4164: Falwell That Ends Well

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4164 of the Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world with me, Andy's Altman, the five-time winner of the...

What was it again?

Yeah, never mind.

It's Thursday the 27th of August, not for the first time, and I'll venture not for the last either.

I hope not.

Anyway, I'm live in London.

And if you'd told someone standing right here 3,000 years ago that today a 45-year-old second-generation lapsed Jew would be recording a podcast with two guests, one in Australia, one in India, via the internet on this very spot, well, you would have been met with some very blank faces and possibly an invitation to sharpen a piece of flint and nip up to the woods to kill some dinner.

But that is exactly what is happening right now.

I'm in the shed and joining me from Sydney, Australia, it's Alice Fraser.

Hello Alice.

Hello Andy, hello buglers.

I am indeed in Sydney, Australia and it's quite nice here which is which is a change for the world.

Yummy that is that is the best the world has achieved this year I think.

Outside the cricket bubble I think.

Quite nice is as good as the planet can get right now.

What's making it quite nice?

Well, I've just moved my dad out of the flat we were sharing into his own house.

He's bought a house and so it's been unpacking boxes and looking at memories and throwing them away.

A metaphor for humanity itself.

And joining us from Mumbai, India, where will Mumbai sit on the quite nice scale to tell us it's Aditi Mittal?

Oh, hello Andy.

Hello Bugler.

So nice to be here.

Andy, I mean I think it's it's now a well-known fact that I don't engage with the outside world because my own mania has kept me pretty busy during this pandemic.

In fact, I recently got a dog,

which is the wrong way to say it because the dog got me.

At this point, I am its designated poop and pee cleaner.

And that's pretty much what he looks at me as.

So

it's going really well.

It's going really well.

Well it's great to have you back on the show.

It's Thursday the 27th of August 2020 and as always some sections of the belatedly remembering things that was it five-time winner

very impressive.

Still got it.

As always

some sections of the bugle are going straight in the bin.

This week, stars and their tsars, top celebrities reveal their favourite Russian Tsars.

Here Justin Bieber lament the early and brutal death of young Fyodor II, whilst Halle Berry ponders how different the world today would be if baby tsar Ivan VI had ascended to the throne at a more mature age than two months old.

Whilst Taylor Swift explains why she named her new parrot, Konstantin Pavlovich.

Also in the bin, a pointless argument topic section, well this world is riven by furious disputes about issues of fundamental importance to our present, our future, and our understanding of the past.

So to help calm things down, we give you free from the bugle nine completely pointless topics for a social media spat.

Enjoy a consequence-free bicker with an anonymous stranger that doesn't leave you trembling with existential dread at the true nature of humanity and the future of the planet on one or more of the following issues about which it should be impossible to be provocatively incendiary.

Issue one, is it possible to drown a table?

Two, do fish actually like swimming?

Three, should jiu-jitsu be compulsory for recovering recovering librarians, or would they be better off learning the clarinet?

Four, who would have been the better Formula One driver?

Composer Bedrick Smetener or painter Tintoretto?

Five, do snakes have lungs?

Six, is blinking overrated?

Seven, what is all the fuss about cushions?

And eight, carrots or tennis?

And nine, a list that was supposed to have nine things that ended up with only eight.

What's going on with that?

Andy, I tried a tweet today where I was suggesting that you see people having arguments online all the time, but you don't know how qualified they are to their opinion, and that we should have a ranked hierarchical caste system where people

get

assigned a certain font.

And I said, for example, if you're an idiot, you can still have an opinion.

You just have to do it in Comic Sans.

I thought, a harmless joke.

And then immediately people came out of the woodwork to tell me that

mocking Comic Sans is ableist.

And then

some people told those people that actually mocking Comic Sands isn't ableist because of these, and it just devolved into a whole argument.

Very stressful.

Very stressful times we live in, Andy.

Such is life.

I think this millennium will be remembered as the millennium of pointless disputes.

Which maybe that'll be better than the second millennium, which was the millennium of highly important disputes.

Not always adequately resolved.

We are recording on the 27th of August, happy sackiversary to our Visigoth listeners.

1,610 years since,

well, your glory days, really.

Alaric and his rowdy rumper squad finished their three-day wild weekend in Rome, which began, of course, as a stag do for Alaric's best friend Keith, and ended up changing the course of European history as one of the great empires crumbled.

On this day, 90 years ago in Canada, five suffragist women sent a petition to the Governor-General to pose the landmark question to the Supreme Court, does the word persons in Section 24 of the British North America Act 1867 include female persons?

It's a difficult question to answer and we mustn't judge it by today's standards.

The initial response from the Canadian Supreme Court was, well, no.

Could you possibly make us a nice pot of tea?

We have some very important men's legislating to do and maybe some Battenberg cakes as well if you're not too busy.

This, however, was overturned in October 1929 in what became known as the, oh, okay, then, ruling, that women are indeed persons and that is a ruling that the bugle fully supports.

You better.

Well yeah I mean I don't know if you've got any views on that DT and Alice.

I mean I mean you know I mean history changes our perspective on these things and

who knows?

People used to think the earth was flat.

I mean are women people really

because I think I think I've spent so much time as a bunch of flesh hanging around a uterus that

I'm not 100% sure there's even value in this argument, to be honest.

Tune in again in another 90 years' time for a final definitive verdict.

Top story this week.

As the old saying goes, how do you know if your planet is teetering on the edge of total catastrophe when 50,000 fish make a break for freedom?

This story really encapsulates the planet: that not only are humans not really satisfied with what's going on, but 50,000 salmon from a Scottish salmon farm escaped.

This week they made a break for it.

They've had enough.

They've had enough of being associated with the human world.

The enterprising aquatic escapologists waited under cover of darkness, underwater, which looks quite dark, especially when it's dark, until storm damage broke the mooring ropes of their Piskine penitentiary and they bolted for it.

Sadly, 30,000 of the fish are estimated to have passed away without even having the chance to become a delicious teriyaki kebab or anything.

Although obviously when the film version of this heroic breakout story is made they'll make it appear that everyone made it to freedom apart from one fish to give the movie a proper tear jerker moment.

Sadly 125,000 of the other salmon at the farm were then punishment harvested as the officialdom tried to

the

officialdom tried to re-establish piss episcopilin, episcopalin.

And the concern is that

the escaped fish who have never known freedom in their young lives will now go absolutely nuts, drunk on the sweet nectar of liberty and run out of their meagre resources of cash within weeks.

And inevitably, there will be tension in the fishy hierarchy.

The leadership will fracture into rival factions, and a bitter internecine struggle will ensue.

But we'll leave that out of the film as well.

It spoils the sweet narrative of freedom.

Anyway, these Houdinis of the high seas are now reported to be gathering support for further breakouts from other fish farms, causing panic in the frozen food industry.

Alice, you are the Bugles

fish escapology correspondent.

I mean where does this rank in your hierarchy of great

fishy breakouts?

I mean this was an epic breakout Andy.

It was caused by storm damage and the storm in question was Storm Ellen, a reference here to a real storm and not to the recent scandalous revelations that the talk show fronted by Ellen DeGeneres has a hostile backstage environment and toxic work culture.

So

it's a farm called the North Carradale Farm near Campbelltown, and it suffered damage to four of its ten fish pens.

And even if I don't really understand what a fish pen is, I feel that I can deduce it from context.

And I definitely know that four out of ten is heaps when it's in fish.

Not heaps in a spelling test.

Heaps in a fish escape.

But yeah,

this is an amazing thing because 48,834 salmon escaped, 30,616 died, 125,000 were, as you say, punishment harvested.

Which, wait, I don't understand how the harvesting became part of the escape story.

If it's a prison break, a ton of fish get shot by the guards.

If it's not a prison break, the remaining fish should be treated as, you know, like respected prisoners, the Judas fish, maybe to lead the other fish back home.

Environmental campaigns have raised concerns about the escaped fish breeding with wild Scottish salmon, which seems racist.

I don't know how, but it does.

Just let them live the lives they want to live.

Aditi, I don't know if

the fish industry of India

is now concerned about copycat breakouts

across the country.

You know, actually,

Andy, I have to tell you, this story personally resonated with me very strongly because it reminded me of that moment in Indian history when we raised the slogan, salmon go back,

which

happened in 1928,

you know, when the Simon Commission came to India

in a commission of seven

English MPs and the Indians sort of you know rose up in protest for representation.

And so this reminded me of that incident and it you know actually warms my heart to imagine 50,000 salmon just breaking out of the shackles of

their pens,

just screaming, like, this is Sparta!

And

because it's so beautiful to me to watch them escaping because they're finally sort of reclaiming their lives.

Because I have realized that as human beings, I was looking up,

should we be eating salmon, right?

Is salmon an endangered species?

And no, it's not.

No, it's not.

In fact, Google tells you, you know what, if you want to go ahead and have a couple of bites, go ahead, choose the wild Alaskan ones because they're not as toxic.

And so actually, I realized that this article is basically us going, oh my God, the food has escaped.

Because I don't think that this has anything to do with us really caring about the salmon population, about their feelings.

And so to me, I support the salmon freedom movement very strongly and I hope even the ones that have been harvested as a protest I mean you know as a sign of

as a retaliation to the ones the 50,000 that have escaped I know that the 50,000 that have escaped will carry the torch of freedom further out so many salmon are contained in these farms I'm hoping that this escape will balance the scales a little

boom boom I mean it's hard to know where to go after that.

It's a story that's touched the world deeply.

I mean, I love the idea of this being like a Spartacist

revolution.

And if it's anything like Spartacus, the TV series, then these salmon are going to have been wearing not nearly as many.

Just absolutely ripped salmon, having a ridiculous amount of sex and destroying the Roman Empire as they do so.

But the question does arrive.

Let's look at the world, the human world that these salmon are trying to escape from.

Clearly, it's a bit of a mess.

We've had yet more tragedies in America's ongoing battle with progress.

And

I mean, clearly, these 50,000 salmon thought we don't need these land-based accessory-legged losers anymore.

We're better off out of it.

And well, let's start with

India news

DT.

We've had exam scandals here in Britain where our government has decided to really parade its fearless incompetence to quite extraordinary, almost Olympic level.

I understand there's

exam rows in India as well.

Yes, Andy, we have had the, we're currently in the middle of the protest against the for the postponement of the JEE and NET admission exams.

JEE stands for the joint entrance exam and NEET stands for the national eligibility and entrance test.

JEE is for engineering and architecture courses, and NEET is for medical courses.

Dadi exams have are being currently scheduled for September 1st but have already been postponed twice due to, of course, I don't know if anyone said this before on this podcast, unprecedented times.

And we are currently, India is currently number one, yes, thank you, at 70,000 cases a day.

These are kind of like the Indian SATs, which we are currently calling the Indian WTFs.

Students have protested

by wearing black armbands and changing their display pictures to black, which several Indian celebrities mistook for a Black Lives Matter protest sign after they discovered it's for our own Indians only.

They changed their DPs back to something that can be jerked off too, and that's as important a service for our students as any.

In fact,

one of the beautiful things that emerged out of this protest is the signs that students are holding up.

And one of the students has held up a sign saying, we want to be doctors.

Please don't make us patients.

And I think that that's wonderful.

I think that's wonderful.

It's also kind of saddening because it makes me realize a lot of really creative people are going to be going into the sciences.

At this point, Greta Thunberg has tweeted in support of the postponement of these exams, which is insane.

It's the ultimate endorsement because this kid spent some time ignoring exams when there was no pandemic and it was really good for her.

And there have of course also been floods in three major states in India, which is further exacerbating the problems that students have had.

At this point, it's like Noah offloading all the animals from the ark and saying, okay, guys, I don't know what the world is going to be like when we find land in terms of food or danger, but you have to f enough to repopulate your entire species almost instantly also no pressure but anyone up for an exam

at this point what this government has done is that they are regulating the exam dates from the center but the pandemic handling has to come from the state and this is the ultimate form of dadness by the central government where he's like oh my god i need to go out golfing so i'm gonna leave my kid in a car on a hot summer's day with the windows rolled up.

And then the kid dies and he takes him home and shouts at the mother, saying, it probably happened because you haven't been giving him enough water.

Now he's dead.

Whose fault is that?

I mean, this is the education ministry doubling down on a date, like a really persistent dude on bumble that you've been chatting with, but don't feel safe enough to go out with yet.

And this is the thing, like rising hate, scams, lack of education won't kill us, but postponing of exams will.

And look, the dates have already been shifted enough and multiple times.

And they say, but they say that they have to do the exams right now because it might lead to a lockjam of admissions in successive years because medical schools have a fixed schedule.

And I'm like, can we change the schedule of medical schools?

Because during a five-month pandemic, I don't know if anyone said this before, but unprecedented times, it's not like medical school schedules are unchangeable.

But no, no, no, no.

Oh my god, the academic year, the academic year.

I'm like, you know what?

You can't spell pandemic without academic.

You can.

That's why I never appeared for this exam.

But I guess the idea here is to let a bunch of students die in the entrance exam itself so that there'll be fewer applicants in the colleges.

This reminds me of my brother's father-in-law who, when he gets a bunch of resumes for a job, will split them in half, throw half in the bin and say, I don't want anyone unlucky working for me.

That's all that stuff.

That's what we do.

That's what we do with all job interviews in Britain.

It's just, you know, before we rip them in half and chuck them in the bin, we check what school and university that person went to to make sure they're made of the right stuff for this country.

Has there not been a thought, Aditi, to

take an example from Indian cricket?

The Indian Premier League cricket competition has been moved to the United Arab Emirates.

Could they not just make all Indian students sit their exams in Dubai?

You know,

the reputation that we have garnered through this pandemic has been, I don't know if anyone has ever said this before, but unprecedented.

So

Indians before the pandemic were not super welcome anywhere else,

and now I reckon it's going to get lesser.

For the Indian media, this situation is a gold mine because after the exams, there will be a series of heartwarming stories about the student who was tied to a chair and had to pee in a diaper and survive off of hair and socks while being stabbed continuously in the forehead with a plastic spork.

And they still managed to get 95%.

This super spreader was also a super scorer.

Because there is literally no stone-cold-hearted decision of the government that the media cannot turn into a heartwarming story.

Britain news now and Britain has been racked by a fundamental argument about its national identity yet again after the BBC announced that the last night of the proms concerts, the annual flag-waving festivity of patriotic music, will only include instrumental versions of the songs Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia, Land of Hope and Glory, which those unfamiliar with might be surprised to discover is actually about Britain.

And Rule Britannia, which despite being a popular song, appears to be a memo that got lost somewhere in Boris Johnson's intray underneath a bigger memo reminding him to dick around, talk shit, abdicate responsibility and blame anything that moves.

It's been a fascinating look into the way Britain is at the moment.

I once went to a thing called Proms in the Park, where they have a sort of concert in Hyde Park and they show live TV relay from the Albert Hall of

the concerts going on there and the annual proms festivities.

And I can safely say it was probably the dullest evening of my life.

And bear in mind the number of my own gigs I've been to.

That is, you know, that is

a high accolade.

you know it's I mean it's not really my thing these kind of uh this kind of uh you know musical uh

musical acts of patriotism I'm not to be honest I've always struggled with patriotism it's just not really not really my favourite hobby I prefer I prefer cricket

and you know it's

not really you know other people you know do like patriotism but don't like cricket each to their own we all find what we can find to keep ourselves distracted from reality whether it's immersing ourselves in the glorious exploits of elite level sports players and athletes, or waving a little flag and singing objectively silly and impressively anachronistic songs.

So the

it's so what happened is the BBC said they were going to do a musical only version of these two songs.

Then the

right-wing media largely jumped in and they're saying this is another attack on

British tradition.

The song Rule Britannia contains the lyric Britons never never shall be slaves.

And Boris Johnson said I think it's time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history.

Now,

let's give him some credit.

He's doing his level best to ensure that we're no longer cringingly embarrassed about our past, because this is heftily camouflaged by cringing embarrassment about our present and a stomach-churning sense of dread about our future, which is probably the best way to deal with any lingering historic guilt we've got.

And also, cringing embarrassment, A.

Cringing embarrassment is the flip side of flag-waving pride.

I don't think you can have one without the other.

Personally, I can't really be bothered with either of them, but that doesn't mean I don't acknowledge both the great achievements of Britain's past and its deep, scarring sins domestically and internationally that have shaped Britain and indeed the world as it is today.

But

it's not really my thing, flag waving pride or cringe.

And also cringing embarrassment.

That's what you feel when you watch the Eurovision Song Contest, or remember Theresa May giving a conference speech, or watch highlights of England losing to New Zealand in 1986 in a test series, or think about having a prime minister who hid in a f ⁇ ing fridge.

That is cringing embarrassment.

Cringing embarrassment does not quite cover slavery and the sins of empire.

Stealing and murdering hundreds of thousands of people.

Oh, it does make me blush.

Cringing embarrassment.

He said we need to stop this self-recrimination and wetness.

Wetness?

Wetness.

Is it wet to think that maybe celebrating the lives of shysters like Robert Clive as discussed on the bugle with big bronze sniveling statues?

Which is the wetness there?

Or the wetness of hiding in a fridge to avoid a journalist.

Anyway, it's a good idea.

We know from the reaction to the Cardi B song that many conservative public figures disapprove of wetness.

And I am tempted to make a cheap joke about all wetness disappearing in the presence of Boris Johnson, but I'm better than that, you're better than that.

And we all know he meant

wetness in the flaccid British private schoolboy vernacular sense and not in its diametrically opposed female moistness sense.

Fably.

Show.

But people are accusing Boris Johnson of cynically attempting to provoke outrage in the culture war by criticising the BBC over their decision about the proms.

If you don't know what proms is, it's like the prom in American schools, except nothing to do with school or students, and more of a week of musical concerts with some banger karaoke sing-alongs like Jerusalem and God Save the Queen and thousands of people singing along to classical music because you're partying like it's 1899.

This year, of course, because of coronavirus concerns, the concert will be very different with fewer performers, concerns about how spitty horn sections in the orchestra can get.

I read an article about this.

Hot tip, extremely spitty, and there will be no audience to sing the words along anyway, whether they decide to have words or not.

Here's a hint: you can sing along at home, and nobody will know whether you're singing the words in a racist way, singing the words in a way that patriotically celebrates all the good things about British culture, or as the vast majority of people who sing along at concerts do, singing the words wrong.

As we all know, the actual lyrics of Brural Britannia are Rural Britannia, Britannia, rule the waves, la la la la la la la la waves.

People then spent hundreds of hours arguing about how cynical they thought this move had been by Boris, how distracted from the main issue they were or weren't, and whether the BBC are pandering leftist quizlings betraying the glorious spirit of the British people or actually quite fascist really and only pandering to to the leftists in order to conceal the hideous fact that they're actually fascistic, boot-licking, authoritarian kinksters with a penchant for being whipped by private schoolboys over a mahogany desk with your face buried in a bowl of eaten mess while an oil painting of a Mitford sister in a safari suit watches disapprovingly.

Sorry, what was the main issue?

What is the main issue we're talking about?

Yeah, the BBC claims the decision, as you say, was prompted by issues of COVID transmission and there being fewer performers.

Obviously, the right-wing press reported this as being the BBC being a front for a Marxist conspiracy to destroy Britain

and basically ran a headline saying BBC bans anyone from singing ever for the rest of time.

A BBC spokesman said for the avoidance of any doubt these songs will be sung next year.

Now, obviously, this is the BBC being lackeys to the government, a tub-thumping jingoist blathering on endlessly about Team GB.

Such is the curse of the BBC.

It simply cannot and will not win.

Well, this is the thing that I would like to note for everybody listening, whether in the UK or not, the proms haven't happened yet.

Yes.

Well, everyone is already outraged at what they assume will happen.

Oh, yeah, well, that's the key with outrage.

You have to get your outrage in early these days.

There's no point waiting for something to happen to be outraged about.

Land of Hope and Glory, for the sake of BBC balance,

they are just hearing, actually, they are going to now sing Land of Hope and Glory, but balance it out with a version entitled Land of Despair and Rubbishness, just to make sure that we get both sides of the picture.

And David Lammy, the Labour MP, accused the government of trying to distract from its own, quotes, relentless incompetence.

Now, I think

this is basically a good two-word summation of the Johnson regime.

So relentless incompetence.

I mean, at least with Theresa May, the incompetence lacks that fevered intensity that the Johnson Junta has brought to the task.

It's more a rubbish village fate where they forgot to order any tables.

All the raffle prizes had to be balanced on the back of the vicar who crouched on all fours for the whole afternoon, and where the food was ordered for the wrong month, so the sausages had gone moldy, and there was a wasp's nest in the apple-bobbing bucket.

That was Theresa May-level incompetence, but this relentless incompetence of John, that's a whole new level of commitment.

Well, they say women can multitask, so she was probably doing some quite competent things with her left hand while doing the incompetence with her right.

Whereas Boris Johnson is charging right ahead at it with that patriarchal power.

I like how David Lammy Lammy said the Prime Minister was trying to distract the public in a pathetic way.

He said he'll take any opportunity to start a culture war, thus, Lamy succumbing to the irresistible urge to leap into the very trenches of that culture war by drawing attention to the pointless fight that up until that point nobody knew needed having.

A couple of other Boris Johnson stories this week.

He has rubbished suggestions, which apparently emanated from Dominic Cummings' father-in-law, his Machiavellian advisor and behind-the-scenes shitsterer, that he that Johnson could step down in six months' time due to ongoing health issues.

He's labelled these suggestions as absolute nonsense and confirmed that he will, in fact, step down in six months due to massive incompetence and being shitless of having to do a real job.

And there was this wonderful story about he gave a speech in a school as he attempted to deflect blame for the exams fiasco.

And

whoever was the school librarian had lined up a spectacular array of books behind Johnson.

These books included The Twits by Roald Dahl,

the subtle knife, Fahrenheit 451 and various other dystopian stories about the collapse of civilization.

It was one of the most glorious, the subtle knife, another one, betrayed.

It was one of the most gloriously subtle burns that has possibly

ever been perpetrated in the history of political burning.

American news now, and well, I remember thinking last weekend to myself, you know, Andy, there is simply not enough going on in this world that is harrowingly, ominously dystopian.

Please, Almighty's use, give us something, just something, that proves that all hope of normality, dignity, and indeed hope itself can be truly crushed and we can all move on from the ephemeral affectation of optimism and accept that democracy and civilization are not only dead, but never truly alive.

Well, my prayers have been well and truly answered by the Republican Convention this week, which successfully boiled down every fear you could possibly have about the present and future of global politics into a week of soul-tremblingly weird propaganda.

Woo-hoo!

It's been

just bafflingly,

bafflingly terrifying.

I mean, nothing says, I'm cleaning the swamp, more than a series of your own family members who found themselves bafflingly in positions positions of alarming responsibility toadying up to daddy dedog whilst others expectorate into the gaping mouth of american democratic tradition precedent and legality um

alice have you uh have you been following the uh the this this curious parade of bizarness

i find myself almost incapable of watching more than 30 seconds of it without having an anxiety attack and i don't even have anxiety i just i find it incredibly stressful to watch and particularly the sort of as you say family circus shenaniganry Because normally, when politicians step forward into office holding the arms around the shoulders of their children and wives, what they're saying is, allow me to present to you the people who I will be ignoring for the next the rest of the term of my duty.

But he's presented his family as like this weird, internecine, political,

familial, hierarchical, dynastic power

system thing.

And all of them are awful.

Like, none of them are good.

All of them not only are awful, they look like they're having a horrible time being awful.

If you're gonna be awful, at least like enjoy it, cackle a bit, you know.

This is so cute, Alice.

It's so endearing to watch someone be confused by that.

I mean, have you seen Indian politics?

That's literally all it is.

That's so nice.

That almost gave me hope.

Yes, I think this is the terrible pain of being an optimist or having a bad memory.

One of the two.

I'm always surprised by how awful people can be.

Optimism and amnesia are happy bedfellows.

In other American news, naughty Christians news now, the Falwell family has found itself

caught up in another scandal.

Alice, you are

high-profile religious figures being massively hypocritical correspondent

with your background in pretty much every major global religion.

So

tell us what the Falwells have been up to.

I mean, this is an amazing story, Andy.

And by amazing, I mean a fairly straightforward story in which

the Falwells, who are a religious evangelical family who supported Trump, are now having been revealed with quite a lot of backing evidence that they supported Trump because he had evidence that they were having an affair with a young man.

And the constitution of the affair is not entirely clear, but it seems to be being agreed by pundits that it was Mr.

Falwell watching Mrs.

Falwell and this, at the time, pool boy, who then they later went into business with and fell apart, and he then revealed all.

I just feel like there are so many authoritarian figures in the evangelical religious community whose kink has to be hypocrisy.

Like the only reason to get that high in one of these performative moral scolding communities is to dial up the orgasm you have when privately betraying the principles you publicly espouse.

You know, you can just not be a religious leader.

You know, no one's going to get in trouble for having dirty sex in a hotel balcony if you're just Joe Bloggs.

You can join a community where that shit is encouraged, you know?

Those sex-based functions do tend to involve way more admin than you would think.

I have a friend who's into sex parties and they're always doing spreadsheets and colour coding consent symbolism and things like that.

It's quite heavy.

But I...

Sounds like what I do with cricket statistics.

But also, I mean, let's look at it from a biblical point of view.

Well, Andy, may I recommend swinging?

Well, I mean, you say that.

Of course, England's greatest swing bowler, Jimmy Anderson, reached 600 tough wickets this week.

So I've been doing a lot of swing, swinging swinging.

Oh, boy, could he bowl a set of keys into a glass fish bowl?

I will pass that on to him.

It's working with the BBC this week.

But biblically, I mean, people say it's hypocritical, but it just very much depends which version of the Bible you read.

In the Gospel, according to St.

Alvin, there is, of course, the parable of the voyeuristic priest masturbating while his wife shagged the toy boy.

There's the miracle of the inexplicable threesome.

And even if you go back to the Old Testament, which of course is the, or as we like to call it, the correct Testament,

in the book of Proverbs,

some proverbs that justify what the Foolwells have done.

Turn not your eyes away from your wife congruntling with a hot young dude, for the Lord also sees everything.

And the perving husband strangles the early pigeon.

I think that pretty much justifies.

Oh, yeah, very importantly, let not your seed fall on barren ground.

Let it fall on 1,000 thread count cotton sheets while your wife fks the poor boy.

There you go.

It very much depends how you translate the original.

I feel like we should end this with amen.

Amen.

One man.

Two men, one wife.

Well, that brings us to the end of this week's Bugle.

Thanks, as always, to our wonderful guests, Adece.

Great to have you back on the show.

Have you got any shows or

recordings or podcasts or videos to alert our listeners to?

You know, I would go back my two Netflix specials.

One of them is called Things They Wouldn't Let Me Say.

The other one is a part of the Comedians of the World series.

It's called Girl Meets Mike.

And the third one is called Mother of Invention, which is on nextupcomedy.com.

And please follow me on Instagram where I have a meltdown live at 4 p.m.

Indian Standard Time every day.

And follow me on Twitter where you will regret following me on Twitter.

And that's it.

Alice?

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

I have a weekly podcast called Tea with Alice.

I have a number of specials out available variously on Amazon Prime or Next Up Comedy or other things.

But you can get them all by going to patreon.com/slash Alice Fraser for a behind-the-scenes look at my glamorous life.

Yes.

Oh, before we go, Bugle Merch is alive and well

again after a bit of a bit of a break to spend some time in itself and think about

what is going on in the world, you can get t-shirts and socks and Christmas jumpers.

There are a few Christmas jumpers left before we are sold out and have to have a very difficult discussion about whether to have some more made or not.

But anyway, go to the website.

If you do not buy Christmas jumpers now, you are a perfect metaphor for the ways in which people are incapable of long-term thinking.

Just because it's hot where you are doesn't mean winter will never come.

That's right.

Set an example for the future generations of this planet by buying a Christmas jumper.

For them.

Thank you very much for listening.

We'll have a sub-episode next week and then be back with a full episode in a couple of weeks' time.

And we will play you out, as always, with some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers to join them and help keep the bugle healthy, free, and independent.

Go to thebugalpodcast.com and click the donate button.

James Conway is not that impressed with Pythagoras' theorem.

Sure, says James, Big P might have had some funky ideas about planets, the Earth, music and stuff like that.

But triangles?

Give me a break.

Seriously, who gives a flying one about right-angled triangles?

I often go months without even thinking about them, let alone using one.

Pythagoras should have kept that tedious guff to himself, the jumped-up protractor-waggling idiot.

No offense.

Strong point strongly made James.

Similarly, Nick Anderson is not convinced that tardigrades, the self-styled most resilient living creatures in the world, are really up to much, objectively speaking.

Well, well done them for being able to withstand extremes of heat, cold, radiation, pressure and oxygen and water deprivation, says Nick.

But what's the point if you're only one millimetre long?

If I was only one millimetre long, I reckon I could probably roll with a few more of nature's punches too, rails Nick.

Heff Davis acknowledges Nick's point, but adds that we need to, quote, give the tardigrades a bit of time.

They're probably playing a long game evolutionarily, and if we come back in one or two million years' time, I reckon we'll see tardigrades about an average of five to six, maybe six and a half feet tall, bustling around in power suits, making some seriously sweet dollar whilst not having to worry about air conditioning, nuclear wars, environmental devastation or burst water mains.

They are, concludes Heff, simply biding their time and learning from our mistakes.

Brian Wieger has come to the conclusion that not only is a vague sense of annoyance the natural state of all human existence, but that that very fact was in fact key to humanity's spectacular progress up the evolutionary rankings.

Being narked off about stuff made early humans think of solutions and improvements to try and make them less annoyed, explains Brian, like for example the door to make caves less irritatingly vulnerable to burglars and dinosaurs, or the wheel to make us less pissed off that we kept being outrun and mauled to death by sabre-toothed tigers and giant whippets, or the underpants for very obvious reasons.

Chris Blakely agrees and adds that being vaguely annoyed about stuff is generally way more useful as a human being than having opposable thumbs or having discovered how to do agriculture.

Thumbs tend to end up being twiddled to no discernible purpose, argues Chris.

Whilst agriculture is all very impressive, but we can get food from supermarkets now so it's probably had its day.

A vague sense of annoyance however is a key productivity driver alongside its evolutionary siblings, a furious sense of injustice and a rapacious sense of entitlement.

On the subject of vague feelings, Matt Shakespeare wonders whether there is a piece of terminology in the field of psychoanalysis that describes that feeling when you're being run over by a rhinoceros in your sleep.

None of the current terms I'm aware of quite do it justice, says Matt, who has also pledged to stop watching both nature documentaries and motor racing in the hour and a half before bedtime every night.

And that is the end of this week's 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.