Bonus Bugle - Your Questions Answered!

Welcome to the bonus bugle with the working title 4175A.

I am Andy Zoltzmann doing an absolutely killer impression of Chris the producer and in no way did I just go out for the day without recording this intro i would never do that whilst i'm here i would like to say a few things number one bloody hell that chris is great what a guy i couldn't do without him uh number two it's holiday season and no i'm not going to go and say which one it's your life you choose but It is time to treat yourself or a loved one, so why not get some official bugle merch?

We have half a glass of altar t-shirts that are selling fast, like really fast, like almost almost sold out.

And interestingly, if you get a half a glass of water t-shirt soaking wet and then squeeze all the water out, it actually will fill half a glass of water.

There's also hats and jumpers and scarves and stickers.

You can get them all wet too if you like.

I don't care.

Bye now.

Okay.

On with the show.

It's a bugle Q ⁇ A that we recorded live on the internet with video and stuff yesterday.

It's still there somewhere.

In it, I, Andy Zaltzmann, Zaltzmann, and with producer Chris and Alice Fraser, answering questions about this fine show, plus stuff about John Oliver, who, the last post, milk jugs and violence.

And then, there's some lies.

Here we go.

I'm going to start with three questions combined from Jennifer Bogart, Paul Crawford, and Marcy.

So we've got 8 a.m.

F you Chris.

Why did I have to get up this early?

And will you be recording this so as some of us on PST can listen and watch later?

Well

PST,

I think you can get medical treatment for that now.

But

yes, well we are recording this.

So if you are not watching this now, you will be able to listen to it.

At a later stage, highlights will go out on the as part of this week's sub sub-bugle 4175 sub-episode A.

So

you can listen and or watch later.

I mean it's a visual spectacle as all bugle shows are.

So in many ways I believe that although we start as an audio newspaper we've become much more about the pure the pure visual element.

Certainly all of your dance videos, your immensely popular TikToks would indicate that your complex opinions are actually best and most articulately expressed in the medium of modern dance.

Yes, well, many people have said that in the past.

And yeah, I mean, the body doubles cost a huge amount, but I think they're worth every single penny.

The grace of an eagle, the aggression of a swan.

8 a.m.

So

that sounds like East Coast, North America.

I mean, that's an early FUC to

fire in on, Chris.

I mean, does the time of day that you receive these anti-greetings

make a difference to the impact they have on the devastation they impart in your soul?

Yeah,

it's actually very difficult for me to start the day without being told

myself.

Like, I feel all at sea.

Before the watershed.

Alice is the only person allowed to swear on the show because it's past bedtime where she is.

Whereas

we are broadcasting,

you're broadcasting to North in North America.

You're applying to kids over the breakfast table, their parents, you know, who see the bugle as an educational resource more than anything that they use to tell their children the truth about the world.

And you've sullied it with your potty mouth.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

Well,

coming from a father who has dropped far more significant language in live shows in front of his own children.

Yes.

Well, I mean,

and we had a question about,

I saw this coming a question about me delivering my son.

So I imagine actually the first word he heard was probably me

dropping the big one.

Well, you know, Andy, it's important to give things their proper terms.

You want to, you know, you want to call things by their proper names.

It's part of the modern child-rearing experience, and you've got to call a spade a

sometimes.

Family show, Alice.

Someone see

Jeff on the YouTube chat suggested Alice is the only person allowed to swear on the show.

Should be part of our new merch range.

Give it a couple of years.

Because we'll get right on it.

Paul Crawford, who asked, why do I have to get up this early?

Well, fundamentally, Paul, it's due to the dog-eat-dog capitalist world that we live in.

That's why we all have to get up too early to work too hard to be not happy enough.

So

blame that.

As Ayn Rand famously wrote, if you don't leap out of bed at

5.30am,

someone else is going to smother you to death with a pillow made of coffee.

But I mean, that's what we fought the Cold War for.

So

sorry about that.

There was also a couple of questions coming in, Chris, highlighting that we'd scheduled this

to happen during the first South Africa versus England 1 international cricket match.

Well,

the cricket fans amongst you may know that game has been postponed, allegedly due to a COVID test, But the real reason is because I wield so much power in the cricket world that they realized they could not have an international match clashing with this hastily arranged Bugle Live QA.

I like the thought of it maybe being a bugler over there who had to dish out a false positive test result to someone just in order to guarantee your full attention for the next hour.

I mean, that is underrating the commitment of Bugle fans.

They definitely went and licked someone.

Can I just ask before we move on to general bullshit?

Tom Walker wants to know, each of you, what is your favourite flavour of crisp?

And I assume they mean potato chip.

I would say I like salt and vinegar chips because

there's something claggy about most other flavours, whereas salt and vinegar clear your mouth as you eat them.

Right.

I mean, to me, Mr.

Walker, Let's just pick up on that name a bit.

I mean, is this are you basically just trying to, you know, tie up some lucrative deal with the world's leading podcast, Walker?

Chip Maven.

Market Your Crisps to our 7.8 billion listeners, which is more people than are currently alive in the world.

Extraordinary.

But we are counting dead people.

That's all the raise these days.

Something like 84% of all the votes in the American election, of course, cast by the dead.

But

that's a fact.

I mean, it's not a true fact.

Still a fact.

I believe, Tom Walker, that flavour in crisps and snacks is passe.

I'm not interested in what it tastes like.

I'm interested in what food makes me feel.

I think emotional crisps are the future.

And of course, friend of the show, Scluton Malvain,

did recently open his new Emoto Bistro, in which each dish is intended to provoke an emotion.

more than a flavour.

Signature dishes include hollow-eyed haddock pessimistically served on a resigned bed of fait accompli seaweed, and a gunpoint-served ransom of lambs liver, frightened to a quivering terrorine, tormented by a haunting memory of spirit-broken split peas.

And he's launching a new range of emotional crisps as well.

The flavours are hope and wistfulness, dread and suppressed regret, and confused betrayal, which I think is the most directly equivalent to cheese and onion.

Matthew Gwynne has been in touch.

This is a long one.

Andy, I think you're going to need to cast your mind back to episode 193.

Okay.

Where in that bugle, you accused Osama bin Laden of using 150 chickens for a seven-round single elimination tournament with 22 reserved chickens to replace winning chickens that die from injuries sustained.

Correct.

I think what our correspondent here wants to know is, should you not have done an eight-round tournament with first-round buys for some of the chickens and subsequent chicken fatalities being an automatic loss in the next round, which would be more in character with Aussie's character and temperament?

Sure, you might end up with no surviving chickens, but fair is fair.

Well, look look,

what I would say is that you're misrepresenting what I said on that occasion.

I didn't accuse Bin Laden of holding this tournament.

I merely picked up on the fact that one of the details that emerged after he was compromised to a permanent end, as I believe John Oliver reported, John Sainh Sainh,

was that he had 150 chickens.

And I pointed out that this was a really weird number of chickens to have because it meant that you could not have a fair seven-round knockout.

And that, you know, if he did any way of doing it, whether with your

buy rounds,

how do you seed chickens?

How do you decide which ones get the buy?

And do you just do a random draw that doesn't seem what the point was bin Laden had clearly not thought about the fairness of any knockout chicken competition which really revealed a lot about the man and his and his appalling moral compass so either way whether you do it as a knockout with

backup chickens parachuted in suddenly you could have a chicken only having to fight the final winning the whole thing obviously unfair or by or some kind of complicated repertage system the point is bin laden did not give any thought to the fairness of a chicken knockout competition and you know that if you needed any further evidence that this was not a nice man to hang out with surely surely that was it

yeah monster monster

Kyle also wants to cast your minds back to Bugle 151

and has asked when will you formally apologize for what happened in that that episode?

Andy, you might need to give some context as to what we did.

I mean, I think the immediate thought would be a pun or something objectionable going in the bin, but is it more than that?

Well,

look,

I took a look back at episode 151, which I'm sure everyone remembers very clearly.

We did report on the royal wedding in that,

the wedding of William and trainee Queen Kate.

I don't know

if that's what you want the apology for, Kyle.

I mean is that is are you so appalled by two young people wanting to share their lives together in

the holy sanctified institution of royal matrimony, which is like ordinary matrimony but weird.

Or also in 151, and you know we we

well i mean we may we might have to apologize for this we did speculate on uh

the the the seemingly distant prospect of Donald Trump becoming president.

Now, I can't know if we'd already done this on a previous bugle, but the Bertha, the Obama Bertha story was in the news

that week.

And

I'm just looking back at my notes from that script.

I quoted an article on Al Jazeera from 2011 saying Donald Trump is the living embodiment of every degrading aspect of American culture.

And those words have really stood the test of time very well.

Indeed, there was a Trump fact box about how he made a lot of his money from casinos.

So this background in fleecing the American public whilst promising them unattainable dreams and stacking the odds artificially against them is ideal preparation for career in top-level politics.

You know, I am a prophet.

It's not easy.

It's not easy to be me when I know the power I wield with my words from podcasts from nine years ago.

So, yes,

we did.

Also, he was a member of the Gaming Hall of Fame.

And I assume that means

gambling sort of gaming rather than

computer gaming.

And we've had

Neil Stars' game.

Exactly.

We've had some questions in about the Watchdogs Legion game in which Alice and I feature.

I don't know if we were we'd put any of them on the the list of questions, but

there was some skepticism, Alice, about how much I know about

the gaming world and whether I'm

not fully up to speed with what the kids are.

I mean that's pretty harsh, isn't it?

Absolutely cutting edge.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

You have the rapid fire thumbs of a 13-year-old competitive Korean esports champion.

Thank you.

Yeah, they just happen to be attached to the wrists of a man who would much rather use them to write cricket statistics.

Andy, you keep putting sections in the bin.

Right.

Has anyone ever emptied this bin?

Well, I mean, it depends what you mean by a bin.

I mean, what.

Sorry, this was from, I should give credit where credit's due.

Alex Buchanan.

Thank you, Alex.

Well, there's a couple of ways of answering this.

One is, you know, what is a bin?

Is it not merely a manifestation of the emptiness of our souls?

And the other is

the bin obviously

is metaphorical.

Because as long-term buglers will know, in one of the very first episodes of the bugle, reported the harrowing story that our bin had been stolen back in 2007 by some people from,

well, a couple of doors down.

And, you know, ever since then, you know,

it's been hard for me to talk about bins.

It's,

In answer to your question, it's all there.

The bin is merely the coal, oil, and gas of future generations, as

no doubt some very dead trees would testify.

Now,

the show has a long history of literary tie-ins.

You know, in recent times, Alice has worked with the acclaimed Dancy Lagarde.

Historically

we built up a relationship with I believe the Grisham Foundation

for a title The Congressman's Penis.

Neil Peter writes in and asks whatever happened to the sequel of that

novel.

Well it was it was Grisham wasn't it the the

writer of the it wasn't my it wasn't my work.

We just had a deal to serialize it.

But

I'm afraid

the whole franchise hit a bit of buffers when

the decision to reboot, do this sort of second follow-up version of the story around a congresswoman proved,

well, unpublishably

graphic.

So that's, you know, it just

went the way of many literary projects.

Alice, there's a question come in for you on Twitter

from Suborble.

I need to know how much cheese is too much cheese.

Again, I feel like context matters here.

I need to know the circumstances

in which you require this answer.

I would say too much cheese is

just slightly more than enough cheese.

And this from

Erin Green, are you aware of a universe in which you or your doppelganger is a flamingo?

If yes, do they also not have COVID-19?

And would you be willing to accept that trade-off?

Absolutely not.

There is no amount of money you could pay me, no incentive that you could offer me,

no possible set of circumstances in which I would contemplate aligning myself with those filthy, knock-need, swamp-dwelling, silt-sucking, baby-stealing,

red cottage cheese vomiting aberrations in the name of both nature and good taste.

So, yes,

I would rather have myself thrown into a sarlaq pit full of wood chippers than contemplate even the possibility of a universe in which I am, let alone am close to, a flamingo.

That flamingo in your description definitely sounded part store.

Aren't they all

you've got two legs, use them?

They're just stalks crossed with communism.

Before we move into another subject area, I just wanted to reflect on Tom Ward's brilliant question.

The question, really, have I wasted my life, is only part of his brilliance because he has.

Again, that is very much the working subtitle of this podcast from day one.

So, Tom has made a list of all the bands that Andy you claim to have been in at school.

Going back to Bugle 22's The Tarpaulin of Mercy,

64's Sausage Forecast.

Yeah, because a bit...

We're working through a budget hazelnut yogurt, kung fu fatty and the second king of pawns.

That's a good album.

Testicular zone.

Oh yeah, that was

arguably a bit too far

for the audience at the time.

Impromptu piss sprinkler.

Ill advice.

I was badly advised by my agent.

Syrian electronic army.

Yeah, I stand by that work.

I mean, it was derivative.

I mean, craft work fans thought it just us playing craft work and

you know through a Syrian flag but look anyway look it was experimental for what it was

slapstick gandhy

Permian Triassic extinction event yeah

I mean not not your classic blues blues band name but you know we you know it was uh

and it made it did make it hard to really penetrate that massively lucrative market.

The next two, amazingly, you invented just for sub-episodes.

So 251A,

Cure Aristocrats of Qatar

and 258A, Bandito Fury.

Both good bands.

I mean, some of the work that

Bandito

did was terrific.

I think it stands the test of time, even though, of course, I was at school at the time.

And some of these bands overlapped.

And I was at school for 13 years, from the age of five to 17, 18.

So

a lot of time for bands.

But it was because we didn't have the internet.

We're going to move on to a different subject matter.

I guess both of you will have a view on this.

From Phil Davison, will the Trump presidency, I guess, deserve and receive a fuck eulogy?

Well, I mean, you're assuming, Phil, that that he actually lost and you know

that the true result will not be known by the 20th of January.

And also, if that does happen, you're also assuming

that, I mean,

yeah, we've talked about this on the bugle.

I'd love to think that the Trump story, as presaged in Bugle 151, is over, but I think every right-thinking human being fears that

in many ways this might be just the uh with hindsight almost uh lightly amusing prequel to whatever may follow in future years.

Well I'd love to I would love to do that.

We will certainly give it the send-off

this presidency the send-off it deserves even whilst

properly shitting ourselves about the the future.

Well Alice what I mean how how how do you intend to uh to mark the end of the the the

the Trump presidency?

Well, I have to say, Andy,

as a satirist,

as a satirist who's in the arts community, which is as we know, dominated by majority leftists, I am sick of the lazy anti-Trump jokes, and

as such, I will probably gather all of my lazy Trump jokes and fire them off in one glorious

spasm of completion.

I think I will be happy never to write another Trump joke, but as you say,

I fear that the requirement for comedy will never cease.

Yes, well,

what I'll do after this, I'll post a link to

the Trump routine I enjoyed doing most, which I recorded a version of at the Great Debate in Australia a few years ago, and which

the only way that I could, I found that

I could sort of cope with Trumpic news as the lily-livered snowflake stroke someone who has vague hopes for a better planet delete according to your political preference than I am was to print out his brain as a cauliflower and get him to talk about cricket.

I will tweet a link to that.

He has an incredible

highlight of my career.

He has an incredible ability to use half-sentences

to gesture towards meanings that his audience wants to hear.

It's sort of a powerful use of language as a sort of an emotional

sort of hand-waving.

Like everything he says is a Rorschach test, where the picture is a penis holding a gun and a credit card

for a shell company that doesn't exist.

If he'd won this election, that is what the American flag would have become by the end of next year.

Didn't your cauliflower Trump actually have some objectionable views on cricket as well uh i can't write it went through various iterations chris it's been a while since but also i found that was the only way the way that i felt i could deal with trump news was but when i started and i we did it a few times on the bugle as well chopping up trumps but it meant that when when he was on the news i ceased listening to what he was actually saying and was only listening to his words thinking what can i you know how can i chop this up to make it turn it into something else and it made it actually a lot easier i would recommend it highly.

It really

takes the edge off things.

You wouldn't take money from Trump if he wrote it on the money he owed you.

Never a truer word spoken, which admittedly is not a huge accolade on this show.

So it's the afternoon in the UK.

So let's.

So let's, as we're in the middle of our day, let's do the middle of this show in Britain with Ian Wilson's question

about where does Canada fall on Gavin Williamson's big list of countries if the UK government are going to go all in on a trade deal with Gretzky land?

Well, obviously, I mean, this is it's been a great week for Britain with the exciting news.

Obviously, around the world, people are getting excited about vaccines.

And

we've cleared it for use.

And Gavin Williamson,

who is, and I say this with the heaviest of hearts, Education Secretary of this country the man in charge of what

British children are taught in schools said that the reason that we have cleared cleared these these vaccines for use before other countries is because we are a better country.

We are a greater nation than some of these other countries with their stickling for detail and double checking stuff and not having quite as bad a virus year as we've had because they're not as great a country.

We fronted up to this virus.

We refused to let it not infect us.

We took it full on.

And that's what makes that's what makes Britain obviously the greatest greatest country in the history of the entire universe in the head of

Gretzky Land, I think is a good name for Canada.

It's got to sort of start marketing itself a bit more aggressively.

Obviously,

the ice hockey fan is the most powerful demographic in global politics

now.

I mean, Alice, where do you think Australia stands on the list of

greatest countries in the world

behind Britain, obviously?

That's a bit of ice hockey for you.

Well, you know, it depends on your metrics for measuring the greatest.

I mean, have we dealt with the virus way better than you have?

Yes.

Are we

built on stolen land?

Yes.

Did we the other day have 40 degree centigrade temperatures and 90 kilometre winds at the beginning of a spectacular bushfire season.

That's just a prediction, but it's a pretty good prediction.

And then the next day we had hail.

So I feel Australia is certainly one of the most excitingly climactic places.

I don't know where that falls on the list.

Yeah.

But I mean, Britain has been world leading in so many aspects of the fight against the virus.

You know, most incompetent

responses were right up.

They're not necessarily top.

So before you start writing in, American Bugle fans, I'm not claiming we did it worse,

betterly worse

than anyone, but we've been right up there.

Definite

podium finish.

A quick shout out to Cosmo, who says that he, I guess, maybe she, discovered you guys via the game,

the Ubisoft game,

on the bug and wasn't aware of the podcast, but is now a fan because of your in-game roles.

My career is complete.

Hello, Cosmo.

Welcome.

Sorry.

There was a question,

Chris,

I wanted to address from

Guy Cunliffe,

which was this.

How many porcelain milk jugs

would you need to scoop up all the lies Donald Trump has told in office?

And how far would those milk jugs extend if you lined them up next to each other?

Please give the answer in a round trip now this ties in with the kind of calculations the kind of pioneering mathematical calculations we've always done on this show uh dating right back to was it frozen cricket bats full of oil or something um way back um

the uh so anyway i've done some maths for you uh guy um

according to the washington post's um lie counter of trump he went through the 20 000 lie barrier a few months ago so god knows after the election exactly what it is.

But he was averaging over 15 a day, and that's even before the election and the post-election.

And that's only the ones that he's published or said out loud.

So they're not even including all the lies he tells himself, which is way off the scale.

But I'm not sure how they count it.

For example, so is...

A 43-minute video containing an unending shitchunder of lies, does that count as one lie?

Or is each individual lie within that counted separate?

I mean, do you I mean Alice, you're uh obviously a a philosophy uh uh expert.

I mean uh what what do I mean how do you define is a forty three minute barrage of lies?

Do you count that as a lie or what is it?

I mean a

a web of lies, a tissue of lies?

Yeah, I feel like it's like a babushka doll in that a babushka a babushka doll is is the entire thing, but then within it it contains a number of smaller uh babushka dolls, except in the case of Trump's lies, often you'll open the babushka doll, and the babushka doll inside is larger and undermining democracy.

Yes.

So

basically, I don't know if the overlapping intertwining webs of lies multiply together or you do some sort of average smoothing.

But anyway, the point is:

say if we take it, even at just 22,000 lies, even if we assume that he actually slowed down a bit this year, if you converted 22,000 lies into milk, and milk is itself a lie

because it's not a white liquid,

It's a colloid.

It's not what it pretends.

Anyway, the point is, assuming one lie is equivalent to four and a half pints of milk,

which is about the amount of milk you would need to have intravenously injected before you start to doubt whether this particular vaccine is a genuine one and whether this particular doctor is fully qualified or just has a vague memory about vaccination having something to do with cows.

But anyway, so you've got 22,000 lies at 4.5 pints of milk.

As much milk as you drink in the GoMad Protocol, I think.

Something like that.

And so you've got...

Yeah, porcelain milk jugs of 225 mil, about 12 centimeters across.

You're going to need 249,900 milk jugs.

I'm ballparking here.

If you line them up side by side, that's about 30 kilometers or 18 miles, which is the exact distance of the round trip from the White House to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where Trump was treated for COVID.

This goes right to the top, people.

In this year of conspiracies, I think I might have landed on the biggest one.

The Walter Reed Medical Centre, of course, named after Walter Reed, the Surrey and England batsman of the late 19th century.

Let's take this one from Alastair Boynton.

How big and fancy are the Christmas cards that

John Oliver sends over nowadays, who?

And are they signed by his secretary?

Well, I mean, he doesn't really send Christmas cards anymore.

He sends an entire theatre troupe to perform a Christmas greeting for me.

And they set up a stage.

It takes them about three days to get all the scaffolding up.

And then there's about a hundred strong troop plus orchestra in a pit that we have

on the pavement outside our house.

And they just do a little Christmas show lasting about 90 to 120 seconds.

And

it's a lovely gesture.

And it's, you know, because

it shows that

he hasn't forgotten about Britain.

Yes, I particularly enjoy how he always themes it to those sort of bad taste Christmas cards.

Sort of the punchline is something like, I'll have Santa up my chimney, oopsies.

David Hemmings points out that John has a sewage treatment works named after him.

Andy and Alice, which public utility would you like to have named after you guys?

Alice,

I'll let you take this.

I mean,

I would say

this is a feature of Sydney.

So if we have any Australians watching this show, go to bed, it's late.

But also,

all of our public facilities, particularly in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, are have incredible views.

So you have like an electricity substation with like sweeping views of the harbour and

the ocean.

So in terms of my own sort of pleasure, it would be something like that.

But realistically speaking, what I always want is a toilet.

Right.

Well, my father had a urinal named after him at his university.

The full story of how and why that happened is shrouded in 1960s mystery.

But it apparently did.

There was, for a time, a

Zoltzmann Memorial Urinal.

So I mean, it's hard to know.

You know, obviously, that's...

Yeah, in typical John Oliver style, he's taken it one step further.

But I had an entire sewage works named after him.

For me, personally,

I would like to have the public utility I'd like to have would be a levitating bench,

which is like a normal bench, but it doesn't have legs and just hovers at bench height.

But I don't know if the cost of that is probably prohibitive.

A natural segue into some questions on the last post.

This is from Ali.

Ask Alice, who does the last post of Alice Fraser announcement in the intro?

It sounds like John Oliver.

Um does he need to do voiceover work to pay bills in another dimension?

Uh well uh you'd have to ask Alternate Universe Alice about that, but as far as I know the John Oliver in that dimension is a shoes sales is a shoes salesman.

Uh so he may do some voiceover acting uh on the side.

Rolf Paulson wants to know uh possibly wrong dimension as you might have alluded to there Alice but will Christopher be shit out of luck on the first 1st of January, 2021?

That was another band I was in at school as well.

I can't tell if this is an oblique question about the end of the last post

or whether they just want the best for Christopher, as we all do, in the other dimension, such a nice man, as all of his many husbands and wives would say,

just overflowing with love and generosity.

So I hope he will not be shit out of luck.

I feel we have probably wished him sufficient luck to carry him into the new year, at which point he'll have made enough passionate connections with wealthy people to continue to fund his extravagant lifestyle.

I genuinely fantasise about going into that universe, that dimension,

killing Christopher.

taking that wonderful reputation in life that he has and just carrying on as me in that world.

Is that wrong with me?

Yes.

Is it?

Alice, this comes from Scott to you.

Scott.

Alice, for the last post, how much of the jokes about the difference between the worlds do you keep notes on, like New New Zealand or Sweden not being there?

All love the last post.

Well, I can, if anyone wants to know, I can show you my mood board here.

So

if you could read any of that, you'll have some sense of how much planning I do.

Quarantines asks, what is the present location of the

test match ball I rolled on the stage at you, greatest heckle in history, at the Aladdin in Portland in the before times?

Yes, well, this was a show,

what, two or three years ago, and I think I obviously must have mentioned it

on the view.

Yes, you rolled a cricket ball across the stage.

Let me tell you where that cricket ball is.

Was I a giant head in that show?

Yes, I think you were.

Yes.

This is it.

This is the ball from Portland and that's obviously in my desk I've also got this one

and

that one plus a few practice balls.

But this is the one, this is the one, that narrow, narrow old style seam that rolled across the stage.

This is a piece of comedy history, albeit a piece of comedy history of real interest only to me and Quarantin, who tweeted that question.

At this stage of a show, we should probably be talking a little bit more about puns.

All right.

Jeff would like to know with the wealth of material available, why hasn't Andy done a pun run using co-host names?

Oh, that's

that's quite a good thought.

That's a bad thought.

Thanks, Jeff.

Yeah, it is.

I think it's because I can't get the phraseology of it.

I'll see if I can can get a pal to help me out.

Oh no.

Oh dear.

You started it.

I don't know how I started it.

With North Korea, I think.

Tony asks

a big question.

Do you do the pun runs for A, the pleasure of bringing home a particularly complex pun?

B

the spite in doing them, despite the pain they cause to other people, C, j simply the sheer fun of it or D all of the above

well

I mean D is probably the closest because I mean how do you separate A B and C they're you know they're all you know very much

you know three

three of the same side of the same one-sided coin if I may put it in those terms um

but um it's it's yeah it's that and also it's just the f yeah the sensation that that I'm of being alive.

I mean w I mean there is no greater work.

Some people do surfing or

do fly wingsuits.

I think sitting up at three in the morning

in bed writing puns about dogs,

that's my

wingsuiting jump off the Burj Khalifa.

We all have different ways of exciting ourselves.

Well, I feel that people underrate puns as a sort of a frivolous pursuit, but essentially we understand the world, particularly in the modern age, as a process of semantics.

You know, we all live online lives.

We live a life of words.

And puns cast doubt on the very ability of language to touch on meaning.

They open a chasm into the void of

meaninglessness.

And so

they, I feel, are an incredibly dangerous toy to play with.

Well, I mean, I don't see them as a toy.

I see, you know, with great power.

As a weapon.

But with great power comes great responsibility, Chris, and I hope I

use that responsibility greatly.

We're almost for it, audience.

Martin Edwards wants to know, is there any, and I think everyone knows your answer to this, but I'm going to ask it anyway.

Alice might have a different take.

Is there any better food

than a sausage wrapped in bacon served on a bed of pork, dusted with crackling?

It's an even number.

It's fine.

That's all I'm saying.

I would say yes, but I'm not going to tell you about it because it's my secret.

What if we were to offer to serve you sausage wrapped in bacon served on a bed of pork and dusted with crackling in exchange for the secret?

I would say no, thank you.

And finally, guys,

unless something comes in that you guys want to attach on to,

this is from

Progress is the way forward.

Serious question.

If the Flamingos take over the planet and force a Thunderdome situation between a literative and Zultz cricket,

who would win?

Yes, well, I mean, speaking of, I've never won a fight in my entire life.

I mean, I've not lost many, any.

I am a coward, but I'm also a strategist.

So I've managed to avoid

fights.

So,

yeah, I mean, it's not a question of winning.

I'm not saying I would win, I'm saying I would not lose.

I would say, working with Andy Zaltzman, I have learned that he is a gentleman and indeed a kind and generous human being.

And I am a vicious predator waiting to leap on any sign of weakness.

would definitely be me.

Also, I have a twin brother, so I know how to fight.

I have an older brother, so I know how to avoid fights.

Look, you have an older brother, so you know how to take a beating.

Well, thank you.

Thank you to Chris.

Thank you enormously to Alice, as ever, for once again joining us at an anti-social time of

her day.

And of course, thank you to the Bugle merch.

That you can see that, look at that t-shirt.

Bubble hat of the year.

That's given by the International Society of Milliners.

And it's all available on the Bugle web page.

We'll be back next week.

Oh, Alice.

Yes, we also have merchandise for the last post: half a glass of water, merch.

And if you're a small fish in a large basketball court, that's what you want.

You want a half a glass of water.

Also, put a pin on the 20th of December for around this time.

And if we don't figure something out,

then just enjoy yourself during that period for me.

I think, Alice, are you trying to say that we're going to be doing something live on the internet?

Yes, but

I didn't want to promise anything that I can't keep.

No, no, I think you should promise because then that gives us an obligation that we've got to follow.

On the 20th of December,

tune back into Bugle headquarters for a live last post something.

And also, let's let's say this now, so we have to commit to it.

We're gonna do a Bugle Live review of the year in some format online probably around about the 29th or 30th of December.

That's a little tease, isn't that what you're supposed to do commercially, Chris?

You tease people, you don't give them a grateful sale straight away, you just float it.

Every time, Andrew, I just look at us and I think, oh, what cutting-edge business people we are, what entrepreneurs,

what an amazing sense of capitalism.

That's how I can afford this office.

And here now are this week's lies about our Bugle premium-level voluntary subscribers.

To join them or to make any one-off or recurring donation to keep the Bugle free, flourishing and independent, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Lies, please.

Ebony Constant believes that it is a shame that there are not public laboratories in the same way there are public parks and benches.

It would democratise science, says Ebony, which for too long has been the preserve of people who happen to have the right type of glasses and the right type of coat.

Ebony continues, if everyone could just nip down to the local lab to test out some crackpot theory they've come up with, the chances are eventually someone would actually fluke something worthwhile.

Alexander Fleming style.

Matt Dunkley would like to see a revival of the ancient Christmas tradition of donkey interrogation.

I reckon they're hiding a lot more than they led on, says a sceptical Matt, those donkeys.

Physically, they've not got a lot going for them apart from strength and stamina, but they managed to wheedle their way into the highest echelons of some of the top Bible committees, so I think they're probably spies passing on info.

Carl Yearwood points out that there was in fact no known Christmas tradition of donkey interrogation, and that the rumour that Matt had heard that there was came from a misinterpretation of a scene at an amateur dramatic group's Christmas pantomime involving a heated argument in which an older than narratively ideal Prince Charming accused both halves of the pantomime horse of having an affair with each other.

Daniel Kamen thinks that most ancient traditions are probably made up by lazy historians anyway.

Let's face it, says Daniel, if you're a historian, it's quite easy to just make something up.

You then hire a few actors to do those slow motion shots they use in TV documentaries to stop people switching over to watch the football, and then bingo, you're suddenly a world expert in the lost art of hedge-frobbing or the Treaty of Snutterbridge in 1621 or why ancient Sumerian dogs couldn't bark.

I'm not judging anyone, I'm just telling it like like it is, concludes Daniel.

Edward MacDonough does not believe that the moon landings were faked, but does believe that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were fakes.

In fact, says Edward, the two people who did in fact plod onto the moon in fact were in fact the then CIA director Richard M.

Helms and Secretary of State William P.

Rogers, who went to negotiate with any moon people or other aliens in an effort to build alliances against A, the Soviet Union and B the Martians.

And Rory H.J.

believes that someday the United Nations will finally get round to imposing a single global bedtime.

Obviously, says Rory, it would be categorised by age bracket up to the age of 18 and then again from the age of 45 upwards, but it might prove surprisingly popular and clear up a lot of arguments between children and their parents.

And later in life, vice versa.

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.