4166 - Five Year Piggiversary

The Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4166 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world recorded here in London where as I speak the government are rumoured to be about to ban all reporting of the government due to it being a COVID hazard because it has now become impossible to read, hear about or see what the government have just done without shouting, screaming or in some way accidentally rage-flobbing at your television, radio or other news device.

It's best for everyone if no one knows anything.

I am still in the shed which I've now not left for six months spiritually.

I obviously have left it physically, but my soul is in the shed, in the words of the Hitmotown star Gary the Gardner, i believe joining me from their own respective de facto sheds in london it's tiffany stevenson hello tiff hi i'm in my turquoise bedroom yeah trying to find tranquility

paint your way to happiness another motown song i think wasn't it um how uh how how i've not checked the news for the last three minutes are there any kind of lockdown regulations that I've missed.

Everything's changed.

I think people are going to die from confusion, like the episode of Portlandia.

So

we are inches away from that happening, I think.

And joining us from New York City, where I'm sure things are absolutely fine, it's Josh Gondelman.

Hello.

It's such a pleasure to be here in my own home,

which, you know, a shed of the mind.

And

New York City, I don't know if you saw this, has just been labeled by, this is real by the Department of Justice.

New York City has been labeled an anarchist jurisdiction.

That's true.

The Department of Justice has said there's too much anarchy happening in New York,

which I don't know.

Anarchist jurisdiction would have been a great punk album, but CBGB's is closed, and I don't think we hold that title belt anymore.

So how is this anarchist jurisdiction manifesting it?

I mean, aren't those two mutually exclusive words, for instance?

That's true.

You've got like, you could have like an anarchist melee or a or a somewhat disorderly jurisdiction, but I feel like anarchist in jurisdiction.

Yeah,

it's a real jumbo shrimp situation here in Brooklyn.

I wonder what cookbooks they have in the restaurants.

Yeah, the anarchist cookbook where I'm from now is a lot more kale than I remember in the old one.

Just a lot more blistered sashito peppers.

We are recording on Monday, the 21st of September 2020, making it five years to the day since David Cameron's piggate scandal erupted.

The obviously groundless scurrility which claimed that the then Prime Minister had, as a younger man, how to put this delicately on this family show, inserted what I believe young Tories at the time referred to as his Trouser margaret into the oralifice of an endended porkine animalium, or in layman's terms, he fked a dead pig's head.

Allegedly, allegedly,

some might say, of course, no smoke without fire.

I would say, what does smoke mean, bacon?

And history has shown

that in many ways this was David Cameron's greatest legacy, greatest positive legacy to Britain, and

admittedly not from a very long list of positive legacies that David Cameron left behind.

For what we are seeing now played out before us every day is the terrifying reality of having a Prime Minister who has not fed a dead pig's head, but is constantly distracted by wondering what it would be like to do so.

So we should be thankful for what we have

looking back with hindsight.

Cameron himself recently took some time out from his hectic daily schedule of not giving a shit about the Jeroboam of devastation.

He's uncawed all over the United Kingdom before waltzing off into the sunset to play with his f ⁇ ing Lego.

Took some time out from that busy schedule to wade into the bait about the wrongs and varied wrongs of the Johnson Junta's plans to flout international law.

The former Prime Minister and harbinger of avoidable devastation said it would should only be a final resort to break international law.

Interestingly, opted not to go for the definite no-no when it comes to baking illegality into the heart of government.

But then again, he f ⁇ ed a dead pig's head, allegedly.

So

evidently made a decision about the elasticity of moral boundaries some time ago.

I wonder, going back just a second, if breaking international law is last resort, what number resort is having sex with a dead pig's head allegedly?

Is it the penultimate resort?

Is it the anti-penultimate resort?

Is it some...

Is it before that?

Is it like fourth resort?

F a dead pig?

I think the resort is Mar-a-Lago.

there actually there's a living pig there who

yeah

a living pig there who allegedly loves to

i mean in terms of last resort aside from it being where david cameron is currently on holiday you you do have to ask you know has the government is it really a last resort has this government really tried everything else to avoid breaking the treaty to me their approach is more like putting your eight-year-old son in an old people's home and saying we have to accept it's best for everyone

as always a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin this week a bugle merch section uh we have expanded our minimalist range of belated uh merchandise uh stroke um

clothereal propaganda um and uh you can now uh find the expanded slightly expanded range by going to thebuglepodcast.com and clicking the merch button.

There, you will find the option to buy socks.

And what an item of clothing the sock is, the eco-friendly rubbish sack for your almost certainly unpleasant feet.

Let's face it, the human foot is a fing design disaster from an aesthetic point of view, which is why human civilization wasted no time in

inventing the sock, which has really reached its apotheosis with the Bugle socks available in orange and non-orange varieties and in one size Chris is that right currently just just the one size no you can be anywhere between size seven and eleven and it will fit you okay what about those well if if if your foot is below the required uh foot size for a bugle sock um

just you know just cake it in clay until it's uh suitably big

You could also buy the t-shirt because torsos are meant to be covered.

The badge, the bugle badge, in case all humanity is suddenly vaporized and you want the aliens who discover and recolonise the Earth to know that you are a bugle fan.

So try our new Armageddon-proof badge.

There are stickers which come in

multi-packs of how many stickers, Chris?

More than one, less than three.

Oh, right, okay.

In that kind of ballpark.

I actually can't remember.

It's so long ago.

You know, this has been an ongoing conversation for years.

Yeah, yeah.

It's been a while.

Anyway, so you can stick it it to anything,

literally, legally.

I believe you have dispensation to stick it on anything or anyone.

Or if you don't fancy stickers,

badges, t-shirts and socks, do you have a head?

Then why not try a bugle cap?

Why not protect your head from

A, the unwanted light of truth and or the sun with the peak of the cap?

And also it comes absolutely free with the rest of a cap sewn on specially to provide emergency unruly hair restraint, stroppy, god-mollifying paint coverage, or an on-the-spot golfer impersonation accessory.

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more presents than non-Bugle Christmas jumper wearers.

No refunds if your government cancels Christmas, which does now look increasingly likely.

The Bugle Christmas Jumper has been tested in laboratories and also works just as well on over 40 other religious festivals and has a half-life of 23 Christmases, meaning it will still just about be usable in the year 2043.

So go to thebuglepodcast.com, click the merch button and you can now go out clothed head to toe in Bugle merch, albeit with a bit of an alarming gap between the hem of your t-shirt, stroke Christmas jumper and the top of your socks.

So please use the stickers on whatever exposed parts of your anatomy most need them and do be very careful with the badge pin.

That's go to thebuglepodcast.com and click merch.

I gave it a hard sell, Chris.

It was good.

I'm only slightly regretting not ordering pants with your face on it now.

Top story now, badly timed deaths news.

And

it's been, well, I mean, I'm a big fan of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, what she's done in her life, what she means to America.

But I have to quibble in the strongest possible terms with when she chose to allow herself to shuffle off this mortal coil.

Josh, I mean,

was six more weeks really too much to ask from this titanic figure of American life.

Why the f did it have to be now?

I, you know,

it's a tough time.

It's people,

she meant so much.

She's done so much good.

People have been pointing out that her record was not flawless, which I understand, but you can hold those two ideas together, right?

That's also true of the band Weezer.

And I'm still, you know, I still remember the good times.

I do.

There's been too few people this week, Josh, who have made that link.

That's the link between

Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Weezer.

And I think, thank you for bringing that, you know, tying it all together, giving it to you.

There's one point of commonality.

It's a slender Benn diagram, but I threaded the needle.

This is what I think.

It's a really bad time for her to die.

Again, I think it was a real error in judgment,

as Andy intimated.

But I think in her dying days, she said that her last wish was that she not be replaced until after the presidential election, which I also hope.

But the problem is, it is up to Mitch McConnell to grant that wish.

And let's just say if the Make-A-Wish Foundation were the Mitch-A-Wish Foundation, he would respond to most dying children by laughing in their faces and bragging about how much revenue their medical treatment generates for health insurance companies.

So I don't think there's a lot of chance that this wish will be granted.

So basically, there's six weeks to go until the presidential election.

And so this has kicked off an unseemly race to

replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg and essentially skew American democracy and justice by speed appointing her successor in an attempt to handmade an American society back to what myopic lunatics think was the time that it was, that it was, that it was great.

I mean, it's quite hard for us outsiders to understand,

Josh,

how this system works.

It is kind of a unique system with a lot of intricate rules that people outside it aren't, you know, just, it's kind of opaque.

This is, I will say, how I feel when you talk about cricket.

But it is.

But at least, at least the difference is, Josh, that cricket cricket is a game that does not shape and influence the lives of generations of people to come.

I mean, it is the greatest thing ever invented by humanity, but it doesn't have quite the same implications as

sticking around with the Supreme Court.

Yes.

So what happens is the president will nominate a judge, and then

the head of the Senate, who's at this point, the Senate majority, Mitch McConnell, will call hearings.

We'll hear about this judge.

We'll hear how horrible they are.

Remember Brett Kavanaugh, he cried remembering weightlifting in high school.

He was accused of sexual misconduct.

And then the Republican senators will go, that's our guy.

And

though it seems like in a fit of what they would pretend is progress, they might say, that's our horrible lady this time.

So

that's a new step forward for them is acknowledging that women can also put forth their destructive conservative agenda.

And I guess that's equality.

So, Toby Turtle, which is what I like to call Mitch McConnell, because I do think he looks a bit like the character from Robin Hood.

I don't know if you remember him.

He said, four years ago, it would be disgraceful and unprecedented to push through the Democratic nominee at the time.

But now,

when it suits the Republicans, Republicans has appeared to do a complete 180.

And how do you shame shame-free people?

Trump was at a rally and they were chanting, fill that seat.

And it's weird to me that pro-lifers are so quick to celebrate death

and how quickly they can.

Because Trump said it's going to be a woman, right?

But we know that it's not just going to be any woman.

It'll be a tub-thumping, womb-bothering, God-fearing, homophobic woman, probably, most likely, right?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I guess on that political Tinder,

those are the attributes that are going to be be

swiped right on.

Because I think that the big the big kind of what I from what I'm seeing from the outside and this because I'm a woman, so you can tell me if I'm wrong, Josh, is that the big

the big

the the big push here is going to be to overturn Roe versus Wade because a lot of the Republicans think that it was a tennis match.

So there's a bit of confusion there.

But yeah, so that that can be overturned and something

one of their health, like the American, the Affordable Health Care Act as well.

Is that correct?

Right.

Yes.

So

I think the

one thing about the Republican Party is that, you know, they want to take away all these health protections, the scant few that we have in this country, proving that they don't also, they don't only want a smaller government, they also want fewer citizens.

That's something that they're moving towards, just a smaller overall population.

Right, Right.

And there's a, is there a strong, is it Mike Caldry?

I think I saw him tweeting, like, goodbye, Roe versus Wade.

Um, and then the scientific American came out to endorse Biden, having never endorsed uh anyone before.

So,

do we think that it's generally like a thing that's going to help the Democrats?

I feel like it will, but I could be completely wrong.

It's hard to say because I think

the Democrats are operating from a place of extreme terror, which I think is a good motivator, right?

That is, it's when people are terrified, that's when they run the fastest.

That's when they scream the loudest.

So I do think it is a powerful motivator.

But

the Republicans are now working from just,

I guess, a position of being fully...

tumescent and horny for nihilism, which I think is also just when you can f ⁇ the whole void, that is a proper motivator.

Just, ah, I'm going to fill up that void with my nihilism.

That's how Nietzsche talked dirty, by the way.

God knows what his safe word was.

I feel like when you're a nihilist, you don't believe in safe words.

If you die, you die.

But it does seem odd to sort of trust the future of justice for the next decades to a single president.

I guess it might have made just about a smidgen of sense back in the long distant past when you could reasonably expect the president to have a better than 50% chance of not being a psychotic bellend.

But those days are sadly gone.

And like I said, it's difficult to understand as an outsider.

Albit we in Britain are more and more trying to emulate and even at times surpass the craven twattery of our of you, our former colonial colleagues in America.

But basically all the ways America loves to undermine itself democratically, whether it's your pea-brained electoral system, the de facto theoretical legalization of all crime, that is the presidential pardon, the gangrenous plutocracy, the rancid corporate parasitism, or whatever bogus validations are wheeled out to justify everything.

The appointment of Supreme Court justices seems to be right up there with the most politically corrosive.

I mean, is it time for America to just...

get its constitution, stick it through a shredder and start with a blank sheet of paper and say, I reckon we can have another crack at this.

Look, I certainly think

we've got to do some amending.

I don't know if I trust the people in charge.

They might just shred it and leave it shredded.

That's, I mean, Donald Trump's businesses do seem like they know their way around a paper shredder.

Right.

That's the whole.

When you tell Donald Trump, shred the papers, he says, how small?

He's not, yeah, you want him to shred the Constitution?

He'll shred it, he'll burn it, he'll find some way to cover up that it ever happened.

But I do, the Supreme Court is, there are so many, the Senate, the Supreme Court, kind of weirdly undemocratic institutions.

Having nine people decide your fate forever would be like appointing a Boston Red Sox for life and just having them play every game, no matter how decrepit and close to death they are, until they decide that they want to retire.

And that is a terrifying proposition, even as bad as the Red Sox have been in this COVID-truncated season.

So there's six weeks to go in one of the all-time classic Septuagenarian on Septuaginarian clashes,

reminiscent of some of the classic Politburo karaoke nights back in the late Brezhnev era.

I mean,

what's your expectation at this stage, Josh?

I mean, Biden clearly is...

He's not the ideal candidate, but then much of America would gladly take an uncontrollably shitting dog running on a ticket with an incontinent penguin terrapin donkey crossbreed as its VP nomination.

So how's it going to pan out, do you think?

Oh, I hesitate to make any

predictions because Donald Trump is,

when you say a shitting dog, he's just the shit, right?

You don't even get the benefit of the dog, Donald Trump.

It's just, he's kind of diarrhea animated to life.

And Joe Biden, his campaign is kind of like a Floyd Mayweather type campaign in that he's mostly playing defense, he's not taking a lot of big swings, and he's been accused of misconduct by numerous women.

So like, it's not a great situation,

but I, that,

you know, if I had to bet

if I, if I were a, if I were a betting man,

I would prefer to be the house in this situation and just take the bets no matter what.

But as a human being with skin in the game, again, I, um, I'll say my prediction is the fastest running, the loudest screaming that we've seen in a long time.

And the role of the Christian right is continually baffling in the Trump era.

I've reached the stage where I think that if Jesus Christ himself were to make his long-awaited comeback and announce that he was standing for the Democrats, the Christian right would still not only back Trump, but also fund his campaign attack adverts accusing Jesus of being soft on welfare.

Yeah, just soft on crime, kind of a socialist

from the Middle East.

That's a dog whistle, right?

They would go hard anti-Jesus.

I think there is probably a section of the Christian right who is less excited for the return of Christ than Kid Rock's next come back album.

So

it's a tough set of circumstances.

Kid Rock was briefly Jesus's nickname, of course, after

the

famous escape scene.

In other American news, America has run out of names for all the hurricanes that are pounding it at the moment.

They've gone through the whole

English alphabet and have now been reduced to using letters from the Greek alphabet as well to name the hurricanes.

I mean, the way climate change is going...

or

and the way climate change is going clearly English and Greek alphabets won't be enough to cover an entire year of storms soon.

You can even throw in the Hebrew alphabet and the Russian.

The Russian one, pay attention, people.

Even that won't be enough.

We'll soon be digging out the Egyptian hieroglyphs before too long.

I reckon by 2037, tropical storm seated man holding stick will be battering Louisiana.

Josh, it's, I mean, you know, has Trump yet suggested this is preemptive divine vengeance for

possibly electing Joe Biden as president?

Oh, he well, he did say that if Joe Biden Biden is elected, there will be no God.

So I think that

covers this.

That's pretty true.

It is a rough sign for the environment, right, that we're running out of names for the tropical storms.

That's a bad one.

I think we should start naming them after, because we just give them first names, right?

Hurricane, Steve.

Now we should name them after specific people who don't believe that climate change is a problem.

Like Hurricane Ted Cruz is hammering the Gulf Coast, ruining everything.

That hurricane, a real piece of shit who doesn't care whether you live or die.

Just to really drive the point home.

You can't, now they've moved on to the Greek alphabet.

You can't help making assumptions about storms alpha and beta, though.

Storm alpha punching its way through the countryside on testosterone replacement, listening to Joe Rogan podcast, and

Storm Beta sipping a latte, casually scrolling through the NPR's website.

But, you know, I've said it before.

America, a lot of times, in terms of weather, feels like the hell mouse from from Buffy and the apocalypse is emanating right from it.

How could you still be denying climate change when, was it in Silicon Valley?

They had like record temperatures.

And you think, God, if you're a climate change denier, all those old white Republican farts, welcome to the heat wave that's going to melt you like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

This is so strange to me, too, that they say they're running out of names.

I do think that that's a little like, okay.

I live in Brooklyn.

I've seen how people name their children children these days.

So, yes, if we went exactly proportionally, there would be a lot of hurricane Atticuses that would be in vogue.

But people get creative.

We could have a Hurricane Jamelin, a Hurricane Figley, a Hurricane Wes Anderson movie, all one word.

I think it's weird that we give them human names at all because it just sounds like they're moody friends, right?

Like Tropical Storm Eric has been upgraded to a class three.

And it's like, well, why?

He says, quote, oh, you should know why.

And if you don't, there's nothing to talk about.

The female names always make it sound as if the storm is pre-menstrual.

Oh, it's hurricane season with tropical storm Beth.

Special relationship news now, and Britain has taken the arguably belated step of stripping Harvey Weinstein, the

convicted rapist and sex offender, of his CBE honour

this week.

That is this week.

That is not, they didn't strip it when he was convicted or when mountains of accusations happened against him over recent.

This week,

it took until this week for him to no longer be officially a commander of the order of the British Empire.

Now, aside from the obvious question of what took so fucking long, there are other questions that arise, such as how did he get a

in the first place uh other than just being essentially rich and famous why do we have cbe's when the e in cbe ceased to exist a significantly long time ago and also seriously what took so

long

There's a lot of resting predator face in the entertainment industry.

And I feel like we're going to be seeing more and more of these happening.

I think if the Queen is going to remove it, she should remove it personally, same as how she gives it personally so she's gonna i know he's not in rikers island now i know he's moved somewhere else uh but i think she should turn up at the prison uh with a sword or preferably a shiv and take it away from him then she should cut his nose chinatown style

like that's how i think it should it should happen but i mean there's always we we we didn't take it away from savil He died and everyone went, there's no point because it's like gone now.

And you're like, well, he still gets to have that next to his name.

There's always a debate every year over like who should get the honours.

And in 2016, this just goes to show the double standard.

Woman's Zone magazine ran a survey debating whether Victoria Beckham suitable OBE material, even though David had one and no one questioned giving David Beckham an OBE.

So this is, I can just let me just give you a list of who they have given them to.

They gave one to Saville, they gave one to Rolf Harris, they gave one to Stuart Hall, they gave one to Ceaușescu, one to Mussolini, and one to Mugabe.

So, all I'm saying is, give more of them to women because they're statistically less likely to be dictators or sex offenders.

Always crunching the numbers, Tiff.

Crunching the numbers.

This is where positive discrimination should come into play.

That is your failsafe, Lizzie.

You're welcome.

Just hand them out to the women.

Also, honours are pointless and dog shit.

I think,

Andy, you're kind of beating up on this institution for

taking so long to strip Harvey Weinstein of this honor.

But I'm sure in 50 years, American conservatives will put up a statue of Harvey Weinstein and then

insist that if you take it down, you're ignoring history and want to erase it.

So

that is kind of their MO.

I think that might be even bleaker than the previous bleak gag you did there, Josh.

COVID news now, Pretty Patel, Home Secretary, despite overwhelming evidence that she shouldn't be Home Secretary, has attempted to ban the ancient British tradition of mingling.

Mingling.

She's trying to ban mingling and encourage people to snitch on neighbours who mingle.

I mean, this year has, as we keep saying, generated sentences that you never anticipated would have to be said.

I mean, quite aside from Pretty Patel, the Home Secretary, which is a collection of five words that should never occur without an awful number of parentheses between them and ideally about a book full of other words.

I mean, there's no real legal basis.

In fact, Elliard Grivet, the Minister for Public Confusion and Fear, hailed Patel's intervention as, quote, impressively ill-informed and legally baseless.

Further signs that this government is committed to delivering on its election promises to avoid competence, good sense, and respect for the law at all times.

And I mean, but the snitching thing is,

I mean, are you,

I'm not sure we're naturally a nation of

snitches.

The government itself has proved that, you know, it doesn't really like the idea of being snitched on by, for example, a parliamentary investigation into the influence of Russia on British politics.

Not like that kind of snitching.

And it's led to this, it's led to this bizarre situation where if your neighbours gather a cabal of five devil-worshipping necromancers to sacrifice a supermarket trolley full of puppies.

That's fine, but seven nuns trying to rescue an injured puffin from a ledge that is now illegal.

Oh, yes, the great puffin problem of 2020.

It's not been discussed enough.

Um, mingling is banned.

How are we going to make cocktails, guys?

Guys,

it does feel medieval.

You might as well bring back the scolds bridal.

That's what it's kind of like.

Don't say that out loud, Tiff.

They'll do it.

I don't know if Josh knows what the scolds bridle is, but it was originally brought in by Scottish clergy for women who spoke too much and gossiped.

And you would have to walk around and have this piece of iron in your mouth and across your face and maybe a bell ringing,

like the shame bell again.

Yeah, yeah.

So Pretty Patel, or to use her correct name, Dolores Umbridge,

said if she saw two families like talking to each other and there were more than six people, she would report them.

And Lord Scriven said in the House of Lords, for the first time since the 1300s, mingling is an offence under English law.

And the Home Secretary confirmed if she saw two families of four on the street and stopped to say, hello, how are you?

They would be mingling and carrying out an offence.

Now, to be fair, to talk to strangers has been an offence in London for a very long time.

So I think it's going to be mainly northerners who will suffer the most for actually trying to greet people they don't know.

But I think Londoners are going to be okay.

But this is after, we have to bear in mind, this is after

we now can't mingle.

We've got this rule of six.

This is after being actively encouraged into this eat out to help out scheme, which involves mingling with 20 or 30 people in a restaurant, but yet you can't meet your entire family.

And I have a sort of sub-like a small conspiracy theory on the eat out to help out that is just it's it's primarily a publicity campaign for pizza express so that everyone will forget it's prince andrew's favorite restaurant

And the snitching is

so pathetic to snitch on someone for mingling.

Like, imagine that call, even.

Like, hello, yes, I've seen a mingling in progress.

It started out as a casual, how do you do, but it's definitely shifted to a mingle.

And I'm worried if no one intervenes, some canoodling might break out.

The worst part for me is that people who aren't in relationships now legally have to say that they're single and ready to stay that way for a depressingly long time.

Grouping your neighbours is horrible.

Stitches get stitches.

Impending apocalypse preparation news now.

And Tiff,

as

the Bugle co-hosts voted most likely to survive and thrive in the aftermath of a global apocalypse, you're keeping an eye on how we should all be preparing ourselves for the inevitable.

What's the latest news from the world of?

In the world of prepping, wandsworth is uh is is big news at the moment uh because wandsworth a south london borough just up the road actually from where i live yeah pretty pretty near to you i'm a north london i'm a north london person so technically at war with south london but let's uh let's not dig too much into that now uh but wandsworth council um have announced uh to anyone living in wandsworth that they should be preparing a grab bag a grab and go bag so they did a tweet tweet saying a hashtag grab bag is a bag full of emergency items in case you need to flee your home immediately without time to pack, which raised the question, what a Wandsworth Council know

that everybody else doesn't.

Some of the items suggested for the bag include a first aid kit, batteries, a whistle, and a torch.

So, a bit like if you're in a plane crash, you know, those helpful items.

And which is sort of the opposite of what we're being told, which is there's a pandemic, we need to shelter in place.

And Wandsworth are saying, listen, Wandsworth Apocalypse on the cards, get yourself a grab and go bag.

I was surprised when I saw this news.

I was like, is Brexit going so bad?

People are being told to take it into their own hands individually.

Just like, get ready to go.

We're leaving.

It is going up that way.

It is kind of like, I don't know, like being in Park Slope.

So you could be in like Williamsburg and not get it.

But Park Slope have been told So just

so that's how like narrow this like set of people are.

So it's just like one borough to another.

So I don't know why Streatham, Andy's neck of the woods haven't been informed of the same possible emergence.

I kind of I think that's kind of nice though to in such a global

you know corporatized world that we're now doing like small batch locally sourced apocalypes.

I mean obviously, you've got to look at the just the bull facts of it and the likely occasions when you need to flee your home immediately without time to pack.

Obviously, threat one,

volcano.

And

in Wandsworth, the threat of a volcano is, well, minimal.

There have been no volcanic eruptions recorded there since records began in, well, let's make up a year here, 1274.

No volcanoes ever spotted in Wandsworth or indeed surrounding boroughs such as Lambeth, of which Streatham is a part or Merton.

any volcanic eruption in Hounslow, that would have no great home-fleeing threat to Wandsworth.

I think you've got time to get out there.

So I don't really see, you know, there's not enough of a volcano.

I mean,

volcano threat comes in at less than the local baby shop running out of luxury Jane Austen-themed muslin cloths.

Earthquake, I mean, despite recent tremors in Britain, quite literally rocking the nation to its foundations, albeit completely imperceptibly.

The strongest earthquake registered in Wandsworth in the last 1,500 years was the tremor of 974 AD, described by the 13th century historian Roger of Wendover as being Licken in untu a flatula frim in Trapt Windig autwuther hauses our soil.

The threat of a land invasion in Wandsworth, again minimal.

Any assailant force taking the old Roman route up from the Kent coast likely to have been delayed by coming through Bromley and Lewisham first to get towards central London, so it's likely to have given up due to there being no discernible signs of the existence of a civilisation worth conquering.

Any invading force coming from the south west, likely to get distracted by tourist attractions such as Stonehenge when making its way up the A303 towards London and also likely to stop for lunch or coffee in leafy Richmond.

So I just don't see

a zombie apocalypse is moderately likely in Wandsworth, but unlikely to make a significant alteration to lifestyle in the Covid era.

And

alien invasion, I mean, to be honest, if extraterrestrials turn up and demand to be taken to our leaders, they're unlikely to be to be fobbed off with Wandsworth Borough Council, to be honest.

Even if they've already headed south from Westminster after being introduced to our leaders there and saying, seriously, you expect us to believe that shit?

Leaders.

We said leaders.

Sorry if you people don't speak your own language, but that means people who do some leading, Capish.

Sport now and COVID, the interfering little shit that it is, has forced sport to go crowdless or sparsely befanned, but sports have managed to find ways to stay alive.

None more or less so than the World Refusal Championships, which takes place this week

in Berlin after 12 other cities declined to host a final.

It's a USA versus South Africa final and Team USA, or as their fans like to call them, Team USNAE, led again by skipper Ordeal Trousel Winch of the Boston Vetos.

They're going to lead off in the mixed doubles rebuff with the cracked pairing of Panisha Belle Lequillic and and Delicious Wabsbury.

Some long-standing simmering resentment between those two should help them along the way as they take on the block box star pairing of Skrank van der Hellhausen and Bickiana Fromage, who've not been seeing eye to eye for close to a decade at the highest level now.

In the singles, Trausell Winch and Johane Twelfthyard could have their work cut out as they try to out demure, respectively, Druckies Loudshit and Van Bridget Coxiel.

OTW of course coming off a disappointing quarterfinal loss at last week's US Open when he lost out to Russia's Yevgivenika Kasplashnikov after carelessly accepting a piece of chewing gum from his opponent at a change of ends.

The final is set to end with a long-awaited head-to-head reject-off between America's OK Billiamson from the New York Knicks and Bloemfontein snubbers veteran Ken Peenard, who famously won the Josephine Trophy for South Africa way back in 2008 by declining to lift a wheelbarrow full of bricks off the trapped shins of Francis de Moulien Partouche, who, of course, received a lifetime ban for accepting medical assistance during that sensational climax.

Exclusive coverage live on the bugle for the rest of time.

Well, that concludes the bugle for

this week.

Tiff is now modelling for us on the video called the Bugle Voluntary Subscribers exclusive face mask.

Look, I sound exactly the same.

But does actually filter out up to 23% of all facts from the mouth of the wearer.

So, I mean, to be honest, I never thought we'd be making face masks as merch.

But, you know, if the world's going to be shit, we might as well brand it with some bugle logos.

Given that we have, as part of the Bugle, the registered website, f dungeons.com, I'm surprised you're surprised.

Josh, have you got any forthcoming shows or other projects you'd like to tell our listeners about?

Oh, my gosh, I miss shows so much.

I do have my own podcast called Make My Day.

It's a comedy game show where there's only one contestant every week, so they're guaranteed to win.

So it's a very stress-free game show experience.

That is the kind of attitude that is making our children soft.

They have to be losers, Josh.

You know nothing about the world.

I'm the loser.

Tiff,

any shows coming up?

One tomorrow night at the Battersea Art Centre, Tuesday night, or it could be tonight.

Let's just say Tuesday, Battersea Art Centre.

That is an outdoor show.

And I have a couple more in, but who knows how long they'll keep going for.

So the best thing to do is join me on a Monday night for Old Rope on Instagram where they can see you.

And there's, in fact, a whole host of the

buglers pop on from time to time.

So yeah, I'm there every Monday, 9

Join us next week for the latest on this idiotic planet.

In the meantime, to help cocoon you from truth, here are some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers.

To join them, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button after buying all the merch.

Lewis, or should that be Louis Strong, thinks that humans undergoing a midlife crisis might do well to consider using cocoons.

Why not learn from nature?

asks Louis Stroke Louis.

When caterpillars can't be asked with caterpillaring anymore, they make a proper change.

There's clearly something about being inside a cocoon that works better as a life-transforming incentive than getting hammered in a bar, buying a flashy new car, getting divorced or jacking everything in and setting up as a freelance Macrame consultant.

Charlie Pearson, however, points out that butterflies are just the kind of short-lived flashy exhibitionists of which the world already has an undeniable surfeit.

Seriously, Seriously, blasts Charlie.

They look nice and flitter about, but what do they actually achieve?

Far from learning from them, we should be mercilessly lampooning these butterflies until they buck their ideas up.

They are the exact equivalent of buying that flashy new car, only they wrap it round a tree within two weeks so it can't ever be driven again.

Give me a moth any day.

At least they get stuff done, even if it is only eating through my bloody woolly jumpers.

On the subject of people and things changing shape, Sean DiFusco doesn't think the Terminator films set a particularly positive example for the world.

Why this obsession with Terminating People and Things?

asks a befuddled Sean.

Why not give them a chance to learn and improve?

If that film had been called The Hiatus Ata instead of the Terminator and just given people and things a bit of a break to reassess, the world would be in a much better state today.

Stuart Davis thinks it is a shame that they gave up on the Bayer Tapestry after the Battle of Hastings.

They should have kept it going for the rest of British history, argues Stuart.

I have calculated that by now it would be long enough to line every single mile of motorway in the UK, giving passengers on long car journeys something interesting and educational to look at when stuck in traffic jams.

Carl Whitman has also worked out that if this tapestry project had been undertaken and you drove past the first half of the 16th century section at more than 75 miles an hour, it would look like a flickbook animation of Henry VIII playing Keepe-uppie with Anne Boleyn's noggin, whilst the 1920s would look like Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald doing a very erotic Charleston with each other.

Stuart Beaumont.

Stuart Beaumont has worked out that it no longer matters what you say as long as you say it seriously enough and claim you are quoting someone famous.

Stuart has won arguments with the concluding line, if I may quote the great Simone de Beauvoir, better be a poor woman with a functioning pogo stick than a rich man in a burning helicopter.

And also by saying, as Niccolò Machiavelli himself famously wrote, a dead pigeon craps not on a well-parked car.

Here endeth the 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.