Bugle 4158 - A vector of disease

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, hello Buglers.

Let's hope the start to this show is better than the start to the last live bugle show, which did not technically start when it started.

Hello, Buglers.

Is this working?

I don't think we've had any messages yet on Twitter to say that we can't hear you or see you or anything like last time.

So this does seem to be an unusually proficient start.

Hello buglers.

Welcome to the second ever Bugle livestream live show.

I am Andy Zoltzmann and if I was the last man on earth I would have lost a significant proportion of my audience and be deeply suspicious of the rest of them.

But I'm not the last man on earth.

There are several others still around.

Time will tell exactly where I end up in the the last Men on Earth rankings, but it's probably going to end up higher than would be ideal, but hopefully not top 5 billion, though.

That would be a significant disappointment.

It's Saturday, the 27th of June, 2020.

This is doubling up as issue 4,158 of the Bugle.

4,158 is also the average number of falsehoods that Donald Trump thinks of per weekday, which is, of course, it's slightly more at weekends.

So actually, for all the criticism he gets for dissembling so much, you've got to give him credit for restricting himself to just an average of 14 or 15 lies a day, according to the Washington Post bullshit tracker.

Right, let me just explain to you

what's going to happen in tonight's Stroke Today, Stroke Tomorrow morning show, delete according to time zone.

What's going to happen is this.

One, this introduction, which has already peaked.

Two, the introduction of our two co-hosts from a total of four hemispheres.

We've got north, south, East and West covered for you.

I've probably said that the wrong way around if you're looking up.

Anyway, but we've got them all covered.

So no complaining for everyone.

This is a four-hemisphere guested podcast.

Three, you're going to get some prime quality jokes about everything that's happening in the world right now or in the last week.

Four, there's going to be stuff about cricket.

I'm just warning you of that.

Promising, promising stroke warning.

Again, delete is applicable.

Five, there's going to be an audience QA.

This is where you come in, viewers.

You can tweet us at Hello Buglers with your cues and we will tell you to stick them right up your A.

Sorry, we will answer them to the best of

our ability.

Six, what's going to happen in the show?

Part six is a bit that we won't get around to and we'll quietly drop from the planned running order.

See if you can spot which bit it is that we don't actually do.

Seven, a formless and probably overlong ending, possibly involving some puns.

And eight, party in the shed, involving me on my own and my friends from ancient Rome.

So that is the end of phase one of the show.

Time to meet our co-host and indeed producer,

producer Chris.

Well, obviously, we can't see what is being broadcast, so I don't know if you're on screen currently.

Hello, hello, Chris.

Hello, Andy.

Yes, good evening.

And your face is on the screen too, as is Alice and Hari's.

All right, okay.

So, the yeah, I could switch it to just put your nice big face on it instead.

All right, well, I mean, that's I mean, my face does not need to be big,

as

my lack of film castings would no doubt testify.

So, joining us, firstly, from 15 sorry from 10 and a half thousand miles away as the crow flies assuming it is a very focused crow which has packed enough snacks for a long flight and is not to be blown off course by the wind at all or about seven and a half thousand miles away as the very determined rabbit burrows in Sydney, Australia at an insultingly early time of day tomorrow.

It's Alice Fraser.

Hello, Andy.

Hello buglers.

Yeah,

we were hanging out here in the corners of the screen because that's why we became comedians to be looked at.

Comedians should be watched and not spoken.

I mean, to me, holding the microphone, standing here listening to you talk, waiting for my cue to talk,

gave me a real insight into the plight of the roving reporter on a news show.

That's very much how I see your role on the bugle, Alice.

There's just no way not to look awkward.

That is also the title of my forthcoming

book of modelling shots.

Also

joining us from one of the silliest sides of one of the silliest oceans from New York City, the city that for the first time in its history this year has actually slept.

It's the man who so often rescues this show's attempt to ensure that its co-hosts' names contain all five vowels in the alphabet.

So when I say, oh, you, it is in fact a grateful compliment.

It's Hari Kondobolu.

And actually, Andy, I'm in San Diego.

Oh, are you?

All right.

I got the hell out of that, Cesspool.

No, my my partner and I are having a baby, and in order for the baby to be born without as much COVID, we moved to San Diego.

But I was thinking about what you were saying about the positives of the coronavirus, and there's two things people don't talk about enough about coronavirus.

One, you know, very good with diversity, right?

Yep.

Two, great with children.

There you go.

Again.

Well, congratulations on

the imminent baby.

Due out of the world.

It was the best time to have one, Andy.

I couldn't imagine a better time to bring life into the world.

Well, exactly.

I mean, it'll come out having had nine months of practice at solitary confinement anyway.

I mean, that's the ideal training for the world that

it's coming into.

Alice, how's Australia?

Australia is pretty good with Victoria letting down our slate of states in terms of they've just had a spike of COVID.

So

our Premier of New South Wales glad asperigaclian has said, nobody have anything to do with Victorian citizens as an official announcement.

Don't be involved with Melbourneians.

Right.

Okay, don't get involved with the Victorians is advice that the world would have done well to listen to some considerable time ago.

On the 27th of June, in the year 2020, or the 27th of Regretuary, in the year 1 CVE, depending on what calendar you're using, on this day in the year 1743, there was the Battle of Dettingen, a classic showdown in the War of Austrian Succession, which is one of those classic wars from history whose very name, the War of Austrian Succession, really makes you think we are a species of idiots.

Britain,

a war for Austrians, anyway, Britain teamed up with Hanover and Austria and gained a classic, classic British victory in that it was not particularly impressive.

It was quite lucky and had no real long-term relevance.

I mean, it's like we didn't even need World Cups to be invented to pull that kind of thing off.

And Team GB that day back in 1743 was captained by King George II, and it marked the last time that a British monarch led the troops into battle.

Officially, anyway.

But was it really?

Because recently declassified papers that I've got just down here suggest that the current monarch, Elizabeth the oh hang on, I'm hopeless with numbers,

second,

trading as the Queen, also known as Betty Baubles, Lizzie the Lizard, the Royal Rumbler.

These papers suggest to the Queen

that the Queen did actually fight in a number of battles.

The Battle of the Sexes, she fought in that.

She brought a radically female approach to monarching more than any British monarch since, oh, Queen Victoria at least, I would say.

She fought in the Battle of Hastings, loves a reenactment as the 68-time British monarch of the year, and the Battle of Trafalgar, when she got a bit overexcited on a royal visit to a top-secret government time travel research facility and had a lovely day out in a boat.

On this day in 1898, the first, on the subject of the boat, the first circumnavigation of the globe, was completed by Joshua Slocum, a Canadian living in the USA.

He arrived back in Newport, Rhode Island on the 27th of June 1898 after a three-year journey taking in 46,000 miles of boat craftery with an apology to his wife.

Sorry, love, I turn left instead of right at the start.

I've got a terrible sense of direction.

And an interview with the live round-the-world trip commentary team, who'd been filling desperately for three years with no action to report on.

I guess there's only so many times you can bang on about pigeons and cakes.

Slocum wrote a book.

about his 1,000-day journey from A back to A, the impressively honestly titled Sailing Alone Around the World.

And the author, Arthur Ransom, said of this book, boys who do not like this book ought to be drowned at once.

And

that is a different age of book reviewing.

But also, I like the haste of it.

Not, you know, there's no appeals process there.

If you did not like this book, I mean, I guess, is that a way to encourage a love of literature?

The threat of drowning.

I don't know the influence it had on the British education system.

But like this book, or I will drown you.

Well, it shouldn't be said as anyone who is part of the book club on the Titanic would no doubt testify interesting fact about Slocum he never learned to swim and that's an inspiration for the modern world you wouldn't have thought it'd be possible to sail around the world without being able to swim but he didn't he did it and you wouldn't have thought that you know it would be possible to be prime minister with complete the rest of this joke yourself

as always it's good it's good not to be able to swim as a sailor it gives you an incentive I guess so and I guess it's good not to have any of the basic skills required to be Prime Minister.

I mean, it makes you really focus on the job in hand.

I mean, if Prime Ministers immediately began to sink physically the moment they stopped Prime Ministering to their full capacity, that might actually work.

Yeah.

It's possible.

And yeah, I mean, I guess.

So the cabinet room in Downing Seat should just be over a shark, maybe a shark tank rather than, I mean,

that would focus the minds wonderfully.

We're making a better world, Buglers.

That is what this show is all about.

It's not even slightly about that

it's generally about further muddying the already impenetrable waters of the news as always a section of this audio newspaper is going straight in the bin

in the bin and this this week's section in the bin is a bins section

today is the anniversary of numerous celebrities using bins including

Queen Elizabeth I and ironically both Gandhi and Churchill and bins have arguably been one of the most important human inventions ever, alongside things like the wheel, the stilt, the sofa, and the hidden camera wildlife documentary Robot Animal.

So we dedicate a full section of today's visual audio newspaper to bins, including we look at the greatest bins in the world, including the Earth's crust, the ultimate bin.

Mother Nature, shit parent of the year for hundreds of billions of years in a row, just dumped all her dead stuff in there.

And hey, not very presto, coil, coal, oil, and gas.

Now, we've done our best to clean up her mess by burning it all, but it just shows shows the rubbish you leave behind doesn't just disappear kids if the oil industry can teach us a lesson it is that also one of the great bins of the world the sea what a bin that is 70 of the earth's surface 100 bin terrific bin when you've got a bin bigger than your house you know you can chuck all kinds of stuff in it without worrying about it and that's how we've used our impressively capacious prime natural bin the sea and people who complain about it just remember more than 90% of the sea is still water so don't believe what the doomsayers and dolphin apologists say.

Use it or lose it.

Sorry, use it and lose it.

And if you're not close to the sea, then for your bin you can always use Rivers and Deltas, the pre-bin of the big bin of the sea, out of sight, out of mind, as certain high-profile oil companies are trying to prove in a court case here in Britain at the moment.

Also, we look in our bin section at some of the great bins of history, including the bin into which Neville Chamberlain threw his piece of paper from Berlin while saying the words, bastard just drew a cock and balls on it.

The bin into which Thomas Edison threw his design for the electric gallop horse after hearing that the car had been invented other classic bins from history include boston harbour and australia classic british bin and um also the bin into which boris johnson threw his faustian contract with mephistopheles inc whilst saying the words can't imagine he'll call this in at any point soon that section in the bin and uh we are now after how long's the intro these intros these live shows chris they get uh even more out of control what are we at what are we at on the clock only 16 16 minutes so far, Andy.

I think maybe it's time for you to tell people about a website they should be visiting.

A good point.

I mean, obviously, the prime purpose of this show is purely to bring some light into the everlasting

gloominess of the universe with a live bugle show.

But also, if you want to take this opportunity to contribute to

the bugle to keep it free and independent and alive and healthy,

then go to

the webpage, thebuglepodcast.com, thebuglepodcast.com, and click the donate button.

Consider that a uh a a voluntary ticket price or a voluntary subscription.

It's uh it's up to you.

Right, it is now time for top story this week.

Uh there's only one place to start.

I'm sure you would both agree, Hari and Alice.

There's only one story that has dominated the world this week, and that is the news that Boris Johnson has banned cricket.

He has

banned cricket in Britain.

He said that recreational cricket cannot restart because, in his words, the cricket ball is a natural vector of disease.

He's saying this,

this most holy of all objects,

is a vector.

This is worse than Cromwell banning Christmas, Alice.

This is the greatest infringement on our British liberties since the last ice age made half of us live under a slab of ice.

This is worse than that.

I agree with you, Andy.

The ball is a natural vector of disease.

It is an outrageous statement.

I would understand it if you said the bat is a natural vector of disease, given that that is pure scientific fact.

But

that's all I have.

Right.

Look, these, look, I'm rubbing them on my face.

Is this too dangerous for you?

How could this is the most holy object that the queen's orb is in fact a cricket ball wrapped in silver.

This, this, you can, you cannot ban these holy holy objects.

He said this.

The problem with cricket, as everybody understands, is that the ball is a natural vector of disease.

Now, let me just pick up a few things on that.

One, the problem with cricket is not that.

The problem with cricket is that it's too short.

Only five days for a match, a couple of months for a series.

That is not enough.

Give me a longer distraction from reality.

We've scaled it back.

It used to go on for two weeks sometimes.

There are wars that are shorter than a cricket match.

There literally have been wars that have been shorter than a cricket match, including there was a 38-minute war between Britain and Zanzibar in I think 1895.

First fact of the entire history of the bugle.

Other recreational sports have been allowed back.

Football, tennis, basketball, lying in parliament, government cover-ups and befouling democracy.

All fine now, but not cricket.

And above all, for Boris Johnson to accuse another thing of being a vector of disease, even in the compendium of the hypocritic arts, compiled and updated every day by Johnson and his enablers, stroke ministers, stroke advisors.

This is a new peak of bilge, if indeed bilge can peak.

Amidst the Niagara Falls of Hypocrisies, which Johnson has splattered all over this country, this is the armisable lunatic in a fluorescent barrel plummeting over the edge.

Johnson calling a cricket ball a vector of disease.

That is like Ludwig van Beethoven accusing a kid's plastic toy electric piano that plays a selection of four simple tunes of being a top-class composer of solo, ensemble, and orchestral pieces.

This is bullshit.

Let's just do a rough guesstimation here on this Evector of Disease accusation.

Johnson tooling around in March, shaking hands in hospitals, Phlem Flannering and

idiocy signalling his way to a far worse natural catastrophe than would have been the case had he not been Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister had instead been a five and a half ounce hard red leather-coated ball with a stitched seam around it.

And is it red leather or yellow leather?

It's red leather.

Red leather.

You can get

a lot ones as well, but no.

Red leather.

No, that is a that is a that is that is tooth.

Cricket is not ready for that level of innovation yet, Alice.

We will talk about you further later in the show.

But if Prime Minister Cricketball had been in charge, by virtue of doing absolutely nothing apart from just being round and red with some stitching around the outside and being a vehicle of choice or a vector of disease, this is an agent of delight.

Anyway, the country will be back on track.

Besides which, and sorry for ranting on about this, recreational cricket is a sport made for social distancing having played a considerable amount in my life i'm well aware that one of the prime attractions of cricket is a participation sport is that it offers you distance from all the rest of humanity solitude in a field and besides that if you're concerned about the ball being infected know that at the not entirely stratospheric level of cricket that i played many of the participants had at a rough estimate 60 alcohol in their breath that is the most hygienic sport you can possibly have in the current circumstances Vector of the if Johnson is looking for a title for his autobiography, Vector of Disease should be right up there, assuming that he doesn't want to go with My Deeply Regrettable Life, or Everything You're About to Read Is Probably a Lie, or Why Turds Float to the Top, a political life story, or I shouldn't I should not have been allowed to do any of this, or A Haunting Lesson for Future Generations, or A Bluffer's Guide to Overweening Personal Ambition, or Who Bris for Dummies, or simply

the family show.

Anyway,

I think I said my piece.

Let us move on to other aspects of the coronavirus situation and the

corona complacency that seems to be overtaking the world.

I mean, the virus is still chugging along doing its nasty business, infecting rising numbers each day.

It's about to blast through the half a million confirmed deaths barrier.

But around much of the world, and certainly in Britain and a lot of the USA, To many people, it's basically over.

It seems to have gone and we are just

ignoring everything now.

Hari, what's the I mean, your vice president, the vice president of all of your hearts in America,

Mike Pence,

this week hailed the truly remarkable progress that America has made in its battle with

the pandemic, despite there being record numbers of cases every day.

Okay, but here's it.

He said there's been truly remarkable progress, of course, after 40,000 people died in a 24-hour period.

But here's the thing.

Truly remarkable progress is true if you don't say what you're progressing to exactly.

He never specifies, right?

So, yes, 40,000 cases in 24 hours is truly remarkable progress to mass graves, economic ruin, and a forever-scarred American population.

The non-specificity of the word remarkable has got Mike Pence through many a press conference and sex act.

Mike Pence and none the smarter.

That was a six pence and none the richer reference from

the mid-90s, a joke I've made on numerous occasions on this program over the last several years.

I feel like it's either that he doesn't understand words or he doesn't understand numbers.

Because when they say things like this, you think, who are they fooling?

And then you see who they're fooling and you start to wonder how you're meant to operate in a world with that many idiots while your clever vegan friend refuses to have children.

I should point out out, it's not 40,000 deaths a day, it's 40,000 cases.

But in terms of exaggerating, you know, we didn't start it, we didn't start it.

And if you're counting the deaths on the inside rather than actual physical deaths, I think it's way, way higher than that.

I mean, the Trump administration is full of ineffective Jedis, right?

The worst kind of Jedi.

It's because they keep trying to pull the mind tricks like, oh, we're making truly remarkable progress.

40,000 people have died in 24 hours.

No, we are making truly remarkable progress.

And each time they do it, it's not working.

None of us believe that you have not pulled a mind trick.

You are lying to us.

But they keep going.

They keep trying.

And you gotta admire that.

Andy, I enjoyed your live action fact checked.

If there was more of that in news, we'd be better off.

Well, if there was a live fact checking in all news programs,

a 24-hour news channel would not have enough time in the day to broadcast it all.

I just want a mild penalty electric collar.

Every time they tell a lie, they have to check it.

Ah, footnote.

Footnote required.

Like Wikipedia, but.

Again, that could be devastating for the environment.

The amount of electricity that would be needed for that could end this planet

years sooner than it's already due to end.

Go ahead.

I was going to say Anthony Fauci

took a slightly opposite view to Pence.

Pence, as you say, we said, hey, truly remarkable progress.

Fauci said America has a serious problem.

I guess you just need to put them together.

Truly remarkable progress into a serious problem.

So there you go.

It's just two people saying one thing.

But as Trump is eventually going to refer to him, chicken little Fauci is just making a big deal about this because he uses science.

Well, yes, I mean science.

When does science ever do this world any good?

All I know is that it

made the world rounder than it needed to be.

It made things fall out of trees that didn't used to fall out of trees, like apples.

You sit under an apple tree before Isaac Newton came along with his science.

You sit under an apple tree, confident that you weren't going to get smashed on the head by falling fruit.

I mean, that is kind of Trump and Pence's approach.

During a recent press conference

with the team, Pence said that increased testing is generating more cases.

He says, quote, it's almost inarguable that more testing is generating more cases.

Now I would say it's not almost inarguable.

It is definitely

arguable that testing is leading to more cases because we're in the middle of a global pandemic.

Now it's not that the tests cause the disease, right?

Even though that is consistent with Trump's logic.

It's that it reveals the truth, right?

So basically Trump's logic is consistent with this because if I don't tell the IRS how much money I have, I don't have to pay taxes on it.

Right?

It's not cheating if she doesn't know.

This is consistent Trumpian logic all the way through.

Pence also, to his credit, was not wearing a mask, just like Trump.

Pence was not wearing a mask because, like condoms, that's not what God intended to cover a major orifice.

Right.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Because he's Christian, and that's a thing he says.

Well, he made orifices not to be covered.

I mean, he's pretty skeptical about underpants, to be honest.

But I could argue, like with pence and sex, he could have just cut a hole in the middle of the mask.

Please don't say the words pence and sex again.

That is

certainly a book that never needs to be written.

Also, it's just strange.

Americans don't believe in wearing masks.

There are protests against public safety, as if it's like a politically correct choice, something that's preventing you from living your life.

It's like they might as well say, well, if I want to put a fork in the toaster, I damn well will.

If I want to put out an electric fire with water, that's my right.

Well, that's why

you people wanted independence from Britain, the nation of great common sense, where we do not stick forks in toasters and then jump in the bath with a lot of it.

Just for clarity,

which you people are you talking about?

Because I have two.

I mean, taken out of context, that looks bad.

I mean, even taken in context, it looks quite bad.

It looks better if you mean the American part to me.

No, what I meant was men.

That was surely clear.

I meant men.

Boris Johnson has warned the British public against, quote, taking liberties with social distancing rules after hot weather led to large public gatherings in Britain.

So,

Boris Johnson has warned British people against taking liberties.

Now, could you please just go back and listen to that bit I did earlier and just change some of the words?

Maybe this time instead of the Beethoven bit, you could say, oh, it's getting harder and harder to come up with these things.

It's like being told by Genghis Khan to find a nice girl and settle down,

or in in fact, like being told by Boris Johnson to find a nice girl and settle down for that matter.

Or like being told by Mary Curie to just let diseases take their course because it's obviously what nature intended.

Taking liberty.

If Boris Johnson is looking for title for a title for volume two of that autobiography, taking liberties pretty much covers everything he's done this year.

It works on different levels, like all the best book titles.

May I argue that it's also like JFK telling you to duck?

You may have that.

You may definitely have that.

Taking liberties is such a sort of a regency phrase.

That's when you ask a lady for a second waltz.

It's not like

licking strangers on the bus.

I like that.

Those are the two phases of

courtship.

A second waltz or licking on the bus.

So

British people responded to Boris Johnson's suggestion that they don't take liberties with the regulations and abide by social distancing regulations by putting on their what would Boris Johnson himself and his pocket Machiavelli do wristbands and completely ignoring that advice.

Britain's beaches once again revelled in their dual status as public garbage depot, communal toilet and infectious disease laboratory.

And there's been a lot of criticism about the number of people crowding onto Britain's beaches and it shows how context is everything.

I mean everyone desperately trying to get on a beach at different times in history has been seen as heroic, even defining acts of selfless bravery.

But in this particular D-Day, the D stands for don't give a shit, not whatever it stood for in 1944.

There are different theories.

Some people say it just stood for day,

apparently, or da-da!

Or don't try this at home, or ding-dong, delivery for Dr.

Deutsch.

I forget which one was the

official D.

What's the beach situation in Australia?

Because Australia is famously,

as we talked about on the quiz, it's girt girt by sea, the beach.

Obviously, you have a back-up beach in the entire centre of Australia.

Has beach culture been affected by

the virus?

I mean, only delightfully so in that the crowding of tourists has now evaporated because we don't have any tourists anymore, which everyone is very pleased about except the people who make their money off tourism, which turns out to be quite a large proportion of our nation.

But certainly the scenes of crowding, such as we're seeing in Bournemouth,

are not as common here.

In Australia, if we go to a beach and there is one person on that beach, we go, oh well, that one's taken.

In other

COVID complacency news,

tennis has been struck by a COVID complacency scandal.

Djokovic UTM, the unstoppable tennis machine, Novak Djokovic, has discovered to his cost that the coronavirus is no respecter of the Serbian superstars' superhuman athleticism, technically perfect ground strokes and ruthless competitive edge.

And has dished out one of the biggest defeats of

his career.

It was a tournament that he was the figurehead of called the Adria Tour in the Balkans.

A well-meaning contest involving players from the historically not often harmonious region playing each other in several different cities.

A lovely idea.

The only problem was it turns out that there is a massive pandemic knocking around places like the world.

So putting 3,000 people in a small stadium, the players all hugging each other as God intended tennis players to do, and then going out partying like it's 1999 or indeed any other year before 2020.

That has proved to be a bit of an issue, and it sparked an outbreak.

Djokovic and several of his fellow players and his coach have now been COVID tested and come back positive.

I like the reaction to his tournament and the inevitable way that

it ended.

I'm happy he has COVID.

Oh, controversial statement.

Are you just a hardcore Federer fan?

Is that it?

Correct.

And if Federer doesn't keep his Grand Slam record, I hope Nadal gets it, even though it's primarily on the French Open, which makes it a little suspect in my opinion.

No offense to Clay, but come on now.

But yeah, f

him.

F his trash family.

Fuck Clay?

His political correctness gone mad, Harry.

Clay's fine.

It's a little messy.

I don't understand.

Because why would one play on clay?

How often is there clay around?

You play, you know, you know, it's not like, oh my god, look at this.

Look at this, all this clay.

What do we do with all this clay?

We play on it.

You play on grass, you play on cement, you play on different types of hardcore.

When is clay just around to play in?

It's absurd.

I mean, how

is X around?

There's no argument against any form of sport.

How often are you surrounded by like eager teenagers bringing you a ball like this?

It's...

A lovely little pun being sent in by Martin, the regular listener to the show, Novak Djokovic.

And he's a

vaccination skeptic, of course.

So thanks for bringing your own puns to a bugle show.

Does that mean we won't have any?

I cannot guarantee or deny.

deny that.

But it's interesting, it could be a new tactic because Djokovic has really come out of this very badly.

And his opponents on court might,

you know, eventually, you know, succumb to his impregnable defensive court coverage and precision engineering of his attacking strokes.

But the virus, crucially, did what the likes of Federer and Adal Murray and the rest of this tennis generation have so often failed to do against Djokovic, and that is be a virus.

And it's easy to say with hindsight.

But if only last year's epic Wimbledon final, fifth set, Roger Federer had tried being a microscopic pathogen instead of the most beautiful tennis player of all time,

he might have prevailed.

Just some breaking news coming through on COVID.

The United Nations has banned the phrase the new normal,

which is long, long overdue.

The worst phrase that has emerged in the English language this year.

The UN's special rapporteur, brackets, language and phraseology, Kipax von Gertrude, announced it's the most depressing collection of words ever f ⁇ ing put together, if I may exaggerate slightly, which I may do because I'm human, it's what we do.

Von Gertrude continued, as a planet and a species, we have to remind ourselves that these things are not the new normal, they are the temporarily acceptable abnormal, ta, which is a better acronym than,

or they're the tolerable under current circumstances, but otherwise, obviously, horrific the ta-hoo.

Von Gertrude concluded, We know all know things are quite shit right now, so let's stop pretending we are fine with them continuing to be shit forever under the veneer of a new normal branding.

It's a shit phrase for a shit phase.

Hey, well, there's no such thing there's no such thing as the new normal.

By the time it's normal, it can't be new anymore.

That's how normal works.

It should be banned.

It should be banned.

The new normal i is just the inevitable passage of time.

iPod.

That's a nice one.

Love you like for any.

Let's move on to American news now.

And well it's a election year, Hari.

and you've already told us that you've fled America, albeit only for another part of America.

I mean that the the polls look

less than promising for

Trump, although I guess the baffling thing is for an outsider is how he's above 0.01%.

Yeah yeah.

Americans very stupid.

I think it has to do with the chemicals we put in the food.

Biden has a real chance of winning this if he does as little as possible, right?

This is, we just got it using one sports analogy, it's like a rope of dope, right?

You know, Trump can't stop swinging.

He'll punch himself out, and all Biden has to do is not say something stupid or the bigger risk, die.

So

that's one.

Using another sports analogy, we don't need to be going for sixes and boundaries right now.

Just

Single runs.

Just go for single runs back and forth.

Just stay on the wicket all day, and we have this.

You like that, Andy?

You like that?

You like my books?

I love the effort that you put in.

But

the Trump Tulsa story is

rather kind of fascinating look at modern American politics.

I mean, I guess it's another addition to the almanac of sentences you would not have expected to hear if you'd been asked to think about the sentences you expected to hear at the start of this millennium.

long title, very long book.

And that sentence is: well, obviously, the president of America was scuppered by loads of fans of Korean pop music, which led to a poor attendance at a mass rally during a pandemic of a virus that is easily transmitted at things like mass rallies, meaning that not many people were there to see him talk almost exclusively about himself at a time of multiple deep national crises.

I mean, that is not a sentence you would have expected 20 years ago.

Not unless you were Biff in Back to the Future 2 and you were given an encyclopedia instead of a sports almanac.

Oh, Terrible job.

That's a terrible joke.

He drew 6,000 people

as opposed to the tens of thousands he claimed he would draw,

which, on one hand, I will say as a touring stand-up comic, there was a part of me that was like, oh man, I can't draw 6,000 in Tulsa.

Also, it was a mistake.

You don't go,

I think it might have been the first time in Tulsa you'd book a 500-seater, right?

You've got to sell it out.

You do five or six of those.

People just are happy with sellouts.

Like, I just sold out six hate rallies in Tulsa.

That is impressive, as opposed to I barely filled up a stadium.

You know what I mean?

Also, he played Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down, which the Tom Petty family and his estate did not like, and they they filed a cease and desist to prevent him from using it.

What was weird is not only that he used that you know Tom Petty, a Tom Petty song, but that he used used that Tom Petty song when there are other Tom Petty songs that would have made more sense for him.

Like

Free Fallen for the U.S.

economy.

Or

Don't Come Around Here No More for immigration.

Or perhaps most appropriately, Walls.

And

this happens to Republicans all the time when they try to use music, right?

Because, you know, conservative music sucks.

So they try to pick music that they think is more popular, which generally is from liberal artists.

Like Reagan did this with Born in the USA, right?

Springsteen's hit.

George W.

Bush did this with the John Cougar Mellon caps on Rock in the USA.

He was asked to stop doing it.

Eye of the Tiger by Survivor, right?

Mitt Romney did that because that's the last song he had heard.

And

conservative artists suck.

So this is what always ends up happening.

So what I think that Republicans have to do in these situations, Republican politicians have to use, is go for what's free on the public domain, right?

Because then there won't be cease and desist orders, right?

How about you use the Tetris song, right?

How about you use an M-I-D-I of the Back to the Future theme song, right?

I'm not sure Tetris is appropriate.

That's all about all different colors harmoniously linking together, isn't it?

Yeah, but it's also about construction and building.

And they like things like that.

Also, why not just put the national anthem in a loop over and over and over again?

The problem being that that means people will never sit down

and

would lead to people shitting themselves and pissing themselves and starving to death because the loop would mean that they would not be able to move and they would be frozen in that position or be called a hypocrite and not patriotic.

Well, of course the estate, it's the estate of Tom Petty which has put out this cease and assist, Tom Petty having died last year, which is the very definition of not even over my cold, dead corpse.

And

K-pop stands are suggesting some kicking tunes that Trump might use instead, including Da-Doo Dadoo or Baboom Baboom by Momo Land, Ring Ding Dong by Shiny, Bang Bang Bang by Big Bang, and Fantastic Baby,

all options in the K-pop pantheon.

Well, thanks for bringing us up to date with

K-pop.

And it was also a campaign

run on TikTok, which I'm not familiar with, partly because I'm 45, and anything that sounds like TikTok, I'm obviously going to stare clear of.

It's a little bit

too close to home.

Petty's not the Tom Petty's not the first musician or estate of musician who have

expressed dissatisfaction at Trump using their music.

Neil Young, Rihanna, the Rolling Stones, Queen, The Queen, Earth, Wind and Fire, the first two of which Trump is clearly very skeptical of.

Guns and Roses, only really into the first of those.

R.E.M., Farrell, Glenn Miller, Mozart, Bach, 12th-century liturgical hit singer-songwriter Hildegard of Bingen, all birds and birdsong, and Solomon from the Bible, the star of the dance floor bump and grind classic, The Song of Solomon.

But

I mean, as you said, there appears to be no music that he could, he could, I mean, probably a few country songs, but there is a band,

there's a band called Kids in Cages who have some stuff on soundplay.

They would at least seem to have an appropriate band name, although I guess petty is apposite and heartbreakers

certainly is if you're a fan of American democracy.

There's been

some

Supreme Court action in the

States Hari.

Donald Trump has railed against what he described as the Supreme Court's horrible decisions, recent rulings, including that gay and transgender workers should be protected by federal employment laws.

That kind of horrible, horrible decision.

I mean, is he just

are there just no barriers left for him in terms of who he can offend?

And he's almost kind of retreading old ground now.

Well, I mean, it's consistent with his with his old.

We've lost, Hari, we've lost your audio.

No,

I forgot to hold the microphone, is what happens.

How long have you been in showbiz, Hari?

It's been a while while since I've been on stage.

I moved my computer closer to the wall so I could have a plug point.

I then spilled water all over the floor and then forgot about my microphone.

So here I am again.

You were saying?

Oh, it's about the Supreme Court's decisions.

Well, it's consistent.

It's consistent with

the Republican Party stance to be the pro-discrimination and anti-vulnerable people party.

This is it.

This is in the convention message.

This is what they strongly believe in at this point.

Trump was mostly upset he couldn't fire anybody on the court

because that's not allowed.

And he also, in addition to saying these were horrible decisions,

added,

but there's two cases, right?

One was about

transgender rights, and the other one was about DACA, right?

Dreamers, undocumented children being allowed to stay to finish their educations and get a pathway to citizenship.

So, in response,

he said, they're going to take our guns away.

We will lose the Second Amendment.

Now, neither case is about the Second Amendment, but if you say they're going to take our guns away, it's like a bat signal

for far-right moral.

It's like it's the batshignal, essentially.

But I guess, you know, let's try and be positive about it.

I mean, Trump gets criticized a lot

on this show.

And I believe, I've heard that certain other media outlets are not entirely positive about the man.

But America's been a lot of criticism of America for the delusions that it's fed itself over the years and the hypocrisies, the myth it's told itself and the world about it being a land of the free and a place of equality, opportunity, openness, and tolerance that it's not always lived up to.

And at last, Tyree, you've got a president who doesn't even pretend to give a shit about all that, who's quite open about his hostility to all manner of different minorities, to foreigners, to people who want to live that bogus dream of America.

And people start complaining: you can't have it both ways, America.

You cannot have it both ways.

We wanted a change of pace.

We were

always good tactic in cricket as well.

Oh, shut up.

So, in all some British politics news

as well, there was

another fascinating look into the workings of politics.

There was

a motion in Parliament this week put forward by the Labour Party paying tribute to health and social care staff expressing concerns about backlogs in the health system and children's mental health and waiting lists in the COVID era.

And this motion put to Parliament continued that the House is concerned that the routine testing of NHS and social care staff is not currently in place and calls on the government to implement a programme of weekly testing of NHS and social care staff to enable NHS services to safely resume and ensure continuity of services throughout the winter alongside a functional national public test, trace and isolate system.

Now, you would have thought there's nothing too controversial there after all.

The government has much trumpeted its test, trace and isolate system, but they voted against it.

And not only did they vote against it, but they put forward an amendment.

Boris Johnson Health Secretary Matt Hancock and various other Conservative MPs put forward an amendment which struck out that last paragraph about putting in weekly testing for NHS and social care staff and replaced it with this.

And this House recognises the unprecedented action the government has taken in its tireless efforts against the coronavirus to protect the NHS and save lives.

So what we have here, buglers, in the wondrous workings of democracy, is not only voting against protecting the NHS and thus risking lives, but then congratulating yourselves for protecting the NHS and saving lives.

We've got not only refusing to do something that you'd obviously have been doing months and months and months ago but failed to due to your own willful institutionally baked and incompetence but then using Parliament to promote your own propaganda that you've actually done a f ⁇ ing terrific job which you haven't and the clue was in the motion itself which with the amendment basically the motion changed the motion changed from things are shit let's do better to things are shit haven't we done well andy i'm not sure if i agree with you on this if if doctors and nurses nurses wanted to be protected from a terrible virus, they would have decided to be bankers who can work from home, not heroically life-saving, dumb idiots.

Well, I mean, that's fair, but they might as well have added to that amendment.

Furthermore, this House acknowledges that Boris Johnson is an absolute dream boat, the Labour Party causes piles, rickets, and leprosy, and that if you masturbate thrice weekly over a photograph of Margaret Thatcher, you will live forever.

Hashtag suck it plebs.

I mean, let's call this what it is.

This is corruption.

This is good, open, honest, legal, above-board, democratically approved British corruption, voted for by pretty much every single Conservative MP.

These same people who just, you know, a week or two ago were bleeding about people graffitiing the statue of Churchill have essentially just pissed in his face.

But remember, kids, respect democracy, stay at home, don't rewrite history, shut up and piss off the big folks.

I would love to piss in Churchill's face.

He'd love that too.

That's the Indian part of you, people, people, if you're wondering.

I was going to say, I don't remember that from

Vera Lenner Bitries, one of her lesser-known

wartime songs.

Now,

let's move on

from that.

I think we've all said things we'd rather take back today.

I can't remember what we've, how are we doing for time?

Oh yeah, yeah, we've got a we've been in

we had

I mentioned the Q ⁇ A at the start.

If we had any

cues for us to A?

Okay, let's have some questions from our listener stroke viewers, visual listeners.

Just to get us going, Ties This This wants to know if any of you want to buy their new book Pence and Sex.

Oh yeah.

I've got an answer to the question.

Pence and sex is the opposite from what I like in a man, which is

sense and pecs.

I thought you were going to go with a multi-million pounds and a platonic relationship.

But

I'll take it.

Alice, you're our other news correspondent.

What is the top other news?

I've sorry I lost control of the running order here.

Labor has just sacked their shadow education secretary for the foul crime of retweeting an article containing the suggestion that the U.S.

police learned to kneel on people's necks from the Israeli Secret Service, which is that beautiful mix of anti-Semitism, conspiracy theorism, and the certainty that the Israeli Secret Service is the best at being the worst in the world, which is either true, I don't know, or they have the best Secret Service PR team in the world,

which has got to be a hard job.

You've got to hype up the Secret Service, but shh, it's a secret.

I mean, do you really need training to do that?

Do you need training to put knees on necks?

It seems pretty straightforward.

It's straightforward to do that ineffective bit of police work.

Knee-neck, gasping, dead, marches, riots, fires, end of democracy.

It's pretty straightforward.

A dance as old as time itself.

Right.

Well, we are approaching the end of today's live bugle.

Thank you very much if you've, well, for joining us.

Thank you, particularly if you've enjoyed it.

Thank you for sticking with it.

If you've hated every minute of it but are still watching.

Don't forget, if you want to make a financial contribution to the Bugle

to pay for your ticket retrospectively for the show that you've just watched and helped keep the Bugle free, apart from the money that you're paying for it,

and independent, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

You can make a one-off or recurring donation.

One final story and

the music news now.

And a string quartet in Spain is going to be performing a concert

in Barcelona, I believe,

for plants.

They are filling a concert hall in Barcelona with plants and playing Puccini for it.

And of course, this is not the first time...

in the history of the bugle that someone has done a concert for a non-traditional concert audience.

Longer-term listeners may remember that Lou Reed and his wife put on a concert for dogs just over 10 years ago, I believe.

There's a certain cringe coming across Chris's face now as he remembers what

resulted from that concert for dogs.

And a friend of mine is really, really excited, very good friend of mine.

She bored her colleagues in skill X on the other side of my eyelids every time I close them.

Not the cold and wet weaver.

So, anyway, there's this concert for plants, and a friend of mine is really excited.

He's massive in the house plant world.

And he was raising money for a house plant charity recently.

The house plant industry has been very badly affected by COVID, and many house plants have lost their sources of income.

So, he decided to put on a charity snooker match.

And he wanted to put on a contest between the Russian ice hockey player from the the New York Rangers, Alex Avechkin, and the Egyptian sun god.

And he said, can you make a quick note of that, Andy?

Just abbreviate the names.

And I said, all right, Alo V Ra.

And then he got very excited about this project, the

L O V Ra

Celebrity Snooker Match.

And he said, who should we put on the guest list, Andy?

How about you invite your bugle producer?

I've always enjoyed his works.

Easily my favourite podcast.

And I think we should invite the competitors' maternal parents as well.

I said, sure, I'll jot that down.

Chris and the mums.

Chris and the mums.

Anyway,

so

on the day, it turned out Ovechkin, the six foot three inch, 107 pound hockey hunk,

was running late.

And my friend was starting to get a bit nervous.

He wasn't going to turn him up.

He said, is Big O near?

He said,

he's about five minutes away.

But anyway, so he turned up.

And of course, Ovechkin likes to relax before a big game.

And he has a massage and we had a masso there because we know he likes to have a massage but he got annoyed because the masso wanted to chat with him and Vechkin was just trying to focus on the snooker and so he said quiet, shrub.

Anyway,

of course famously he has his own green room when he plays hockey and the same when he's playing snooker and he brought in a massive fish tank.

with some huge fish in it and I said what fish are they Alex and he said that's my Marlin and this is my wife's pet tuna here.

Okay.

Anyway

insisted on his on his ride of having some very trendy snacks or hip biscuits.

Hibiscus?

Hibiscus.

And he told me some interesting things about before hockey matches he imagines he's a huge fearsome warlike creature like the ones in Lord of the Rings and channels those feelings into his subconscious and it's very effective his orc id.

Anyway, Ra, the Egyptian god, his opponent, was very confident.

He said, I'm going to whip your ass, hockey boy.

I'm going to thrash you.

I'm going to tan your hide, Ranger.

Anyway, so the game started, and

Ovechkin saw an opportunity to play a shot which knocked the red

onto the blue onto another red and that red into the pocket.

He spied a plant.

Good skills.

And anyway, so it turned out 3-0.

3-0, Avechkin beat Ra, the Egyptian sun god, and he was pretty pleased with himself afterwards.

He said, Andy, I gave him a, absolutely thrashed him.

He must be glad he only agrees to a best of five frame match.

Ra was devastated and eloquently bemoaned his misfortune with some really moving words about how sad he was at his defeat and Vetchkin was impressed.

He said, That's a sick lament.

But my friend

attention of the occasion, whether he was going to make or lose money on this charity snooker match, of course he has this kind of

bizarre rashes that come out on his backside and under his arms.

And well, he was suffering from considerable arspit distress.

Anyway,

anyway, so we went back home and he saw that he had this great collection of

plants in his garden and he thought these large black birds had crapped on his flower beds and he said, f you, you bloody useless undersized fing ravens, you shitful-brained dinosaur castors, you can fing shove your own sinister sorting beaks where the sun don't fing shine.

It was a real string of crow cusses.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Anyway, he was convinced he could make his plants grow faster with drugs.

He grated an ecstasy tablet over his flower bed, gave him a lily.

Anyway,

he wrote an autobiography a while ago.

It was an awful standard writing, real vile lit.

Anyway, he went to drown his sorrows at a pub quiz.

It was this pub quiz where, to save time, all the answers, you only had to give the first syllable of the words in the answers.

And

one of the questions was

which

party leader won the first post-war British general election?

And so the question master ended up saying,

right,

on to question 24 about the post-war British election, Wincher is wrong.

Claremat is the correct answer.

Right.

Anyway, so probably

lucky I'm going to leave this kind of stuff behind now.

And from next week, I'll be

going down to do BBC radio cricket cricket coverage uh along with the uh BBC's cricket correspondent who likes to bring his collection of wild cats so I'll be sharing a commentary box with uh Aga's Panthers

that is

that is niche that is

that is that is very niche

I pined for that to be over

I was I had a great deal of impatience right I'd good to see Alice you rose above it

I feel like I've been listening to those for days and days.

I want to commit violence against you, Andy.

Right.

Well,

anyway,

let's all forget that happened.

We were contractually obliged to do an hour-long show today, and I think we've already done about an hour and a quarter.

Oh, no, even longer than that.

So you don't have to count that last bit of the show.

Only remember the peak hour that you got for free anyway.

So

unless you want to donate to the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme on a one-off or occurring basis, go to thebugalpodcast.com and click the donate button.

I think that's the end.

That's the end.

Because I haven't written an end.

Someone's just tweeted

a little video of tumbleweed.

What?

What?

What?

I don't know.

It's a kind of plant, Andy.

Maybe it was a suggestion for another bit.

It's possible.

I assume it's for one of your guys' bits.

So

thanks.

Thank you very much, everyone who has joined us, who has contributed questions.

I do hope you've enjoyed it.

You're able to hear highlights of this show as this week's Bugle regular podcast.

Hari, have you got any forthcoming shows online or

tell you that you'd like to alert people with?

A couple of things.

First of all, it was recently announced that The Simpsons will no longer use non-minorities, I believe believe they're called white people,

to do the voices of non-white characters.

So

that may or may not somehow be connected to my documentary, The Problem with Upu,

which is available now on Hulu and Amazon.

If you are not in the U.S.,

I would try a thing called Torrance.

I get no additional money, so really knock yourself out.

And

also, I have a Netflix special, Warn Your Relatives, that has nothing to do with cartoon characters or me destroying your childhoods.

Well, it's all the subtext, though, isn't it?

Alice, apart from the last post of Eagles sister podcast from Another Dimension, anything to tell our viewers about?

Yes, indeed.

My stand-up special, Savage, is available on Amazon Prime, and its sequel, The Resistance, is also available on Amazon Prime, even though I filmed it before I filmed Savage.

It's all very complicated, and time doesn't work linearly in the stand-up universe.

But also, I'm doing a live show on Next Up for the Next Up comedy festival, and that's sometime next month.

I could tell you the dates, but I don't know what they are.

Well, thank you very much for listening.

I hope you've enjoyed it.

It's been a lot of fun to do,

and I mean, not as much fun as doing it in front of actual people, but I feel I've got to really know my webcam really well over the last few months, and I've just enjoyed trying to get some reaction out of it it is

just stares at me stony faced I think it slightly laughed at one of those puns anyway thank you for listening thanks Chris for all your efforts to

to make this thing work it seems it seems to go tech technologically superbly well by bugle standards I mean I'm guessing so unless this is some kind of conspiracy who are just joking along sending us messages whilst laughing at the fact that we've done 90 minutes that no one's heard a word of

that would not be the first time I've done that in my career

I used to do late-night stuff on radio for.

So, thank you, thank you very much for watching, stroke, listening.

We'll be back with a regular bugle next week, and we will have another one of these bugle live shows at some point in the not too far distant future.

Thanks to Hari and Alice.

Goodbye to you all.

Bye.

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.