BONUS BUGLE: Gaddafi, Gandhi and randy

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to Bugle sub-episode 4164A for am not able to do a full episode this week.

You can however hear me hosting the new series of BBC Radio 4's The News Quiz available from all good podcast shops or just asking nicely on the internet.

Or you can hear me banging on about the cricket again if that's your bag, which if it isn't, I want nothing more to do with it.

You are still a valued bugle listener who has my undying respect and gratitude and pity, idiots.

Instead of a full episode this week, we have some prime off-cuts from recent bugle recordings featuring me, Alice Fraser, Nish Kumar, Aditi Mittal and Anuvab Powell, plus the history of the world.

Well, bits of it.

Bits of it that happened in the equivalent week that we're now in, but in different years since the bugle began.

But first, Chris, crank up the off-cutting machine.

Let's hear the gold that you siphoned off from all the other gold.

India news now and well a huge story, Anuvab,

in fact here in Britain, that a pair of Mahatma Gandhi's glasses were sent to an auctioneer's and were left hanging out of the letterbox.

I mean, this is a kind of

a strange story, but apparently the glasses are worth

around about $20,000.

And it did make me think, Gandhi had a pair of 20 grand glasses.

No wonder he couldn't afford a pair of trousers.

Prioritise your spending, folks.

Prioritize your spending.

Sure,

a good pair of glasses makes you look wise, authoritative, makes you look like you mean business, but not if you're not accessorizing them with at least a smartish business shirt.

It was all about accessories, Andy.

This is the thing.

So what happened is around four weeks ago, an auctioneer named Andy Stowe headed into work and was checking his letterbox at his office after the COVID lockdown in Bristol.

And he found this thing and it had a little note saying, these belong to Gandhi and my uncle was given them.

Now when contacted, this uncle, an 80-year-old man, said that they were given to him by the Mahatma Gandhi while he was employed in South Africa.

Apparently, Gandhi was very happy with the particular legal note this gentleman had written, so he gave him his glasses.

And you know, as an Indian person, I've always had an issue with Gandhi's acts of reckless generosity.

You know,

you know, just when we're on the verge of independence with the civil disobedience movement, a few people die and he calls it all off.

You know, where everywhere else, a little bit of murder is natural in the path of independence.

But not for Gandhi, he has to be like this recklessly generous person, and he's also very altruistic.

You know, if he didn't ever have a nice watch or a lot of cash, so he just gave this guy his glasses and presumably walked around South Africa, not being able to see much for a week.

This is exactly.

Now you sounded like a good, honest member of the BJP or the RSS on a goddamn.

Now you sounded like Gandhi was.

It started with his glasses and then it ended up with him giving Pakistan a candidate.

Exactly.

That's how it went.

In fact, you know, the right-wing BJP party in India had a speech the other day, Dish, where they said, you know, all these things have been tried.

This quote-unquote non-violence, this...

This quote-unquote freedom of press.

What has that got us?

That's a legitimate point.

You start giving away your glasses.

Next you'll demand courts, you know, evidence-based trials.

Where does this end?

Where do we go?

That's reckless.

Reckless.

I feel like I'm talking to my extended family WhatsApp group.

Exactly.

Exactly.

But it was rather incidentally, apparently, he owned them when he was working for British Petroleum in South Africa in the early 20th century.

Why was Gandhi working for the fossil fuel industry, you may ask?

Well, he just hated polar bears.

It was as simple as that.

But I'm rather intrigued by this

note, to the fact that this was submitted to an auction house.

This little note saying these belong to Gandhi, my uncle was given them.

And now, there we go, up for auction, 20 grand.

Other items submitted for auction since that auction house explained how a pair of glasses someone claimed Gandhi had given to his uncle and shoved them through a letterbox were worth 20 grand include a Sashev ketchup someone's auntie Mildred picked up in a motorway server station after Elvis had stopped for a half dog

a paper aeroplane folded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt that someone's granny had kept when she found it whilst tidying up the recycling after the Yalta conference a pencil someone's great-great-granddad borrowed off Abraham Lincoln when he'd finished scrawling the Gettysburg address on the back of a handkerchief shortly after saying the words what do you mean I've got to do a fucking speech in five minutes time shit I'll just hack out a couple of hundred words and see how it flies and also Hitler's other testicle found in a jar of white vinegar in a broom cupboard in the Albert Hall by someone's mate's dad's brother when singing backing vocals for the rock group Grand Funk Railroad at the iconic venue back in 1971 and kept in a fridge ever since.

All those are for auction in the next month.

Thank God there was a joke in this podcast that referenced Abraham Lincoln, Adolf Hitler, and Grand Funk Railroad.

I think we were all concerned.

The big three.

That someone wouldn't manage to hit the big three.

That concept, actually, the Grand Funk Railroad gig at the album in 1971

almost resulted in me not existing because my dad took my mother to it early in their marriage and I think she nearly left him.

It's like the

Grand Funk Railroad is musically the opposite of Barry White.

It's really

music.

It's really music to kill a vibe.

In other American news, scientists have discovered evidence that humans may have settled in the Americas much earlier than previously thought.

New finds have suggested people could have been living there as long as 33,000 years ago.

The theory is

that humans

peopled the Americas initially via a land bridge from Russia.

Pay attention, people, from Russia.

Russia.

Ding-a-ling America.

Russia.

They've been playing the very, very, very long game.

This find in Mexico, they've used dating techniques, including radiocarbon dating, which relies on the way a radioactive form of the element carbon, carbon-14,

decays.

It decays gradually over time, carbon-14, to give you the idea of the age of something, and also, interestingly enough, is the principal chemical component of hope.

They've also used optically stimulated luminescence, which works by measuring the last time sediments were exposed to light, and optimistically stimulated luminescence, which combines the two techniques and tells you the last time something was exposed to hope for a lot of Brits.

I think it was in the year 2016 or 2010 or 1065.

So, I mean, this is a very

exciting discovery, Hari,

for you as an American to think, you know, 33,000 years ago things started going tits up.

It must be very shocking to Europeans who conquered it several hundred years ago when it was discovered that there's actually

people there previous to that.

What?

It's not 600 years old from the first time.

It's new to all of us.

The site is in the central northern

Mexican highlands.

Rock Boffins, Cyprian Ardelean from the University of Zacatecas in Mexico, Tom Hyam from Oxford and other artefact bothering colleagues claim to have found evidence of human occupation that dates back, let's say, 30,000 years since the first settlers set the Americas on their inevitable path towards Trump, Bolsonaro and diminishing returns at international football tournaments.

One of the archaeologists, Professor Dr.

Drellard Buttclark from the University of Nantwich, admitted, it's just a few bits of stone really, chisels and shit like that.

But really, it shows there wasn't much advanced for tens of thousands of years, which does rather make you suspect that our human ancestors were lazy ass bastards who like to kick back and take it easy.

No queuing up to buy the latest Apple Chisel Blade 6 or the Mammoth Slayer Arrowhead 3000X.

Just the same old useless, slightly sharpened f ⁇ ing pebbles.

Who were these f ⁇ ing layabouts?

If they'd got off their asses 2,000 f ⁇ ing years ago, we'd probably be flying around the universe in intergalactic spaceships by now or have developed time travel.

Maybe that's why they didn't bother come to think of it.

They didn't want us to travel back in time and kick them out of their cushy little cave and tell them to snap to it.

Hang on, the internal logic of that doesn't stand up, but the point does: it's time we call these early humans who fannied around for a hundred thousand years, scrawling the odd elk on the inside of a cave and otherwise failing to advance what they really were.

Losers.

There, I've said it now.

Bit of archaeology for you, right?

That's like listening to a question on university challenge.

There's been a huge public outcry over the draft Environmental Impact Assessment Notification 2020.

And I mean, it's good to know that

environmental impact assessment notifications are still as popular now as they used to be in the past.

Ajiti is our Global Environment Correspondent.

Just bring us up to date with this.

What is happening with this current version of the EIA in 2020, the version that this government wants to pass, is that it reduces the burden on industries so that they can pillage the environment more freely.

And

there is this constant battle of development versus environment, development versus environment.

But it's like saying, you know what, let me destroy my lungs so I can have prettier nails.

And

having nice nails, having nice nails doesn't matter because shitty lungs means you'll die and those nails are going to get burned with your body.

And the problem with cutting down all the trees is that you're not going to have enough kindling to burn our corpses in.

I've never really thought of it that way.

That's a good way of looking at it.

But I mean, it's

part of the great human tradition of, you know, in the old days,

lead-based makeup that

made people

look prettier as they gradually died of poisoning.

I mean, this is just what we are as a species.

We are basically, you look at the world now and you just think humanity in 2020 is just a giant 500-mile-high middle finger to Charles Darwin saying, You reckon we're evoluting forwards?

F you, you dead-bearded bastard.

Yeah, watch smart women with degrees refuse to have children.

I have a dog.

You know, I also, I mean, mean, guys, I just want to put this out there because this is a thought that struck me.

Is

aren't trees the real culprits here?

It's about time someone has held those bars to account.

Yeah, because I mean, they're the ones that, first of all, they're releasing carbon dioxide in the night while we sleep, sneakily behind our back.

And so, I mean, at least industries and sort of corporations have the decency to spew pollutants in the air in front of us, like during the time that we're awake.

So I think actually this is a positive step to make things easier to pillage the lands.

Right.

I mean, it's good that someone's got the courage to say that because too often we get caught up in the woke agenda of

wanting to save the planet.

And

thank you for being a voice for the disenfranchised.

Big business, big industry, unbridled capitalism, Aditi.

There's not enough people like you in the media today.

Yeah, people are always talking about huge tracts of fertile rainforests being destroyed.

They never ask if those huge tracts of fertile rainforests were nice or not.

That's what I'm saying.

I mean, morally nice, obviously, as trees, they're very beautiful.

You know, I don't even know.

I would prefer my road to progress to be paved with some depression, death.

With the shade of my haters more than the shade of trees.

Those were some recent offcuts.

Back in time time now, and remember when Republican conventions were not harrowingly dystopian barkings of the hounds of democracy hell?

No.

Oh, well, at least the barkings were a bit less barky.

Anyway, here's 2008.

To tell you all about it.

So, John, you must be pretty relieved that this two-week festival of communal political masturbation has drawn to a merciful political close.

Absolutely right.

I think it's interesting.

It's been like a controlled experiment of how much democracy the human soul can take.

And I'm here to tell you it's eight days.

Non-consecutive.

I guess the story of the convention will be Sarah Palin.

And it is really depressing that that's true.

It's depressing that a move so cynical seems to have worked.

They went absolutely crazy the other night for her.

They were walking out, all of them screaming, home run.

She knocked it out of the park.

Another crass sporting man touchdown.

It was a three-pointer.

It was a long blue to the top left corner.

Thanks.

That's one for our British listeners.

Think Alex Higgins in the 1982 World Time Action.

Oh, what a shot, Andy.

What a shot.

So, John, I mean, have you met many average hockey moms in your time in America?

I don't know.

I mean, mean, that's very much the new thing to be now, to be a hockey mom, which is interesting in a country which has completely turned its back on that game.

I guess I've probably met them all the time now, seeing as they've all reinvented themselves as hockey moms.

There's a certain kind of Stepford hockey mom here.

She describes herself as just your average hockey mom.

And now call me old-fashioned, John.

I know I'm not American and therefore don't really have a vote in this election.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Andy.

Again, we're going back back to whether you recognise American independence or not.

I guess so.

To me, it sounds like the average hockey mom is, if not the last person that you would want to be one rogue snooker shot away from the Oval Office, then certainly probably the penultimate person you'd want to be that.

They're just that sliced cue ball that jumps off the table and hits the president, you know, on the temple.

Is that the second snooker joke already?

Yeah, I know.

We're going in hard.

Well, it's just because, you know, it's a convention special.

That's two weeks we've had.

Kind of aimed, I guess, not squarely at our global listeners, more at our American.

So, you know, a bit of snooker.

It's the game that the rest of the world plays.

The incredible thing with Payload as well is the vetting process for her.

Because

gradually, each day there's been a new, absolutely incredible fact emerging about the one that she was a member of this party, which was actually part of the Alaskan separatist movement, which I suppose is, in many ways, quintessentially American to want to segregate from the nation.

That's really taking it back to old school.

But it does seem that...

I mean,

that's not even a vetting process that should have caught that.

That's just a Google search.

I know that McCain doesn't use a computer and has talked a lot about that, but surely someone should have just put in Sarah Palin, enter, and seen what came up.

Yeah, but I guess if what came up was that photo of her in a Stars and Stripes bikini holding her machine gun, then all other vets are off.

That's surely enough for any red-blooded American voter.

Actually, next week, Andy, I'm going to be doing the bugle with a machine gun and Stars and Stripes bikini.

I don't really approve of your increasingly cavalier attitude towards the bugle dress code.

Cavalier?

In uniform, Andy.

And also, Sarah Palin, she only got her American passport in 2006 and has been to a total of five countries, one of which it turns out she went to only while her plane refuelled there.

You can't count that.

You do not get, Andy, the flavour.

I don't want to come across as a liberal hippie here.

You don't get the flavour of a nation from its airport.

I don't know.

When I was a kid, I was flying to South Africa to see my grandparents.

And, you know, we stopped off in Mombasa in Kenya.

And I like to think that ever since then I've really had a deep spiritual affinity with the people

of all parts of Africa as a result of that half-an-hour stopover at the age of six.

2008, there, but as we now know, September 2008 was followed just two years later by September 2010.

And this.

Top story this week, vanity publishing.

And former Prime Minister of Great Britain Tony Blair's memoir has hit the bookshops of this planet.

And well, potentially of other planets as well.

But at the moment, this planet is the only one that we know of.

It's called A Journey.

My Political Life.

And its launch was an eagerly anticipated publishing sensation.

Who can forget?

Andy last week the scenes of children lining up outside bookstores at midnight, all dressed up as their favourite characters from the autobiography.

Ex-Foreign Secretary Robin Cook was a popular costume.

One little girl dressed like a very convincing Claire Short and was shouting something about the Iraq war being illegal.

And one child was lying motionless on the ground, presumably having come as David Kelly.

Either way, it was a festive atmosphere, Andy, and the kids feel like they couldn't wait to get the books home, start reading, and have their spirits and imaginations completely crushed.

There you go.

David Kelly reference.

Three assassination references.

Or was it?

Yeah, two and a half.

Yeah, he's had to cancel some book signings because

of protests, John.

He had eggs thrown at him in Armstrong.

I'm so sorry for him, Andy.

He's been through so much.

Well, it just shows that he's learning, John, because he is at last learning to back down in the face of public protests.

Just seven and a half years late.

He's donating the profits from his book to a charity organisation for British soldiers injured during the Iraq war, which is both an excellent idea and also technically and literally the least he could do.

Political memoirs are notoriously self-serving at best.

Often their authors are seen late night on bookshop security cameras breaking into stores and moving their books from the autobiography section to the history section, while their detractors hide in the pregnancy section and wait to move the the books to the fiction shelves instead.

It's a to and fro.

In fact, in the interest of transparency, every political memoir Andy ever written should really be forced to have the same title, which should be, No, you're all wrong, this is how it happened.

By whoever.

And in the grand scheme of Blair's overall record on war, that was very much a hamster of mitigation on the end of an ethical seesaw that has a rhinoceros of repugnance squatting and defecating on the other end.

Though was this money, as some critics have claimed, blood money.

Or was it merely further justification for Blair's decision to join America in invading Iraq?

Because without the controversy created, there is no way he would have been paid so much as an advance or sold so many copies and thus be able to give so much money to the British Legion.

So, really, it's all starting to self-justify itself.

That's why Prime Ministers should never have their publishers as a key advisor during their time in office.

Listen,

you've got to give me a little Zaz to play with.

That's where Neville Chamberlain went wrong.

The two main characters in the story are Blair himself and ex-Chancellor and ex-Prime Minister and current holder of PensionerZinger 2010 Gordon Brown.

The book is surprisingly honest about Blair's complicated relationship with him.

It's not that the nature of the relationship is surprising, just that he's chosen to be so honest about it.

Blair, after all, as you mentioned, has a proven record of not being a huge fan of the concept of honesty.

And it is surprising that he suddenly decided to try it now.

Well how controversial were his statements about Brown?

Not especially.

To be honest he describes Brown as maddening which I don't think anyone in Britain would disagree with.

In fact it seems to be one of the least negative of his almost impressive number of character flaws.

He also said that Brown lacked emotional intelligence.

Again, I think Brown would struggle to make a decent legal case against that, partly because he lacked the social skills to be able to communicate a coherent defense to his lawyers effectively.

But he said in an interview this week, John, he said that he was still friends with Gordon Brown.

And out of all the porkies that Blair may or may not have told over the last 13 years, that has to be right up there with the Weapons of Mass Destruction Classic and the claim on page 324 of his memoirs that he is in fact Elvis.

And if I may quote, did we get the serialization for rights for this in the end?

I can't remember.

I think so.

I think this is a Bugle World exclusive.

Anyway, oh, this is from page 324.

I realised that whilst I'd done much great work unifying all humanity as Elvis, there was still much left to do.

And the best way to do that was to fake my own death and reinvent myself as a creepily, over-sincere, free-market quasi-socialist with an unshakable belief in his own destiny.

So there you go.

Beautifully put.

That was 2010.

A year later, Bugle issue 166 entered the world, just as someone else was leaving it in a not 100% ideal way from his perspective.

Top story this week, Gaddafi's last stand.

And Gaddafi is dead, Andy.

He's dead, isn't he?

He must be dead.

We're all celebrating he must be dead.

Right, yeah.

I'm not sure he's...

I mean, he's dead inside, John, but I mean, that's been the case with the time.

Oh, that's right.

Gaddafi's dead inside.

We killed him.

We killed something deep inside him.

The hope for the future.

We killed him.

Yeah, there's been a $1 million bounty put on Gaddafi's heads, dead or alive, preferably for the sake of legal convenience.

I imagine NATO is preferring A dead rather than B alive.

But

please, Bugless, if you do find Gaddafi, do not be tempted to keep him.

He has a limited resale value.

And if he is on eBay,

if you find a Gaddafi and put him on eBay, we cannot be held responsible.

for me bidding for him.

But you know, I mean, that would be a nice thing to have in your house, wouldn't it?

What a Gaddafi.

Yeah.

Just ornamental Gaddafi.

I mean the best kind of Gaddafi.

Or you could kind of uh embed him in your front door and use him as a doorbell.

Yeah, that'd be good.

Well just like

punch him on the nose.

Just poke him in the eye.

Ah!

Yeah.

Ah!

Ah the door.

What kind of time is this?

Does he eat or not Gaddafi?

I I don't think so.

He doesn't look like the kind of guy.

I mean he's such a monster isn't he?

He probably

he doesn't really eat just Ozmos.

He's been He's been up to his old tricks, Andy.

During a broadcast on a local TV station, he pledged Martyrdom or Victory.

What a game show.

That is what television needs.

Too much of these little lame-ass quiz shows.

Talent shows.

Let's have something with something real on the line.

Let's see.

how much people really want to be celebrities.

And martyrdom is pretty much your

still your your grade a weight of celebrity it's a win-win it worked for jesus didn't it yeah that's why it's a feel-good game show that you suggested arguably jesus's whole public profile was based on him being a good martyr rather than a good magician and raconteur which is what he'd previously done well hold on magician and raconteur

that's basically

without the spin and the pr so speaks just murderous strip away strip away the layers john

but he was also claiming on local TV station this week that he was still in the capital, Tripoli.

He said, I've been out a bit in Tripoli discreetly without being seen by people, and I did not feel that Tripoli was in danger.

Every part of that sentence is untrue, Aina.

Every single part.

I've been out a bit in Tripoli discreetly.

No.

Without being seen by people.

Incorrect.

I did not feel Tripoli was in danger.

If that's true, he's fing mad.

Or he hasn't been watching the news.

Yeah.

And he should probably, I guess in his line of work, he needs to keep abreast of the news.

You know, because I mean, people clearly seem quite angry with his leadership.

And if he's just blanking out the fact that his own compound is being raised to the ground, he needs to get on top of that.

But is it not possible as well, as a man in his position, that he might be able to walk around the streets of Tripoli right now?

Because no one would believe he had the bareface balls to walk about.

You just think, oh, that man looks an amazing amount like Colonel Gaddafi.

Obviously, it can't be.

It's a Colonel Gaddafi impersonator.

Yeah, a good one.

There he is shopping for bread.

Yeah.

Doesn't seem concerned by anything.

No, we love bread, Gaddafi.

Yeah, he did.

He was all about the bread.

Two baguettes every morning.

He couldn't function without two baguettes.

Oh, that's a lot of...

It's a lot of bread, Andy.

We slow him down.

Well, I know, and that's, I think, why he's gradually lost his grip on power.

due to a bad diet.

But they found some amazing things.

As always, there is absolutely one thing that a despot will give you, and it's arguably worth enduring the four decades of pain and persecution to get there.

But you know, when a despot is overthrown, you're going to find some crazy shit in his house.

And amongst various bits of crazy shit, perhaps the craziest that has been found so far in the Gaddafi compound is a photo album stocked to the brim with pictures of Condoleezza Rice.

Crazy, Andy.

Crazy.

Crazy Crazy in a Patsy Klein kind of way.

But

apparently he said some amazing things.

I mean we've all been there let's be honest.

Yeah.

Let he who does not have a secret stash of Condoleezza Rice photos cast the first stone.

I have a sequence of Condoleezza Rice photos tattooed on my stomach.

Well yeah.

But some of that was more to get your green card than anything else, wasn't it?

I said I'd do whatever it took, Andy.

I didn't leave anything on the field.

Yeah, I mean, she looks great on a moped, to be fair.

Yeah, well, I didn't say how I was going to picture her.

I just said she was going to be on there.

There you go.

There is your bugle sub-episode to keep you going for the next week or so.

The bugle will be shifting to Monday recordings for the next few weeks whilst I'm hosting the news quiz.

So if the bugle does not plonk itself into your pod machines at the regular point in the week, please do not panic.

Or at least only panic internally and try to minimize public displays of despair, if that's not too much to ask.

Stay calm, sit next to your wireless, and await further instructions, or just wait for the show to plonk down early in the week instead of late in the week.

We will be back in a week-ish, or a little bit longer, maybe.

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.