them in.

And presumably, they must have thought, well, I mean,

if there's two groups of people that you know throughout history aren't going to do anyone any harm it's Vikings and Nazis so we might as well let them in.

It's so mad and just I wonder now because we all thought,

you already living there, I always thought, right, oh imagine if anyone, anyone without the proper credentials or with any sort of vaguely malicious intent got within a thousand yards of the Capitol building, even looked at the steps.

There's probably some special laser thing from space that goes

and they're never heard of again.

And in fact, you could just walk up, smash a window and walk in.

And I think now probably every campaign should try this.

So say the Cheltenham cycling lane campaign.

Instead of just having a little rally outside the local town hall, should try just invade the Capitol building

and cycle over some old portrait of Franklin D.

Roosevelt

anyone Harry Christian's instead of going up and down Oxford Street gong ding ding gong that they should just smash their way in

bang a gong bang some bang some senator's head on a gong and

anyone you're just allowed in

the selfish people are taking but they probably if this keeps happening they you won't even need selfies because you know when you go on a water slide at a theme park and you come off and there's all them pictures they've taken of each person and you can buy it, it'll be like that.

There'll be one,

glad to buy a little memento folder.

We've got one of you pissing on the senator's desk here.

Look, I can understand from a certain point of view,

that Donald Trump really doesn't want to move house because moving house is a pain at the best of times, isn't it?

And especially during the pandemic.

But I think he's taken this just a little too far.

I mean, you look back, I mean, clearly it's a string of failures, Harry, have led to this kind of heartbreaking, stomach-churning, lethal malarkey, a string of failures dating back to, as discussed, 1776, of course, and the decision to unburden the USA of the transatlantic umbilical cord that nurtured America with God-given, world-leading British wisdom and insight that can still be seen in the fact that Britain is the greatest nation in the world right now, absolutely everything, some 245 years later.

I must stop commissioning Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, to write my scripts, but you know, there we go.

It's

it's, I mean,

how is this, Harry, is this, was this the end of, was this the last thrashings of an idiotic serpent's tail?

Or

is it the culmination of delusionist politics, this mutant variant of democracy that is philosophically committed to nurturing, sharing, and promoting delusion?

Or

is it just

the end of episode one of a tediously elongated horror series?

No, this is the end of the new hope.

We haven't even started the Empire Strikes Back.

This is just the big, like now we've seen them riot, because just because Trump's gone, he'll be martyred probably, like, if he gets thrown in prison or whatever, like he's not going away.

These people aren't going to go away.

In fact, they have weapons, and despite the fact that militias tried to kidnap a couple, not one, but a couple of American governors and threatened

to kidnap the governor of Michigan's family and the governor and kill them, you would think the security would have been beefed up a little bit when when a whole bunch of these people stormed the capital.

So I think it's not over partly because we have seemingly taken very few steps to prevent it.

Note again that there hasn't been a terrorist attack in a while.

They've focused,

sorry, a foreign terrorist attack.

They've focused a lot of the energy on that and I think that's wasted because if I was a terrorist in another country and saw what was happening to America, i would probably think to myself don't worry america you got this

i'm not gonna waste my airline miles well hari i think uh in what is a hotly contested field that might be the most depressing joke ever told on the bugle and there's been a fair few of it the last

god was it 13 years but at least hari we're just nine days away now as we record from being able to wake up for the first time in four years without our first words of the day being being, I had this batshit crazy nightmare in which America had elected as its president.

Who the f is that on the front page of my newspaper?

Only nine more days of that.

I mean, the only person I could imagine this last four years really helping is 15th President James Buchanan, who is regularly listed as the worst president of the United States.

He is sending in his gold medal as we speak.

After all these years of being on the bottom of the list, thinking it was hopeless to ever, considering that, you know, his presidency ended up leading to the civil war.

The fact that Trump tops it with a civil war and a pandemic and a threat of nuclear war, that's pretty, that's pretty great for James Buchanan.

This is one of the interesting things that you say,

his Twitter account has been permanently suspended, but he still has control of America's nuclear arsenal.

Now, is that the right way around?

Have we cancelled those subscriptions in the correct order?

Here's the thing.

He does not, I think he's not going to use those nuclear weapons, right?

And it's not because he's worried about the sake of humanity.

He doesn't want to die.

For the sake of self-preservation, he won't do that.

If the world ends, then he ends.

Like if the aliens came down, he'd negotiate with them and give them the world.

You know, that's not an issue.

He'd sell us all out because he'd be okay.

But

in a nuclear situation, no, he might die.

And his whole life has been about self-preservation.

But all this, so we all say all of these things, and most people in the world are saying things fairly similar.

But the only people who didn't seem to be aware that something like this would happen would be the people in charge of defending the building.

We couldn't possibly, there were just no clues that he would do anything like this.

Very cryptically, he said once or twice a day on all of his social media accounts, come to Washington, D.C.

on the 6th of January, we're going to smash up the Capitol building, I'll march down there with you.

But

this is so carefully coded that no one was able to work out that that

meant he was going to go in there at all.

Oh, there were just, there were, I was amazed, only reading this morning, they are number, I mean, horrible, you know this much better than me, but there was lots of discussions, wasn't there, between

the people who ended up going there about what should we take?

Do we take guns?

What's our aims and all that?

Just like, you know, people

going on a day trip, or are we staying till the evening?

It was like that.

And

somehow nobody spotted it, that that's what they were going to do.

Oh, the people who said they were going to do something have done the thing they said they were going to do.

Led by a mental person who said for years this is what he was going to do.

The t-shirts that really struck me, the 6th of January Civil War t-shirts.

I mean, that's

when you see people wandering around with those on.

Again, you know, you think at least an alarm bell would dingle somewhere.

Currency news now, and well, if money makes the world go round, we've got problems here in Britain because a coin has been released that had errors on it,

A tribute coin to the science fiction writer H.G.

Wells, a two-pound coin,

apparently had a wrong quote on it and also had

pictures of some of his famous creations, the tripods, which he wrote about and then subsequently became a TV series in my childhood, but a tripod with four legs, which generally goes against traditional tripod three-leggedness.

And apparently the invisible man, another one of Wells's famous characters, was wearing the wrong kind of hat.

Which, I mean, Mark, this, you know, out of all the trouble Britain's had recently, this is the last thing we needed, isn't it?

You know, some misprints on a coin.

It's absolutely the last thing we need.

It reminds me, in fact, of, you know,

I do a show where I go around towns and write about the towns, and that's been a little bit tricky over the last 10 months.

Just a couple of days before the lockdown, I went to Stratford-upon-Avon to write a show about that.

and Stratford-on-Avon's where Shakespeare was born and given their due they've not made a big thing of it

just entirely from start to end just every little bit of Stratford on Avon is full of shape there's I mean these are these are real ones there's a there's a butcher's called to beef or not to beef

There's a cafe, this one really annoyed me.

There's a cafe called If Music Be the

Food of Love

Play On.

But that's really annoyed me because that's about music, not fing food, you ignorant idiot.

So it should have been, if food be the music of love, then cook on, essentially.

This is the point I'm coming to.

There was a great big gift.

There's many great big gift shops there.

And one of them had t-shirts with Shakespeare quotes on.

One of which was,

I challenge you, I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you have come unarmed.

William Shakespeare.

But it wasn't Shakespeare, that was Oscar Wilde.

And there's this bloody shop is selling this fraudulent f ⁇ ing stuff.

All you've got to do is check it really easy.

Just look on Google for 10 seconds.

But no.

And similarly, these two pound coin people have done the same with H.G.

Wells.

They've gone, oh yeah, there were these Triffids come down.

They were tripods with four legs.

Who are they employing to do that?

That's all you've got to do.

Your whole job is to check how many legs on a f ⁇ ing tripod.

Well, I see it as a Brexit thing, Mark.

You know, take that Brussels with your regulations on how many legs tripods have.

We're Britain again now.

We're going to have f ⁇ ing four legs on our tripods.

I mean, to be fair...

To be fair to the people who, you know, made the HG Wells coin, you know, if they had a time machine, I'm sure they'd go back and fix it.

Yes,

exactly.

That's probably what they're working on, and then this bit will make no sense.

The wrong shape hat for the Invisible Man, I was less fussed about that because H.G.

Wells wrote the Invisible Man story in the 1890s.

So he was, A, a man in the late 19th century, and B, he was invisible.

So I reckon he's going to have at least two hats, minimum.

Probably multiple hats.

So, you know, I mean, why would you only have one hat if you don't have a visible head?

Yes.

Yes, well, I agree with that.

As a man with multiple hats, I would

I would agree with that.

In fact, I was in a hat shop in London, and I like this.

It was this

prestigious hat shop, and there were these two old fellows who worked there, both sort of about late 70s, and they dressed immaculately.

And one of them

came in, as he came in, he said to his mate, and they must have been working there every day, it's actually years and years, and one of them said, I've just been through Trafalgar Square.

You wouldn't believe the number of of people who aren't wearing hats.

He's only just noticed the decline in hat wearing since H.G.

Wells's day.

Bless him.

In other currency news, Bitcoin has doubled in value in the last month.

I mean,

this,

in many ways, this, again, is a story that encapsulates everything about the modern world.

As we get more and more anxious about reality, Bitcoin, the even more fictitious

pseudo-cryptocurrency that's even more fictitious than real money, and it's doubled in value over a month.

Essentially, the financial markets are increasingly fleeing any market even tangentially linked to the real world and are going all in essentially on fictional parallel universes.

And I mean,

this I don't understand economics, as you guys

both would know, having worked with me over the years.

But

how can you explain?

Because Bitcoin was worth five years ago, f ⁇ ing all, which was correct.

But it's cleverly exploited this endemic flaw in the human brain

regarding how economics works.

And it's alchemized itself into one of the most valuable, non-physical things in the universe, just as the value of hope, joy, and truth have collapsed even further.

over the past year.

But how do you explain this Bitcoin doubling in value at the moment?

I mean, I don't, to me, like,

when I read this story, it felt like they were saying, the snozberries taste like snazberries.

Like, I'm like, I don't, what the hell's a snazzberry?

I don't know how they work.

I don't know what they're supposed to taste like.

So,

I mean, it's, I,

yeah,

because it's as you say, Andy, because it's just in the

mind.

And if you are aware of that, I suppose you could buy a hundred X X and the next day sell it for 200x and you've got you've got your 100x profit that is in the real world but people tend to believe it and they go these X's are now

actually worth more

and

therefore they can't stop going up in value like the tulips you know about the tulips in the yes yeah yeah yeah so once people believe and that's the same with bonds and that was the same with debt packages before before 2008, the debt packages were just being bundled together and sold from bank to bank to bank and everybody forgot what it originally was.

So it didn't have any relationship to the real world, which is why the tulips, it wasn't really tulips, it was tulip bonds.

They're just going up and up and up.

They can't stop.

But there's no actual real value being created.

So eventually when someone goes, oh, actually, I need my tulip bond or my debt package or my Bitcoin or whatever it is back

like you know well this is best explained really as I think

this is

as I think economically this is one of the best explanations it's a bit complicated but in Mary Poppins when

they hear the little boy saying he wants his money back from the bank his sixpence whatever it is and they all panic and think the money's not the banks running out of money and because people think the bank's running out of money then it does indeed collapse bringing about the destruction of Edwardian society and the end of the age of deference, the rise of

women's suffrage and the triumph of child's imagination, as was the aim of the people who wrote Mary Poppin.

It's a horrific dystopia up there with a handmaid's tale in my book.

Other cryptocurrencies doing well at the moment include Pretendergrams, Victor Doe, Spoof Wage, Faux Florins, Bragging Rights and the Swiss Roll.

And Elon Musk has jumped on board.

He's recently become the world's richest person, subject to confirmation that he does actually exist.

And he's said that he would happily be paid in Bitcoin.

His personal wealth has been valued at $190 billion, sneaking him ahead of Jeff Bezos,

who's having to tighten his belt to get by on just $185 billion at the moment.

He might have to start doing some of his packaging and postage himself just to make ends meet.

Do you think there's anything he can't afford?

Bezos?

Do you think he's going to fing hell?

Look at that.

I was going to buy Saturn and

I haven't got enough.

Elon Musk's long-term rival Pilau Snork has announced plans to build a warp-speed mega maglev tunnel through the centre of the Earth's core to reduce travel times on the not very lucrative Hawaii to Botswana route to just 17 minutes.

And has also announced the launch of the domestic oil re-vegetative visor that turns crude oil back into plant matter for use in smoothies, salads and facial rubs, and also makes makes your car both vegan and carbon positive if you do the maths wrong.

And since so we've had this coin snafu here in Britain we have for you a bugle coin fact box.

The first coin was the same size and shape as a woolly mammoth.

In fact it was a woolly mammoth that was bartered in exchange for a job lot of 3D flint arrowheads.

Thus began international finance.

The origin of heads or tails coin tossing dates back to Roman times.

Roman coins until the year 236 AD all feature the tale of the emperor's favourite pet, at which point Emperor Maximinius Thrax ended the practice after being bitten by an escaped squirrel with a provocatively bushy tail.

In a post-coin world, the decision on who kicks off in football matches will be decided by a distant spitting competition, whilst the coin toss in cricket matches will be replaced with a competitive poetry recital between the two captains.

If British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab were to be commemorated in a coin, it would involve a picture of a floundering man struggling in choppy waters behind a weeping ferry.

In a post-coin world, pub quiz machines will reward triumphant quizders with the shells of baby terrapins instead of coins.

And the largest denomination banknote ever issued was the 100 quintillion pengo note, issued when Hungary went naught crazy after World War II.

Based on the difference in size between the £1 coin and the £2 coin, if a £100 quintillion pound coin was ever made, it would be 13 light years across.

I did do the maths, I might have done them wrong, but it's the 2020s, that's how we roll.

And at the current rate of progress, Jeff Bezos will have commissioned that coin by the year 2031.

I want to see the cricket captains doing a poetry song.

So we're here early this morning because of the poetry recital.

Joe Ruth to start.

I wondered lonely as

a cloud.

What is it?

Is it cloud?

Oh dear, that looks bad from Joe.

I think England are going to be bowling this morning.

Of course, my favourite cricket poem is,

shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Yes, you're like a summer's day, love, in that the cricket's on and a cart, so I can't spend any time with you.

It's 142-3.

Could you make me a cup of tea?

Danish penis news now, and whilst the world battles in existential crises against the seemingly unstoppable enemies of the COVID virus, the mutant strain of democracy that's infected the world, and as the future shrinks and shrivels before us like a particularly reluctant slice of bacon shedding liquid, leaving just a salty, shriveled mess at the bottom of the pan, Denmark has found itself a means of disputing something truly meaningful, the rights and wrongs of showing a children's TV cartoon about a man with a ridiculously long penis and his adventures, his peniids, if you will, with that penis, including using his

well, I mean, it's what, about 10 foot long, the penis to protect local children against an attack of lions.

hari you are our uh penises in culture uh correspondent um bring us up to date with this uh this thrilling uh advance in uh danish uh danish art

well let me first say that my lawyers are suing the creators of this tv show for stealing my life story

family the book had not been published yet somehow it had leaked and

all of it um

you know it's interesting because denmark has a really weird weird history with immigrants recently, and

there's been talk, I don't know if they're actually doing it, but making the children of immigrants take Danish courses to know how to be a proper Dane, to know the culture, to assimilate properly.

You know, they have this high

sense of self.

And after hearing about this penis cartoon, I think to myself,

a culture that could make this maybe not great

maybe could use other influences

outside of themselves

I like it

you like it yeah I think it's a shame there wasn't a mr.

man called mr well hung

there was a I mean I guess there was mr.

tickle it was very Mr.

Tickle was kind of very 1970s vibe really did a bit carry-on wasn't he Mr.

Tickle

mr

mr massive penis lived in massive penis cottage good morning he said to the children how are you today

well i'm not so good i've got to spend five minutes clambering over your massive penis to get to school said the children

well i mean you the thing is

In this world where this man has this giant penis,

you're telling me that kids don't don't accidentally bump into it or touch it and stuff.

So this show is full of children touching a man's penis.

Well,

yeah, but it's Danish.

So, I mean, let's try and keep it

in perspective.

The Danes still haven't apologized for what the Vikings did on these shores.

So we can't judge them by our own attitudes.

I mean,

they're not ancient Greeks.

They're Danes.

This is

not acceptable.

But what can he do, though, if he's got a penis that long?

He can't help it.

You've bought into the reality of this.

No, but I think we've got to be fair.

He can't help.

You can't apply the same rules of child abuse to someone who's got a penis that's 45 miles long.

I mean, people are going to bump into it without you knowing.

That's only if he has an erection, Mark.

Yeah, but when he hasn't and it's flaccid, it might be draped across the M40.

Everyone who's gone the way to Milton Keynes will bump into it.

This man, if he had any dignity, would wrap it around his thigh.

It is absolutely absurd that this thing is coming out of his pants.

Also, what kind of material stretches like that?

Stretches

10 feet.

Especially modified.

He'd strangle himself like when a constrictor goes around you.

He uses it for social good.

He uses it to etch murals, to hoist flags, and to perform rescue operations.

I mean,

is he not a role model, Hari, for how we men should be using our wangs more productively for the good of all society, to etch murals

wherever we possibly can?

It's an interesting philosophy.

Instead of maybe encouraging men to use their brains more,

this is saying that we should use our penis more in a variety of different ways that often involve children.

What the f?

This is sick.

What is this?

No, this is not okay.

This is fing.

What?

I mean, they got universal health care.

They've got all these things right.

I guess they're allowed to have one terrible idea involving a man with a 10-foot penis.

I mean, if any country's allowed to.

But, like, get out of here.

It's ridiculous.

I'll do the washing up with Maui.

This lockdown's gone on too long, Mark.

10 feet flaccid means how much erect?

20 feet?

I mean,

is he having sex with women and other, like, in other words, cartoons, I think?

I think it goes into just other

shows on other channels at the same time.

You turn on Bugs Bunny, and then all of a sudden you realize, oh, wait a second, folks, that's not a carrot.

It could be

used as a zip wire, yeah, exactly.

I mean, it's it's um it could be it could be used in these Brexitious times.

He could he could stretch his penis across the North Sea to provide a physical bridge between Britain and continental Europe.

Surely that, I mean, that's oh god, that'd get him going mental, wouldn't it?

We voted to come out, right?

And now he's gonna fing put his penis

to fing connect to spam out.

That's not what we voted for

if he if he ejaculates on a Monday, does that mean it comes out on Tuesday or Wednesday?

That's an interesting point.

Well, we'll have to watch the program and find out.

It's not a one of the makers of the programme, so

it's not sexual.

It's just

a very, very long wang.

You know,

that's different isn't it is there will be a spin-off about a man who

a man who does like 40 foot wide shits

and and uses it to sort of uh to attack

demons that are coming to

to eat all the people in the village

I think that might be a wasp-ish satire on the 21st century so far, to be honest.

Anyway,

more from Danish penis cartoons over the next 10 to 20 years, exclusively on the bugle.

That brings us to the end of

this week's show.

It's been a pleasure talking to you.

As always, we'll be back next week to chart the final full week of the

Trump presidency.

We will be recording the bugle on Mondays for the next few weeks while I'm hosting the news quiz on Radio 4 that you can also download as a podcast.

Hari, any, I know your politically reactive is back currently, isn't it?

Yes.

Politically reactive drops new episodes every Thursday.

It's me and W.

Kamal Bell figuring out how we're spending our last days together on this planet.

And

also the podcast I do with my brother, the Kundabolu Brothers

podcast.

You know, we think of ourselves as a seasonal

and small batch and kind of a bit of a pop-up,

meaning that we've released 31 episodes in a decade.

So we don't know when they're going to come through, but

they've been popping up of late.

So I'd check that out as well.

Mark, any shows to tell our listeners about?

Yeah, I've got quite a lot of shows, actually, that

have been cancelled and then reinstalled and then cancelled again.

So if you sort sort of look around in general at most theatres I'm booked to do a show that will without any question be cancelled

so you're very very welcome to buy a ticket for that

and

never ever get to see the show you bought a ticket for

the value of those has gone up 275% in recent years some of those are now trading at £8,000

So essentially, tickets to your non-existent gigs are worth more than Bitcoin now.

Yeah, yeah, much more.

Yeah.

Yeah, much more.

We're going to buy Bitcoin out.

Thank you for listening, Bugles.

We will play you out with some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers to join them and make a recurring or one-off contribution to keep the bugle flourishing and independent.

Go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Franz Janka is not convinced that Sphinxes, the celebrity ancient Egyptian lion stroke, human stroke, other animal and occasionally bird hybrid, were all that.

With all due respect to the ancient Egyptians, says Franz, the Sphinx is an absolute mess of a mythical creature.

Anything with the body of a lion but without the head of a lion is pretty goddamn pointless if you ask me.

It will look weird and be much less good at biting, which to my mind is key.

Peter Coward agrees that a human with the head of a lion would be more worrisome than a lion with the head of a human.

Opposable thumbs and a carnivorous slaughter bonce, no thank you, barks Peter, in justified concern at scientists' plans to create such a breed.

Those jaws and a propensity to make, operate and trade high-tech weaponry, that is a cocktail made in military industrial wildlife park complex heaven.

And I am emphatically not in favour.

Michael Kemp pipes up with confirmation that a feline with a non-feline head is not something science should be aspiring to.

I've taken it upon myself to make my cat, which is like a micro-lion in so many ways, wear the head of a selection of Muppets, Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog included.

None of those heads provided an uptick in his overall cat performance compared with his own cat head.

I therefore rightly assume that Sphinxes would replicate that.

And finally, Gillian Piper also points out that those varieties of Sphinx with the wings of birds to add to their lion's body and miscellaneous heads are quote pretty impractical and in terms terms of bald physics likely to struggle to get off the ground.

They're not going to trouble a basic domestic bird table, let alone soar to the skies before swooping down like a vision of unquenchable vengeance if that is indeed what motivates sphinxes to get out of bed in the mornings.

Here endeth the 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.