4165: Below the Belt

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4165 of the Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world, with me, Andy Zaltzmann, coming to you live from Old Trafford Cricket Ground in Manchester, where I'm in the final few days of my unexpectedly cricketous summer.

If you want to hear what a cricket ground sounds like at nine o'clock in the morning when nothing's going on and I've got the windows shut, this is it.

Pretty special I think you'll agree.

Joining me from Sydney, Australia, it's the zero-time Olympic 15-metre human catapult individual gold medalist Alice Fraser.

Hello Andy, hello buglers, I hope you're all well there.

I am well here except there appears to be a rescue helicopter going on quite close by, so it's nothing that makes you feel weller than knowing that other people nearby are doing really badly.

That's basically what powers international politics, essentially, isn't it?

Diplomacy.

You're living a dream.

It's rage inflation.

And joining us also from London.

It's the man who has never once claimed that he once saved the life of an injured leopard cub by putting on a leopard print leotard and sleeping with the stricken young cat in a tree and feeding it pastrami bagels until its mother returned from a working holiday in the Serengeti.

Nishkumar!

Hello, Andy, hello, Alice, hello, buglers.

Andy, a couple of weeks ago, I caught some more flack in sections of the British press for lacking impartiality in my comedy.

So, in the spirit of impartiality, I will say it's nice to see you both, and also it isn't,

you can both and you can both go f yourselves

we learn this life skills we pick up

I am absolutely fascinated by the fact that you are currently living out what I assume is the plot of a short story you wrote when you were 11 years old about a boy who has to live in a cricket ground

yes

I don't know what kind of Faustian pack with the devil that I've made that is going to rebound on me horrifically at some point in the future.

I'll be honest, Andy, I know exactly what Faustian packed.

I think eight months ago, you in some sort of weird back alley market stall were given a monkey paw and made a wish that you would be able to live in a cricket ground.

The monkey paw's finger curled, someone fked a bat in China, and now here we are.

You didn't think the parameters through, Andy.

Just because you could doesn't mean that you should.

I mean, that's not the most outlandish theory on the origins of COVID that the world has yet heard.

So

we are recording on the 14th of September 2020.

As always, a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week, an awards section after Donald Trump this week claimed to have won the Bay of Pigs Award, a claim undercut only by the fact that the award does not exist, we look at other famous people in history who could feasibly have won awards had those awards actually existed, including Shakespeare's Bubony's Plague Remedies Verbal Leviathan of the Year award, Beethoven's Eurovision Sonata Contest victory, George Washington picking up the Hampston-Dillard-Felbury Divorce Lawyers Splitter of the Month gong, and Mary Curie winning Nominative Determinism Monthly's Woman of the Decade Prize, two out of two for the happily wedded medical pioneer.

Yes, the 14th of September 2020 and there are no relevant anniversaries whatsoever this week.

None at all.

Things may have happened on this date in history but I'm not going to tell you what they are this week Buglers, by which I mean it's 9 a.m.

I'm not used to recording this early and I woke up slightly late.

It's good to share, be honest.

It's all right for you, Alec.

What time is it in Australia?

About six in the evening?

You've had the whole day.

Six in the evening here, yeah, I've had the whole day, except that I've just recorded four episodes episodes of a podcast.

Well, I was up.

I'd tell you which podcast it was, but part of the conceit of the podcast is that it's daily and not recorded in batches.

Well, keep that very much under your hat.

Well, of course, I was busy until relatively late last night watching Australia massively choke a one-day international cricket match to the amusement of everyone in Old Trafford.

And by everyone, I mean about 30 people who are allowed in the ground this year.

But I'm sure, had there been a full crowd of English cricket fans in, they would have dealt with it with the good-humoured

dignity, fair-mindedness, and equanimity that

we generally deal with cricketing victories over Australia.

Well, the thing is, Andy, as I've said to previous lovers in the past, you know, Australians need an audience.

It was a sex joke for me, a non-sexy comedian.

That's right, family show.

Family.

9.15am, Alice.

Mortal points.

This is a fing family show recorded in the cing morning.

Top story this week.

Britain fights the law.

And the law is a bit surprised and will probably win.

This is

been an interesting week,

Niche, for Britain's relationship with international law.

The government here has basically said that it will break international law in order to basically change

the Brexit withdrawal agreement that it had negotiated and signed and sold to the public in the general election just months ago.

And now they say that it needs to be broken because, you know, Brexit.

And I think we've learned, I guess, you know, Boris Johnson does respect the law, albeit in the same way that Ronald MacDonald respects cows as something to be destroyed and reshaped to his own benefit, enabling him to live his dream of being a very public clown.

It's

truly uncanny.

I mean, Nish is our Britain Breaking Global Laws correspondent.

You must have been

very excited by this story.

Yeah, listen, it turns out that Boris Johnson has the same respect for international law as he did for his marriage vows.

He'll say anything just to keep the process moving but in six months time the man is going to be crop spraying jism across the home counties like a biplane.

And it'll be on the front page who exactly he's faith to fuck people and it's going to be pretty common knowledge.

But in order to keep things moving along, he will agree to absolutely anything.

So yes, last week, last Tuesday,

the government announced that they were going to table a bill to amend the Brexit deal.

The announcement was leaked to the press and then formally made by Brandon Lewis

who is the winner of the WHO?

Oh, him award for political obscurity.

He's the Northern Ireland Secretary who admitted that the bill that the government's tabling would go against the Withdrawal Treaty, thus breaking international law.

But he said that we would do it in a specific and limited way.

And that is how laws have always been interpreted, Andy.

If only Jack the Ripper had had the foresight of the Conservative government to break laws in a limited and specific way and had someone sit him down and say, look, Jack, just try and keep it under three.

And if you're going to do it, do it with something weird, like an old sock or a VHS copy of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

I mean, I sort of understand the logic for Boris Johnson because, you know, he needs a bit of a distraction.

He's been conducting the orchestra of government very much like Herbert von Carrion with the Berlin Philharmonic, only instead of Herbert von Carrian, it's a giant squid on a bucking bronco in a wind tunnel with a load of batons in its tentacles.

And instead of the Berlin Philharmonic, it's a bunch of incompetent self-serving half-wits.

And instead of their musical instruments, it's the future of the United Kingdom.

And instead of sheep music, it's international law.

And instead of trying to read that sheet music, they're ripping it up, pissing on it, and trying to set it on fire.

That's one for any classical music fans out there.

But I mean, the point is, he's not exactly been nailing it as Prime Minister.

Or he's been nailing it, but only in the way that the Roman centurion nailed it.

The one,

Septimus Floridius Craiba, I think his name was the lad who was given a cross, a hammer, some nails, a Jesus, and a set of Ikea-style instructions all those Easters ago, and ended up with himself banged to the cross saying,

I'm sure that's what the picture said.

Maybe I needed to use the Allen key instead.

Whilst a slightly cranky Jesus said, Mate, can you get the f down?

I'll need this for my brand.

So we needed a distraction.

So what better than a good old-fashioned bit of international law flouting?

We've all done it.

We've all done it.

We've all done it.

I mean, the problem with breaking international law is that the international legal agreements are all sort of done on good faith and handshake agreements and a general sort of, I mean, what we really need in this situation is to invent an enforcement mechanism.

I think we need a Judge Dredd-type law enforcement system for the UN to deploy, along with, of of course, their general disapproving shaking heads and

at various volumes that is their current arsenal of tools in the war against doing the wrong thing.

What we need is to take some of those Elon Musk pig chips and put them in the brains of police officers and get like a proper Judge Dredd international policeman scenario that can just parachute in and kick Boris Johnson the head for being an asshole.

And also to be balanced, guys, you've been very partial in this podcast.

For balance, the government is good and crime is fine.

I mean, I guess it's inevitable with all these face masks knocking around society that people are going to start behaving like absolute bandits.

And essentially, it's what's working.

I really

got caught out by the use of the word bandit there.

Got a bit of 18th century on that, Joe.

And I mean, let's not forget that this deal being negotiated, and you know, I guess we should say, let he who has never ridden roughshod over an international treaty that he himself has negotiated, signed and enthusiastically sold to the people at a general election, cast the first stone.

But Boris Johnson didn't tell us this deal was oven ready.

I guess the only problem was that it seems that he doesn't know how to open an oven or indeed that you need to switch the oven on.

And it also helps that

when you're cooking something, it might be oven ready, but it can still be poisonous.

I mean Fanny Craddock's short-lived but very briefly popular bake-it-yourself strawberry and strychnine muffin mix, that was oven-ready.

It doesn't mean you necessarily want to actually put it in the f ⁇ ing oven.

Yeah, there's sort of two phases to this catastrophe.

The first one is just the fact that it's happening at all.

So

the specific piece of legislation that's been violated is the Northern Ireland Protocol, which keeps Northern Ireland essentially in a hokey-cokey style.

sort of in and sort of out arrangement with the European Union.

And the bill that the government is tabling, and which I think is coming for a second reading today

is

basically the bill itself says this is effectively going to break that agreement.

So that, first of all, that's bad.

And arguably what's worse is that 10 Downing Street has been briefing the press to basically say that the withdrawal agreement was it's sort of shit.

So number 10 last week briefed the papers that the Withdrawal Agreement and the Northern Ireland Protocol aren't like any other treaty.

It was agreed at pace at the most challenging political circumstances to deliver on a clear political decision of the British people.

So basically they've admitted we rushed it.

The government is effectively taking the same attitude to the withdrawal bill as I did to my year eight geography exam in which I got 12.5%

because I revised in a rush.

And so for all

Boris Johnson's promises in December that the deal that he had was oven ready, it turns out he thinks his own deal is a bag of shit.

And not only is the oven broken, it was never actually an oven, it was a cardboard box on which he had written the word oven and misspelled it.

And not only was the deal itself not oven-ready, it wasn't even a deal, it was a pack of sand and human hair and teeth that he'd shoved into this cardboard box nightmare.

But you say it's fulfilling the democratic decision of the British people.

I mean, that is fair.

And the democratic decision of the British people was to have a zero competence, zero zero-ethic government.

So it's

what we voted for.

Let's give them some credit.

The British team, as you say, claimed that the legislation was designed to protect the Good Friday Agreement.

A senior European official responded, that is bullshit and everyone knows it.

And by the smallest of coincidences, bullshit and everyone knows it.

Was the subtitle of the successful Conservative Party manifesto at last December's general election?

That's bullshit and everyone knows it was a very popular Cat skills comedy duo back in the 1920s.

Everyone knows it was the little one, right?

It is pretty much putting the blame on the British public by saying, Well, look, if you hadn't voted for Brexit, we wouldn't have had to do such a terrible job of it.

And if you hadn't voted for us to all get coronavirus, we wouldn't have had to do such a terrible job on that.

Some other interesting reactions from the EU.

An unnamed senior political source, quoted, I think, in The Times

about the way Britain is going about this, said there is general agreement across the EU that they can go f themselves.

It's not

the most diplomatic

language.

But I mean, again, this is what the Brexit vote was all about.

The right for us as God's chosen people.

Hang on, I'm mixing up my identities here.

But

as the United Kingdom, the right for us to-the right for us to go f ourselves.

We don't need any external assistance from Europe.

We will f ourselves under our own steam.

I mean, is this just

kind of manoeuvre?

Is it pre-fright trash talking, like when boxers say they're going to smash their opponents back to the 1730s or punch them so hard they'll start having to smell things in Morse code or knock them out so viciously they're going to wake up thinking they're one or both of Napoleon and Susan Sarandon?

I mean, is this what it is?

Is it just a

bit of trash?

Trash talking?

Well, that is the theory, isn't it?

There's sort of two theories about what this could be.

One is that

there are rumours that during the process of the Withdrawal Agreement, which was roundly disliked by most hardline Brexiters, they were promised by Michael Gov and Dominic Cummings allegedly that the UK would renege on this deal and do exactly what's happening at the moment.

There's also another school of thought that suggests this is just sabre-rattling as a way of intimidating the EU ahead of the negotiations.

But also, there is an ancient Hindu proverb, right, that I think is relevant for this occasion.

And it goes, and I'm translating very loosely, it goes something like this.

Sometimes a stupid, unprincipled

is just a stupid, unprincipled.

And really,

it is a religion and culture with a real deep well of wisdom.

I mean, I think there's also a possibility that Boris Johnson has started to row back on this deal after hearing that he himself negotiated it and on that basis alone, it was safe to assume that it was, in all likelihood, absolutely insane.

I mean

this is the kind of man who, if asked to solve that famous riddle about how you get a chicken, a fox and some grain across a river in a boat, would eat the chicken, shoot the fox, sell the boat to a Russian billionaire and grind the grain all over his nutsack while saying, come to Captain Cornflake.

So it's some.

I have to disagree with you in the strongest possible terms there, Andrew.

We all know that Boris Johnson would f the chicken, f the fox and f the grain.

It is a little bit like pre-fight trash talking, Andy, if when they got in the boxing ring, one of the members of the fight just ran round and round and round going, catch me if you can, I'll fight you if you get me.

It's also a bit like

pre-fight trash talking.

If one of them was like, I'm definitely going to kick you in the nuts.

I know it's illegal, but I'm 100% going to kick you in the nuts.

Also, I've got a knife.

But it's probably not so much

saying, I'm going to kick you in the nuts.

It's saying, I'm going to kick myself in the nuts.

And make you watch.

You can hit below the belt if you're hitting yourself.

Loophole.

It's a loophole, everybody.

The UK's chief Brexit negotiator has called for, quotes, realism from the European Union ahead of the next round of

trade talks.

But I mean, come on, let's be realistic.

We cannot expect realism at this stage.

That is the only bit of realism that we can bring to these negotiations.

The idea that realism is absolutely off the tape.

The time for realism was ages ago.

Now is the time for naked opportunism, delusional fantasies, and last-minute trickery.

And I expect that from both sides.

That is trade negotiations 101.

The time for realism was, well, A, before the 23rd of June 2016, or indeed any time between then and the 31st of January this year, idealism has had a few pops in it, but it never really gets much done.

So move over Rover and let opportunism and delusionism take over.

The rogue, asset-stripping stepmother and psychologically ruinous absentee father of all politics.

One hour ago,

a Tory MP, Theresa Villiers, has said that

it's not unusual and in fact is routine for countries to disregard international law and has said that international laws are merely a set of political constructs.

And having heeded that advice from Theresa Villiers, as soon as we finish recording this, I plan to walk into the street completely naked and start defecating in the middle of my nearest high street.

And when apprehended by the police, I will inform them that all laws are simply a set of political constructs and they need to chill the f out.

Yeah, just scream as they approach you, it's a norm, it's a norm.

Rules are meant to be broken.

We're being governed by people who are taking their cues from t-shirt slogans from the mid-90s.

Oh, happy times.

But in the interest of balance, also they are good.

So there you go.

Thanks.

It's good to see this new perspective in your comedy this.

You'll be writing a column in the Daily Telegraph's in.

Hey, I'm 10 moves away at any one time from being on the Tory Tory front bench.

I'm a high-profile Asian.

If I renounce all of my political views, I could be in a safe seat by October.

Oh, man, that is a sitcom waiting to happen.

COVID news now, and well, it still hasn't gone away.

And, well

it was disappointing.

Um here in uh here in Britain despite the best efforts of uh everyone to ask it nicely to go away um and to you know try and live as normally as possible to try and just bore the virus into leaving us alone.

That doesn't seem to work either.

Uh the government has introduced a new rule of six

in uh in this country.

Uh now rule of six of course means many different things to many different people.

Uh to some people it means the number of spins of a coin you have to lose consecutively before you finally get round to doing that vitally important paperwork you've been putting putting off.

To others, The Rule of Six was an influential lecture given by the arch aristocrat Lord Strevens Ponsonby Windsor, the Duke of Groutby, on human reproduction that was the first BBC broadcast on the matter, which went out on the wireless back in 1928.

The Rule of Six.

To some, the Rule of Six is Lord 19.7.1 of the laws of cricket.

And to others, it's a short-lived jazz funk, acid, lullaby, grunge folk shithouse collective that involved Bob Dylan, Rod and Jane from Rod, Jane and Freddie from the British TV kids' show Rainbow, ex-UN Secretary General Perez de Cueyar, Kurt Cobain and Shram Priva, the world's leading Pam Shriver impersonator who made a decent living in the 1980s, mimicking the mannerisms of the five-time Wimbledon Women's Star Wars champion.

But essentially what this rule is, is that that under the latest clampdown, people are no longer allowed to meet in groups of more than six unless fill in your list of exemptions here that is pretty pretty long.

Um

Nishk, I mean is it possible to keep up with what the actual current advice is or not?

I mean i is is it even worth bothering or well Andy the short answer to that question is no and the long answer to that question is uh no

uh yeah it's it's another it's been another uh confusing week uh in

uh british coronavirus policy um and really what this is discriminating against is people with large Asian families.

Okay?

I'm sorry, rule of six, this is some white people nonsense.

Okay, this is some white family nonsense where you've got one uncle, one aunt.

It would be impossible for me to gather my family together

in a group of less than six.

Okay?

I mean, Boris Johnson's spear three have got to feel really left out by now.

So we take it a little personally.

You've got to interpret this rule as Boris Johnson excluding the ones he doesn't like.

Spare three is not to be confused with the unwanted four

and the unaccounted for five.

The forgotten 15.

The rule of six is indeed the rule of thumb for people who are so inbred that they've got an extra one.

But Michael Govis clarified these coronavirus rules after a surge in transmission rates.

Under-12s will remain part of England's rule of six, while under sixes will be part of a rule of 12.

And one bushel of hand sanitiser is equal to 14 feet of social distance.

But if you're outdoors, it's the same.

Elderly people and people with pre-existing health conditions are to be considered worth one-third of a landowner who will get 2.5 balls to throw in the pot from a distance of four feet if you're holding your breath or eight feet if you're breathing at a normal rate.

All clear?

Right, good.

Yeah, that is much clearer than

I mean,

we've tracked during the bugle the way the government advice has changed

earlier in the year.

Schools receive 40 different pieces of government advice in a single week.

I mean these are not so much individual policy U-turns as policy quintuple salcos followed by a triple twisting pike back somersault.

And that line does involve a mixture of ice skating and highboard diving.

But can any of us truly say we would not instantly tune in to watch that sport?

That would be truly sensational.

Yeah, the Group of Six policy does

slightly fly in the face of the fact that the government is simultaneously encouraging people to go back to work in offices and also has rolled out the opening of the school year.

And this is the problem when you have a government entirely made up of people that went to elite private schools with

class sizes of less than six.

This is exactly the issue.

The problem is now they've been confronted with people saying, well, you've got the rule of six, what about classrooms?

And they're like, well, they're fine.

There's only three of you plus matron.

Well actually, at my school in my A-level Greek class, you would have only needed a a rule of two.

It was me and the teacher.

But it's funny, isn't it, that children's parties involving the same children who those children have spent the entire week in a single room with have now become illegal, whereas illegally breaking international law is not illegal.

Which

that's a confusing world for the kids to try and

get their head around.

And regarding the U-churns, and

U-churns, I think U-churns is pretty.

U-churns is

a better term for it, Andy.

Your subconscious has stumbled upon a more reflective phrase.

An anonymous Tory MP quoted in the Times said, It's an utter, utter shit show.

Mess after mess, U-turn after U-turn.

God knows what is going on.

Well, does he?

Let's find out.

Almighty Lord, what is going on with the government?

Fing typical.

Typical.

Just not never at his desk when you need him.

A new slogan came out as well this week from the acting health secretary, Matthew Hancock.

Don't kill Granny,

which,

you know, basically just advised people, and this is the nanny state gone mad, isn't it?

I mean, let people make their own decisions about whether or not to kill their grannies.

I mean, the state should not interfere in British people's personal choices over whether or not they freely commit grand mattricide.

Grand mattricide was your wrestling name, wasn't it, Zoz?

It was, yeah.

Another new slogan, Hands Face Space, who of course were the original members of the A team.

Face was the only one who survived to the classic line-up.

Space was off his not an aggressively potent prescription medication 98% of the time.

And Hands, even by the standards of the day, wasn't allowed on set with any women.

Hands Face Space, also the name of the short-lived 1970s disco supergroup featuring England wicketkeeper Alan Nott, Rod Stewart, and Neil Armstrong.

Their one hit Stumped on the Moon in a Kilt led to creative tensions and the end of the band, sadly.

It's been a long week.

Andy, looking at the state behind you, it looks like you've already committed mattress side.

It's like you're in a cricket-based remake of The Shining.

All work and no, day's play makes Andy a dull boy.

I mean, this whole thing has been set up for a classic Agatha Christie-style murder mystery.

Current and former cricketers and media people locked in a cricket ground for weeks on end.

I mean, it's amazing that everyone is still alive.

It was Jimmy Anderson with the middle stump.

Write that novel, Saltzman.

Write that novel.

Uh on the plus side for Britain, uh the government's gonna test test absolutely everyone in the world on an hourly basis

within maybe a week or so.

They've announced the latest moonshot, they've called it, the moonshot testing programme,

which is a bit reminiscent of King Canute's Operation Dry Tootsies that went so disastrously, sock-wettingly wrong all those years ago.

Understand all skepticism about whether the government can pull this one off,

given that they've failed to do anything at any basic level of competence.

I mean, would you go on a polar expedition with someone who'd just come back from a trip to the local corner shop to buy milk and bread with a dead rat and a six-pack of special brews?

Saying, will this do?

I just don't think you would.

I don't think I would man a space mission organized by Boris Johnson for fear that

we turn up to the launch site and find that instead of a jet propulsion engine, he's just strapped a bunch of fireworks to a toilet roll tube.

Moonshot was a terrible phrase, unless by which he meant he's going to show us his ass and hope that does something.

Peace news now and the Afghan government and the Taliban are in peace talks, the first ever peace talks between the sides following months of delays and pressure from

from America on both.

There are concerns that it's being pushed by America as an election gambit by Donald Trump.

It's possible that something good might come out of Trump's rampaging self-interest.

I mean,

his moral compass does point unerringly towards that rampaging self-interest, and the needle on that compass is shaped in an exact silhouette of his own wang.

But, you know, per fact perhaps that on this occasion the fact that he could hawk an Afghanistan peace deal to the US voters as a counterweight to the megatons of incompetence on the other side of the scales might actually work

in the world's favour.

Is this a straw we can be clutching at?

I mean, it would be amazing if it's able to happen, but I mean, from an American perspective, it might feel a bit like the time I followed through once farting and took the opportunity to discard some old pants.

Yes, ultimately there is a net benefit to me, but at what moral cost?

Well, I just think, you know, bringing the Taliban to the table, Donald Trump has done an enormous amount of work because I know that one of their sort of agendas is bring down the West.

And they can just look at him and be like, actually, we can take a back seat now.

Now, I do have to pick you up on one piece of factual accuracy there, Andrew.

It's not the first time they've had peace talks.

It is the first time that the Taliban have actually attended.

Also, as a side note, it is a very strange thing to read news reports that include the phrase, delegates from the Taliban, because it's not an organisation you traditionally associate with having delegates.

But this isn't actually the first time they've been ten.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Human resources at the Taliban.

It's not the first time they've had talks.

It's the first time that the Taliban have actually sent somebody.

Ten years ago,

Afghan leaders were in conversation with the Taliban, or at least they thought they were, because they were engaged in some secret talks with a high-level delegate from

the Taliban, one of the most senior commanders, a man they believed to be Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansur.

This was in 2010 as part of

that year's round of peace talks that the US was trying to organize.

Only there was one problem.

It turned out that Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansur was not Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansur at all, and was in fact a grocer from Pakistan.

So the Taliban...

Ah, putting the actor into Mullah Akhtar.

Boom.

They had just sent a grocer to the talks.

And a Western diplomat at the time said to the New York Times, it's not him.

And we gave him a lot of money.

The American officials eventually worked out that he wasn't a member of the Taliban leadership at all, but in his

trip to the peace talks, he met with he was flown on a NATO aircraft to the presidential palace and met with then Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Absolutely incredible.

I remember when we were a kid, we were all impressed that a sort of situationist prankster was able to sneak into a Man United team photo.

This bloke managed to get into a meeting with the Afghan president about peace talks with the Taliban.

Take that, Banksy.

Well, among the Afghani government-appointed negotiators, there are four women who have promised to preserve any women's rights in a power-sharing deal with the hardline Taliban.

And that's got to be a weird meeting to go into where you're not sure if you can agree on the basic premise that you're a person.

I guess

from the point of view of the politics of it in America,

anything Trump thinks will help his election prospects, he's prepared to do essentially.

I mean, he would be prepared to drown a basket of puppies in a vat of cheap whiskey in front of a schoolroom full of weeping six-year-olds if it gave him a two-point bump in the polls.

You know, he would do an interpretive modern dance on the theme of the rules of snooker if it flies in a swing state.

You know, he would create a fairer society with a healthcare and social security system that benefits the most vulnerable in society if he thought it would help him but America being America that would be borderline electoral suicide.

He'd have sex with a reanimated woolly mammoth if he thought actually he'd probably do that anyway but the point the point stands Mike Pompeo told Fox News

I don't know what they're talking about in terms of politics this has always been about delivering counter-terrorism protecting America and reducing the cost both in blood and treasure to the American public.

Now, I don't know if he had a parrot on his shoulder when he said that,

but I think a skull and crossbones might be a more appropriate flag for the USA these days.

But also, the interests of balance:

Trump is good, and so is war.

High-tech robot pig news now.

And

Alice, you're the Bugles

high-tech bionic livestock correspondent.

The cartoon billionaire techrepreneur Elon Musk has announced that one of his companies, Neuralink, has implanted wireless technology into the brains of

three pigs.

How significant is this both for humanity and

piggity, if that's the pig equivalent of humanity, and indeed for the dream of having kosher bacon.

Well, Andy, it is a massive step for both pig and humankind.

If you've ever wanted a Wi-Fi enabled pig, it's a great thing to know that not just do we have an Internet of Things, we also have an Internet of Pigs.

You can remotely access your pig from a distance away.

You can,

I don't know what you can do with the pig.

He's just put chips in pigs, which is the start of an incredibly dystopian future in which the pigs achieve sentience and escape and fire themselves onto the moon in a Tesla.

Like, I don't understand

what is happening.

I don't know why it's happening, but I am all for it.

I mean, it's, you know, he's basically read Animal Farm and thought, oh, that's a good idea.

Let's see if we can make that happen.

He described them as healthy, happy, and indistinguishable from a normal pig,

which, by coincidence, is Silvio Berlusconi's online dating profile.

And

it's,

I mean, it's great to have a pig that is internet links, you know, all the benefits of a pig with all the benefits of the internet.

You know, because as well as oinking in time-honoured pig style and

creating sausages, Musk's high-tech piggy can also give you pictures of celebrities with no makeup on, a free bet on something, and classic black and white sports footage from the 1950s.

So, you know, this is this has got to to be one of the greatest animals

in history.

I've said it before, I will say it again.

Elon Musk is a baby's idea of a grown-up.

All he wants is talking pigs.

He's got all the money and resources in the world, and he's using it to send cars to space, like the wank fantasy of nerds that wish they were brave enough to be assholes.

I can never make up my mind on whether I like Elon Musk or whether he's an asshole, but I can rest assured that he absolutely will not care.

The Musk pig follows the less successful launch of

his new ox,

and it's further proof that

A, humanity simply cannot be trusted with its own planet.

B, some children never grow up, and C, Elon Musk is provably fictitious.

Sports news now, and well, there's been some naughty sports people around the world in the last week or so.

When you hear something described as sad and empty these days, it comes as no great surprise, but you assume that it's someone talking about perhaps Britain's latest Brexit negotiating threats, or any theatre in the year 2020, or the future of all humanity, or a fake dinosaur egg they brought on eBay to try to cross with the domestic iguana to make a market-friendly, non-violent safer saw.

But in the last week...

These words safe and empty were used by Novak Djokovic about his own feelings after the Serbian tennis star, also known as the tennis tech unbeatabot Robo-Ralia 3000X, was disqualified from the US Open for thwacking a tennis ball into the throat of a line judge.

Now just give it some context, Djokovic did not deliberately take aim at the line judge shout lunchtime open wide and slam a forehand directly into her gullet, but in a fit of just having lost his service to give nondescript Spanish player Pablo Corina Buster a chance to serve the first set peek, he flapped the spare ball from his pocket behind him and it hit the line judge in the throat.

Now unfortunately for Djokovic, turned out she was not one of those people who really enjoys being hit in the throat by a relatively fast-moving tennis ball that has been struck through the table.

But she might enjoy it just for consent.

Yeah, well, she did if she didn't, sadly.

So, in that sense, he was just a bit unlucky.

However, following a prolonged discussion with the tournament referee, Djokovic was turfed out.

His plea in mitigation that he didn't mean to hit the line judge was somewhat undermined by the fact that, well, he's played a lot of professional tennis, and he probably should have known that behind where the players are on the court, there are generally, for example, line judges and ball kids, a total of often five human beings, all of whom often have throats.

So,

I mean,

it's not the worst thing he could have done.

Let's not go overboard.

It's not like he promoted a tennis tournament with big crowds during a pandemic, in which he and other leading players dicks around in nightclubs, prompting a wave of COVID infections, jeopardising the rest of the tennis season, quite apart from the well-being of thousands of people.

It's not like he did that.

I mean, which by unlucky coincidence he might also have done

this year, but he was still

a bit naughty, really.

Well and it's not like he also has started an organization within the organisations that already exist within the game one of whose central tenets is to fight the idea that men and women be paid the same amount of prize money.

It's not as if he's done that.

He's not done that.

He's definitely not done that.

He's not also

pushed outlandish anti-vaxxer propaganda either.

It's not like he's done that.

He just hit a ball and accidentally hit a person.

Let's get it in perspective.

Well, you know, for balance, I think we should all look at a way of rehabilitating Novak Djokovic.

And in this modern world, retributive justice is very

popular.

I reckon he should live stream the line person punching him in the throat to balance the scales in that kind of code of Hammurabi eye for an eye sort of way.

Only then will the people be satiated.

Djokovic has reassured his fans that he will have been fully rebooted and reprogrammed by the time the delayed French Open begins.

Personally, I preferred the 1970s Yulbrener tennis robot, but

well, thank you very much for

joining me.

I've got to return to thinking about cricket.

We'll be back next week.

Alice, anything to plug?

Yes, I have a daily satirical news podcast set in an alternate dimension called The Last Post.

You've been a guest on that, or your alternate dimension person has, as has Nish, as has Chris Skinner.

You wouldn't know anything about that personally, but your alternate dimension people seem to be having a great time.

Also, I guessed on the podcast, which was a great time.

Also, you can see my special Savage on Amazon Prime.

That's a thing.

Oh, or patreon.com/slash Alice Fraser.

Nish, anything to plug?

Hello, America is on Quibi and it comes out twice a week.

And also, I would like to plug The Law

and the importance of following it.

You can hear me on well the last cricket game on Wednesday also BBC's news quiz for the next the next few weeks.

We'll be back with another bugle next week.

Until then obey all international law unless it is slightly inconvenient.

Goodbye buglers.

We will now play you out with some lies about our premium level voluntary subscribers.

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

Klaus Pedersen would not be averse to a return to the process of ostracizing, by which citizens could be expelled from ancient Athens for 10 years by democratic vote.

I reckon it could be just the shot in the arm that modern democracy needs, explains Klaus.

I've got a list of candidates from public life who I'm more than happy to nominate.

If you've got a couple of hours to spare for me to read out all their names, you could send them all to a special ostracism island as well for a reality TV show, so the self-obsessed bastards would probably be right up for it.

Tobias Schmidhaus once had an extremely animated argument with a professional golfer, who shall remain nameless, on whether chicken should be reclassified as a vegetable on the grounds that you can use it in a salad.

It was an argument in which neither party was prepared to concede any philosophical ground, both sides claimed victory, and chicken remained located in the meat aisle at the local supermarket.

Tobias has never enjoyed watching golf ever since.

Stephen Eames is tired of the uncertainty surrounding what the world will be like in 300 years' time.

I haven't got time to wait around to find out, blast Stephen.

I want answers now.

If you extrapolate from 300 years ago to now and then 300 years more into the future, it should be easy enough to work it out.

I reckon we'll all be living in luxury flying solo hammocks, speaking one language with a total of 130 words in it, printing babies in special laboratories and eating vegan coal.

By neither coincidence nor contrast, Craig Hewitt would like to do some proper research into that vague feeling of having accidentally buried yourself in uncooked macaroni.

Maybe it's just me, says Craig, and it can be cured by taking a hot bath for 11 to 14 minutes, depending on whether you like your pasta al dente or not, but it's one of the many vague feelings that we just don't know enough about, like the vague feeling of your chair being on a very slight left-to-right slope, and the vague feeling of a broken toaster slowly clamping itself around your fingers.

David Raynor wonders whether the issue of tax avoidance by the extremely wealthy could be solved by marketing public services as must-have luxuries.

These people love spending an unnecessary amount of money on totally unnecessary stuff, like wasp ovary serum for healthier looking earlobes, or spare mega yachts, or designer accessories that look like they've been designed by five-year-olds in an unstaffed primary school art class.

If we tell them that a functioning welfare state is a trendy A-lister accessory, they'll pile right in.

And Jonathan Miles does not enjoy exaggeration.

I'd say it's my least favourite thing in the entire universe, says Jonathan, and by a hell of a large margin, too.

Hang on, he continues, that felt oddly good.

I might have to reassess my original statement.

On reflection, I think that might actually be the biggest lie anyone has ever told.

Oh, yeah, I feel like a new person in every conceivable facet of my being.

Wow.

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.