Bugle 4157 - Fart The Police

Imagine the world wasn't like it is.

Well, I mean, there'd still be that guy, and that guy, and the one who needs the eye test.

But there's also sexy literature.

It's not until her shirt is coincidentally ripped open during a fight with the winged wivens of the northern wastes, revealing her creamy breasts, that Dermian realises the archer he has been befriending is his left-behind love.

Water.

Cravings, hunger, a deep aching longing.

Try half a glass of water.

It won't fix everything, but it'll help a bit.

Jim's Gym and Gymnasium.

Have you been pumping your booty?

Booties are in.

They used to be out, but now they're in, by which I mean to say they should stick out.

That's good now.

Join me, Alice Fraser, on The Last Post.

It's like the bugle, but shorter, hornier, weirder, and dailier.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4157 of The Bugle, the world-renowned scientific research audio journal that will confirm this week that horses are in fact quintupeds.

They have a hidden fifth leg shaped like a head, but no actual head.

That the melting point of ice cream varies depending on flavour by up to 1000 degrees Fahrenheit.

And that volcanoes are 99% psychological.

That's why they don't happen in Britain because we're mentally tougher than other countries.

I've said it now, don't argue, you cannot rewrite history.

I am a still shed-bound Andy Zoltzmann and what little grasp I had on reality before this lockdown has long since disappeared and judging by the news I'm not alone in that, mentioning no entire cabinets full of unhinged delusioniacal government ministers.

It is Friday the 19th of June 2020 and it is a huge sibling bugle welcome back to someone who, well, if it transpires that making podcasts is the early 21st century equivalent of 18th and 19th century imperial pillaging and exploitation.

There are going to be statues of her everywhere in the world, all the way from down the A23 stroke M23 from London in Brighton, the city of Bar Mitzvahs itself.

It's the former baby.

Sorry, first impressions last.

Helen Zolzman.

Hello Andy.

Hello Helen.

Thank you for already poisoning people's opinions of me as a statue person.

Don't fight it.

Don't fight it.

It's just the most maligned kind of person in the world today.

It's better that we talk talk about it than just brush it under the carpet.

No, with our mum, it's better that we don't talk about it.

Just FYI.

Telegraph subscriber.

How are you?

Oh, fine.

I mean, we probably should catch up off my candy.

Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah, I guess not really what

this show is about.

Also, joining us from even further south.

Just keep going past the end of the M23 until you reach Australia, basically.

And joining us, as long as the allegedly Chinese government launched cyber attack on Australia has not disrupted our internet link, it's Alice Fraser.

Nihao, Andy, how are you?

And may I just say that Xi Jinping is truly deserving of his lifelong election, democratic election to office.

It goes deep.

It goes very deep.

How's Australia, apart from having been

downloaded by China, by the sounds of it?

Well, yeah, it's been hacked by an unknown malicious state actor.

A lot of our government websites have been hacked.

Our Prime Minister Scott Morrison is not naming the country, although various other people suggest that the only people who have the means and motive may indeed be located in China.

But of course, Scott Morrison doesn't want to say that for what he calls political reasons.

And also, we all got a text today from ourselves on our own phones that said it definitely wasn't China.

So that's good to know.

Sounds legit.

If a government website is hacked, have there been examples of those websites becoming better as a result?

Because a lot of governments are not run by digital natives.

Please, please, if you're listening, China,

hack our government websites.

We need it.

Yeah.

Just make it easier for us to pay our taxes.

and file our returns.

I'm not saying take over the entire government.

Just a bit of IT know-how would go a long way.

I don't know, I'd consider it right now.

It's the 19th of June 2020, which means it's summer solstice this weekend.

Only in the world's greatest hemisphere, of course, you southern losers.

It's the Esteval Festival itself, mid-summer.

Although it would not be entirely surprising if our government here in Britain announces that actually the longest day of the year this year will be sometime in mid to late October due to unknown procedural difficulties.

Boris Johnson is 56 years old today.

Coincidentally, he was born on the same day,

same year, as as American singer-songwriter-musician from the band The Verve Pipe, Brian van der Ark.

And ironically, Ark is one of the many public projects that Johnson would undoubtedly have f ⁇ ed up royally if he'd been in charge at the time.

Mr.

Johnson, that's not an ark, that's a raft made of sausages, and you put the zebras next to the lions, and you're holding up an obvious plastic dove with a bit of cardboard that looks a little bit like an olive branch in its mouth.

It's a world-beating arc, frubble-frubble, now is not the time to argue about sausages.

Look, look, Dovey says everything's fine.

Churchill was a dream boat, frubble, frubble, frubble.

So Brian van der Ark, same birthday as Johnson.

Also, ironically.

Doesn't every Eaton alum get an ARC?

Sorry?

Doesn't every Eaton alum get an ARC?

It's part of,

well, it's privilege.

It's a metaphor for privilege, Andy.

That's why they have the

Olympic-sized rowing lake, I think, so they can have some ARC practice.

They get their butlers to build them in CDT class.

Brian van der Arck, same birthday, Johnson.

Also, ironically, a van is the kind of vehicle Johnson would hide in to avoid having to answer an awkward question from a journalist.

Rumour is that he's going to use his parliamentary majority to force through a new law enabling him to park a van in the House of Commons.

So, whenever he gets asked something that he can't, or more likely won't, or even more likely can't be asked to, and would probably bring down his own government if he did answer.

That sentence has got out of control.

He can just pop in the back of the van, slam the door shut, and have one of his cabinet lick spittles drive him off to the loving embrace of his handler in number number 10.

So, Brian van der Arck, also ironically, der is the kind of term Johnson would use when mocking someone less expensively educated than him.

And Brian is a word that if you heard Johnson saying it, you would assume it was an outdated racist term just because it was coming out of his mouth.

And also, also ironically, Van der Arck's band, The Verve Pipes, debut album in 1992, was entitled, I've Suffered a Head Injury, which is what more than 38 million people in Britain have done as they slam teapots and other household utensils into their own heads in frustration and bafflement at how Johnson has dealt with the COVID crisis whilst the bands call this dealing

well dealing I even wrote dealt with in inverted commas but I don't think that came across in the way I delivered it Helen so you picked me up entirely correctly there dealing dealing with yeah it it seems

or having a big runny shit over is that a synonym potato potato um the Verve Pipes follow-up album was called Villains and you can write the rest of that bit yourself so a couple of serendipitous shared birthdays there

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

This week, a very sad week for British music with the death of not one but two leviathans of wartime warbling.

Dame Vera Lynn unaccountably passed away at the age of 103.

I mean, once you've made it to a century, you've got to capitalise and make it a big one, haven't you?

So many people relax after reaching three figures and just give it away in the next five to ten years.

But aside from Vera Lynn, also, her contemporary and sometime rival Bernard Sladgett also bit the big, big one, or perhaps more appropriately at the age of 105, nibbled the little one.

Sladget, rather different in style to Lynn's sentimental serenades and nostalgic numbers, expressed a distinctively British cantankerousness and sense of existential ill-will.

Known as the shrieking beetroot for his tendency to turn a somewhat crimson shade when barking out his most hostile and obstroperous numbers, Sladgett kept Britain cranky during the dark days of the early 1940s, helping maintain the righteous national fury that drove so much of the war effort.

His top 10 wartime hits included Do That Again and I'll Chin You, Herman, as well as Defiance Blitz Anthem, Is That All You've Got, Fritzy Flyfly.

Not to mention the gramophone tremblingly aggressive Hymn to the Home Front, The Turnip Song, and of course the double A-side platinum-selling Hitler is a total shithead and actually I love powdered eggs.

Like so many music stars, Sladjit had a colourful personal life and was romantically linked at different times with, amongst others, the Duchess of Membury, who was 783rd in line to the throne at the time, Winstoner Churchillada, wartime London's leading female Mexican Churchill tribute act, Enid from the local chip shop, Octogenerian former Wimbledon champion Maud Watson, unrequited as confirmed by ensuing libel action, and after a graphic interview in tennis today.

The gossip columns also linked him with the dead 19th century author Elizabeth Gaskell following what became euphemistically known as the British Library incident and after a characteristically furious and drunken evening in London, the statue of Queen Victoria outside Buckingham Palace.

Sladget found success harder to come by in the less confrontational post-war years, although as official songwriter laureate during the final wind-down years of of the British Empire, he produced classics of national self-justification, including What's the Problem?

We've Left You a Hedge, Let Bygones Be Bygones, Even If They've Only Just Gone By, the retro music hall styled You Can't Look in the Mirror If You've Thrown It in the Bin, the Dylan-inspired Don't Think Twice, It's Probably Not Alright, and the official British Independence Handover valediction anthem, You're Welcome, Don't Mention It, brackets, please I really mean that.

Sladget's attempt to redefine himself as a punk provocateur in the 1970s failed to rekindle his former fame, although his spoken word album of social gripes, Postcards from Grumbleshire, did cause a minor riot at a swimming pool in Harrogate and a still unpublished government inquiry.

In his later years, he was employed by a karaoke bar to accelerate the departure of Clientel after closing time, and Sladgett continued to perform past his 100th birthday, despite four larynx transplants and numerous court orders.

Figures from the music industry paid tribute after his passing.

Hannah Spirit, former member of S-Club 7, now lead soprano at the Port Stanley Opera House in the Falkland Islands, described his singing voice as, quote, a uniquely and uncompromisingly intrusive growl rasp that none of Bradley, Paul, Paul, or John could come close to matching.

Whilst Willie Nelson commented that Sladget did not inspire him to become a country singer, Bernard Sladgett, who sadly died this week.

That obituary in the bin.

Good S-Club googling, Andy.

Googling?

That was one of the few things I didn't need to Google.

Don't stop, never give up.

Keep your head high and reach the top.

Top story this week.

Well, as if the world didn't need more hostility between the police and the public.

Austria has been rocked to its foundations after a man in Vienna was fined 500 euros for flatulentialising loudly in front of police officers.

Helen, you are.

Not just loudly, Andy.

Provocatively.

Yes, well, Helen, you are, of course, our landlocked continental European countries and flatulence legislation correspondent.

Bring us up to dates with

what went on.

Well,

this man, this farter, was sitting on a bench.

He was having some kind of,

as described by police, prolonged, unruly, and disrespectful interaction with them.

And then he got up and did a big fart.

And they said, it's, of course.

They said on Twitter, of course, no one is reported for accidentally letting one go.

So as with so much of the law, intent is key.

There must be a mens rea as well as an actus reus.

Provable intent is relevant here.

I'll let he who has not used a parp as an assault weapon throw the first wind, say I.

Good to bring a bit of lawyers' expertise to this, Alice.

Thank you.

Last year, a man in Scotland farted intentionally whilst being bodily searched by police and got 75 hours of community service.

Right.

Well, yeah, 500 Euro fine for uh the petrator here, um for uh

uh the olfactory infraction.

He was fined under the audible gaseous discourtesy subsection of Austria's Offending Public Decency Act.

He was uh said to have um as you say let quote let go a massive intestinal wind apparently with full intent.

Um this provocative proctal promulgation following an encounter with the police who insist that the accused performed an unwarrantedly confrontational ex flagrutum.

I mean the mac the maximum sentence in Austria for nasally discomfitting a police officer is 35 years in jail and a lifelong artichoke consumption banning order.

But the police let him off with a 500 euro fine because of a backlog in the Austrian court system caused by a combination of lockdown Brexit and vegan schnitzels.

I wonder if in America they would have tried to shoot the fart.

One can only assume that they probably would have done.

He's got to use the facilities.

The police in Austria noted that the man may appeal appeal against the penalty if he feels that it was unjustified, though it may be difficult for him to find a lawyer who will open the pleadings in the traditional manner of offences of this kind, which is, mom!

Yeah, I mean, but it's good actually, don't you think, you know, with so many laws and social customs that have gone out the window during lockdown, see Austria trying to keep some semblance of social order.

It does seem that as a nation, Austria these days is a little more sensitive to the need to stamp down on the early sides of social and political rebellion for whatever reason.

And

no, no judgment on the man from us here in Britain, where just four years ago, 17.4 million of us voted for better out than in, regardless of the impact on others.

It just makes us feel better about ourselves, and we can't be worrying about who else gets inconvenienced by it or whether it signifies an underlying digestive or dietary issue that we don't want to face up to.

Can I end this contrived analogy here, please?

Yes, Brexit is the fart that began as an attempt to relieve pressure pressure and ended up in an accidental pants shitting.

Yeah, except they shat in all of our pants.

Virus news now, and everyone's least favourite microscopic terrorist, the coronavirus, continues to upheave and inhavocate the world.

Jerichocratic governments continue to fumble around in a self-imposed fug of stubborn arrogance.

Science continues to try to convince people that it isn't making everything up as it goes along, in everything it does, as well as the virus.

I've been reading the Telegraph, and I'm starting to doubt that gravity is real anymore.

Life is shifting and changing by the week, and nowhere have the effects been felt more profoundly, no area of human activity has been so deeply impacted upon than in the filming of sex scenes for TV shows.

Helen, you are the Bugle's artistically, probably just about justified nudity filming logistics correspondent.

Please

fill us in, or more appropriately, make it look convincingly like you're filling us in.

Well, the Bold and the Beautiful soap opera is resuming filming, having been off since March, and they have a number of steamy scenes.

Obviously, they want to keep things socially distant

but still sexy, so they are going one better than just people wrapping their arms around themselves and moving their hands up and down, like in the playground.

They tried cutting these scenes, they're like, it's not the same.

It's not the same.

So instead, first of all, for kissing, each of the actors will just be filmed separately.

I don't know if they're allowed to kiss something like a melon or their own hand.

And then they will be edited together.

And then when they're doing sex scenes,

their spouses, if they are negative for COVID, may be allowed to play whoever they're sexing on.

But otherwise, they will be using blow-up dolls and

dummies.

and usually the dummies are used for stunts, like when people fall out of a window or have to play a corpse.

But not this time, they're getting lucky.

I mean, of course, with the amount of Botox and plastic surgery going around on the set of the bold and the beautiful, for those of you who don't know the bold and beautiful, it's like the fast and the furious, but without cars.

It's going to be difficult for viewers to tell the difference between the blow-up dolls and the actors themselves.

There are rumours in the sex doll community that if the sex dolls do a good enough job, they may be cast in speaking roles.

Right.

That's, I mean,

I've never seen the bold and the beautiful, but there's an etymological interest.

I know, Helen, you love, you love your words sort of to a professional level.

The bold and the beautiful is the phrase most diametrically opposed in the English language to the phrase Boris Johnson's cabinet.

So it's a bit of an item of linguistic interest for you.

I mean,

is this not an over-complicated solution to the problem?

I mean, what's wrong with a good visual metaphor these days?

A train going into a tunnel, a nodding donkey oil well, a tree bursting into blossom, or an industrial chimney being chained up, blindfolded, whipped, and forced to say yes, Mistress Margaret, like in that old biopic of David Cameron.

I once saw a very sexual montage on a BBC documentary about bread of people provocatively kneading dough.

So they could do that.

Nobody needs dough, Helen.

You can only ever want dough.

Oh my God.

Very philosophic.

We haven't all suffered enough, Alice.

Not yet.

Elsewhere in the world of COVID, New Zealand is obviously in line for the United Nations Smuggest Country of the Year award, with justification, to be fair.

They've managed to control and suppress the virus through some strange, arcane, anachronistic, and occultishly alchemic cocktail of sense, humility, and administrative organisation.

Rugby has resumed in New Zealand

in front of actual human crowds as well.

And there's been some classic New Zealandic opportunism.

A homeless man, quotes, sneaked into a five-star hotel used as a COVID quarantine facility and stayed there for weeks

in the kind of initiative that I think the world needs more of in these difficult times.

Yes, and this news came to light when Mr.

Woodhouse of the National Party in New Zealand criticised the government's incredibly effective handling of the coronavirus by citing a tiny number of bad actors and slipped loopholes.

Apparently, this man stayed in quarantine for two weeks, and when he was ready for discharge he was asked for a forwarding address and said he hadn't been overseas.

He'd just joined the back of the queue two weeks ago.

And Mr Woodhouse is quoted as saying he hadn't come back from overseas.

He spent a fortnight getting three square meals at a bath every day on the government, which

to be honest, to me, sounds like an excellent outcome.

Call me a bleeding lefty, but three square meals at a bath every day for the most vulnerable members of a society that is rich enough to support every citizen in such a style seems like it ought to be the goal of every functioning developed nation.

But don't ask me, I'm not American enough to believe in the freedom to starve to death because my government would rather spend its money on sentient bombs and cages for foreign babies than social welfare programs for its own citizens.

Well, you can't do that.

You can't do that, Alice.

I mean, you can't, I mean, yes, there are shitloads of homeless people

in nations that really don't need to have any.

And as civilized societies, we generally try to brush that under the carpet.

And also, there are even shitloadier shitloads of unused properties lying empty because, well, I mean, I guess you can't have a small fraction of them being used by people who desperately need them because otherwise we'd have let Stalin win the Cold War and all the people who could have fought and might have died in the Cold War had it ever got hot would have hypothetically died in vain.

So

you can't open that lily-livered lefty door or it will never end.

The article described this latest claim as leaving Jacinda Arden's government, quotes, red-faced.

Now, I mean, that very much shows the difference in how countries have responded to this virus.

The idea that Arden's government could be red-faced at one person getting a freebie in a hotel.

You need to raise your blushing threshold, New Zealand, here in Britain, with tens of thousands of people unnecessarily dead.

Not even a hint of a pinkening of the governmental cheek, not even a mildly furrowed brow, let alone a discernible trace of facial shame.

Actually, it makes gammons go paler.

That was another virulent song.

They're only going paler because all their blood's going to their erect penises.

Yeah, they do get off on the idea of the poor dying.

Here in Britain, Dominic Raab, the bafflingly appointed Foreign Secretary, has been criticised for

a comment he made about the Black Lives Matter movement and taking the knee specifically.

He said, on this taking the knee thing,

a phrase dripping with respect, I know maybe it's got a broader history,

said Rob.

It seems to be taken from Game of Thrones and feels to me like a symbol of subjugation and subordination.

So there's a number of things to pick up from this

sentence from Mr.

Rob.

I don't know maybe it's got a broader history.

I guess a British politician not bothering to find out stuff about history is nothing to be surprised about these days.

He also said, I take the knee for two people, the queen and the missus, when I asked her to marry me.

Now, I don't know

who the her is.

Is he married to the queen?

Well, exactly.

It's an imprecise sentence, isn't it, Helen?

The

first lady of language picking it up there.

Is the her referring to Mrs.

Raab or the Queen?

In any case, take take the knee as a gesture of feudal subservience to a woman who, after 68 years, must be heartily fing sick of seeing the tops of people's heads, but not as a gesture to support a campaign for a more equal and tolerant planet and solidarity with the struggle to equalise centuries of exploitative racism.

I guess each to their own.

It seems a curious kneeling priority to have.

This is admirable, Andy.

This is truly admirable.

He's refusing to kneel to anyone but the queen and his missus when he asked her to marry him.

That means that this is a man who will lunge up against a tree to tie his shoelaces,

lest he be seen as subordinate to the needs of knots.

How does he build sandcastles?

I mean, that's, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that's

the logistics of these things.

People don't think through.

Rob added, I understand this sense of frustration and restlessness that is driving the Black Lives Matter movement.

Now,

let's try to be as positive as we possibly can be about this, frustration and restlessness, and describe it as a typical British understatement rather than a spiritually noxious belittlement of a defining social issue of current and historic injustice.

That's why people are going out on marches because they're feeling a bit restless.

They just could use the walk.

Frustration and restlessness.

Rather like when AJP Taylor wrote that Hitler could undoubtedly be something of a rotter.

On the plus side, Johnson's government has announced plans for an official government commission to investigate racial inequality in Britain,

hoping maybe that it comes up with a different verdict from all the other recent commissions that have already addressed this issue in different ways, as pointed out by, amongst others, the Labour MP David Lammy, who chaired one of those commissions himself.

And the government has chosen to flatly ignore the recommendations of those previous commissions and is now maybe hoping for

its own investigation into racial inequality to come back with an actually it's all fine as you were verdict rather than the other reports whose verdict was, if I may summarize, it's not fine, it's never been fine.

And here is a long list of easily achievable things we should do about it.

You're in showbiz, Andy.

You know, you have to keep going.

When someone says no, you keep going until you get a yes.

And that's what they're doing.

You keep going until racism's okay again.

Oh, that's where I've been going wrong in my career.

So when someone says no to me, I just sit in my shed for the next 15 years.

Tearing down statues news now, and well, as the

battle over Britain's statue legacy continues and the arguments over exactly what form of hysterectomy would be best for this country heading forward,

the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford is now due to be removed.

And a lot of people have said, oh,

this is unacceptable.

This is airbrushing history.

You can't just pretend Rhodes didn't exist.

Well, I mean, maybe instead we could have a statue of a gentleman in a bowler hat stealing a rhinoceros, a crate full of gold, and all the food while casually tossing a vial of smallpox over his shoulder like a mobs are lighting a petrol fire.

That would seem to be more appropriate than a statue of Cecil Rhodes himself more in tune with our history.

Alice, how's the, is there much of a statue argument in Australia?

We inherit all our arguments from Britain, Andy.

I feel like, on one hand, beginning to take down statues of people in in history who achieved great things while or by perpetuating grotesque wrongs on the vulnerable and oppressed feels like a satisfying shift in the right direction.

That direction being the direction of not rubbing people's historical abuses in the faces of the people who have inherited the hangovers of that abuse.

On the other hand, it feels a little bit like once you start pulling on that dangling thread at the bottom of the jumper of history, there's not going to be that much jumper left at the end.

end of it.

It's almost like the people who pursue and exercise power on a grand industrial scale that affects the movements of history history tend also to be ruthless with an eye to the prize and a foot on the neck of whoever's neck happens to be most foot proximate in the pathway to historical renown.

I also feel like by covering this, we're part of the problem.

And the problem is that discussions about the statues, the names of streets, who said what on social media six years ago, all of those discussions mean that people are focusing a significant and possibly pivotal amount of time, effort, energy, and attention on the most peripheral symptoms of what is a fundamental problem at the core of society's understanding of itself and the ways in which power moves.

You know what I mean?

Like both the pulling down of and the defending of the statues feels like it feels like putting aloe on the sunburn that's responsible for the cancer, the treatment for which is making your feet sore rather than solving the current problem.

Not that history and memories aren't important, it's just that while you can acknowledge that the causes of current difficulties lie in the complex past, until we get a DeLorean, it feels a little bit more useful to focus on the complex present.

Does anyone like statues?

Does anyone think they're nice?

Wouldn't it be better just to put some vending machines there?

You can't have a vending machine up a 50-metre-high plinth, Helen.

I just could get up there, Andy.

Right.

I guess you've got to really want that snack.

I saw a correction on a monument in Melbourne.

This is the only time I've noticed such a thing.

But it's a monument to John Batman, who formed a settlement and founded one on the site of Melbourne, then unoccupied.

And on that big stone monument is a plaque which says, whoops, sorry, it was occupied.

We just forgot that First Nations people were people.

Oops.

Yeah, I think that's a good way to resolve the issue: just on the plinths around the bottom of the feet of these statues, just show all the people who are being oppressed.

Or big plinths.

Or amend the inscription on the statue.

Cecil Rhodes, quite the

QT.

There's a few addendums on the ground floor of BBC Broadcasting House about the Eric Gill

things on the frontage.

This picture of him fondling a boy isn't drawn entirely from his imagination.

Yes, you would have thought, in the light of what's happened at the BBC over recent years, that statue might have come down if you're unfamiliar with it.

Well,

and feeling willing to be shocked and appalled, find it on the internet.

Yeah, about that, I mean,

it would be quite a simple thing to add to a lot of these statues, like an official kind of QTC

coat of arms, or not, SPQR, the old Roman drains and stuff, just put QTC on a statue, and everyone knows that it is

a tainted relic.

Or, like, you know, the food measures, you know, how they have those little graphs for food, whether it's healthy food or unhealthy sometimes food.

You should just put a little potometer at the bottom of each statue.

But would it be variable according to

the current verdict of history?

Yes, exactly.

That way that you don't have to change any of the statues, you can just adapt them as time goes forward.

Well, I said some time ago on the show that the people we should be putting statues up to are the likes of John and Marjorie Lemming,

who no one has ever heard of, who never did anything in their lives.

That's the one way to guarantee a future proof statue or

they don't get statues they get benches andy

yeah but what about all the benches in our parks that were you know sat upon by by racists in the 1950s what are we going to do john and marjorie quite the cs

love sitting here saying extremely unacceptable things

i do think we need to look uh look at the positives here because um our government gets criticized a lot on on this show and uh and elsewhere and often by their own faces.

But no government...

And yet they still don't do better, despite all the shit you've been flinging at them, Andy.

What the hell?

But no government, Helen, I would say, has done more than this current Johnson government to prevent another British empire.

Because much as they might hark back to the old one, we have shown that we cannot organise a mobile phone app, let alone an empire encompassing a quarter of the world's population and land area.

I mean, sure, we might still have the British exceptionalist arrogance to do it.

We still have amoral economic opportunism baked into our system but the logistical competence no f ⁇ ing way.

Rest easy world.

Rest easy.

And good news for future statues the way things are going at the moment if a cabinet minister manages to successfully order a pizza at the moment or do up all their buttons unaided we will be gratefully whacking up a heroically posed marble of them on a f ⁇ ing great column and people in hundreds of years time will gaze up in wonder and parents will explain to their children ah, the great Liz Truss.

She was one of the good ones.

She did a whole three-minute radio interview without trivialising racism.

Incredible.

But by the standards of the day, you have to wonder.

It's not by our standards, kids.

Remember, we mustn't view history through the prism of the present.

Which prism should we view it through?

Of the collection?

The prism of.

The prism of Britishness, Ellen.

That's the only prism we need.

It's more just like a brick, isn't it?

American lies news now, and

well, an extraordinary court case in America, Fox News, has gone to court to assert that it is not telling the truth.

I mean, this is a curious, this seems like ultimate kind of peak America.

A news company asserting that, contrary to scurrilous accusations from rivals and critics, it is making shit up.

A sort of meta-libel case.

It just means new.

Fresh bullshit, Sandy.

You should be familiar with that.

This is Tucker Carlson, which presents itself as a news show.

It looks like a news show.

It sounds like a news show, but it emphatically declares that it is not a news show.

I think

their argument is that viewers...

The viewers of Tucker Carlson don't assume that Tucker Carlson is reporting facts.

That's their claim, which is the worst self-own I've seen since someone kicked a football that went into their own goal and then came back and hit them in the face.

I don't know, football metaphors.

I think anyone who's watching Tucker Carlson on the reg can be safely assumed to be incapable of critical thought at that level.

You can only eat intellectual junk food ironically for so long before your brain starts to get puffed going up a flight of conceptual stairs.

And I think it's like expecting question time to be distributing information rather than just making everyone's blood feel like hot acid in their veins.

Well,

that is the purpose of

TV news, essentially.

We need hot acid in our veins, otherwise, the world will grind to a halt.

History is

surely that is the lesson we should be learning from history.

Keeps the cholesterol down.

In other lies news, John Bolton, the former national security advisor

for Donald Trump, has produced a book which has been described as a bombshell and a pile of shit.

So it's

by all accounts.

Written with a sub-Dickensian level of literary flair,

but also contains yet more accusations against Trump, which, if even partially true, you would think would make any president with dignity instantly resign and fire themselves into space.

But allegations in the book include that Trump thought Finnen was part of Russia, that he sought Chinese assistance in his election campaign, that he told China their internment camps were a great idea, perhaps with a hint of jealousy, that he thought Antarctica was a theme park, that he tried to launch an invasion of a country called Muslimistan, that he tried to change U.S.

school history syllabuses so that he, not George Washington, led America to independence in a war against the Germans, or something I might have glazed over, to be honest, after the I mean, none of this makes any impact at all.

If any of this was going to have any effect, it would have had an effect in 2016.

It's now just more steaming shit on the volcano of steaming shit that is Trump's life and career.

Well, that's the thing.

If you don't care about being undignified or being wrong, what are they going to do?

You're invincible.

Exactly.

However, it's not just a one-way street.

Another book has come out this week

from a more pro-Trump angle.

Trump acolyte and former White House insider Druba Klink has published Loading the Clawhammer of Justice Inside Trump's Quest for a Happier Universe.

And I've got a few, I've got a world exclusive, a few excerpts from Druba Klink's new inside look from a rather more rose-tinted view of the Trump administration.

On his first day as president, Donald took one look around his new office.

It's not oval enough, he said.

I thought it would be way more oval than this.

Make it more oval.

It was the kind of clear, decisive, aspirational decision-making that America had been crying out for.

This is further on in the the book.

It was not reported in the news, but in 2018 Donald averted war between Paraguay and Liechtenstein.

He set up a conference call with the president of the two countries, which his advisors said might be having an argument over which is the most landlocked.

The two leaders insisted a little too vociferously that they actually had no plans to invade each other.

Obama would have bagged a Nobel for that, remarked Trump.

I'll probably get blamed for the lack of decent Paraguayan war films 20 years from now.

Such is life.

And one final excerpt from our world-exclusive serialization.

Donald's deal-making skills and unquenchable thirst for a better world were once again on display during his first meeting with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong-un.

Trump offered Kim the hand of Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg in marriage, hoping to build a bridge of love between the two nations.

Kim was right up for it, and even offered Donald to go on one of his nukes as a thank you.

All was set for a statement wedding that could symbolically presage an era of world peace.

But Ginsburg refused even to install Tinder on her phone, let alone go on a date with Kim.

She's a widow, for heaven's sake.

Sometimes I think America is its own worst enemy.

Don't these people want us to succeed?

So it's a fascinating, rippering read.

It gives you another view on the man and his presidency.

Elon Musk news now.

And Alice, it seems that every week you're on the show, which is a lot of weeks, Elon Musk has done something ridiculous.

What is the...

I think it was a five-dimensional attack snake that could revolutionize warfare last time.

What's he been up to now?

Well, Elon Musk, with his unlimited imagination slash money purse, has decided that he is going to confirm that his SpaceX space ports, which will be used for firing rockets into space, can also be used for hypersonic travel on the planet.

I feel like Musk's plan is to get people as quickly as possible from one place to another, no matter where they're going.

It's all he wants.

He just wants to fire people off in all directions.

It's his thing.

Everything from electric cars to baby catapult.

That's large catapults for throwing babies, not itty bitty catapults.

Let's be clear: much like a six-year-old packing three fruit roll-ups and a pair of socks into a backpack because their mum shamed them for the poo they did in the pool, Elon Musk thinks the future is far away.

It's like all the world his Lego set.

I say it before I say it again: Elon Musk is a baby's idea of a grown-up.

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

We'll be back next week with a live show on Saturday night, 8pm UK time.

Live streamed on wherever things get live-streamed.

Chris, what are we going for this time?

Apart from hopefully it working at the start?

We're doing the YouTubes, we're doing the Twitters, we're doing the Facebooks, we're doing the Twitches.

How much of these does Andy know what they are?

Absolutely not.

I think they were all dances from the 1960s, weren't they?

That may be true, and maybe we could practice them in the week.

I'm sure the Twitter and the Twitch were.

So, Saturday, 8pm, the 27th of June.

Thanks, everyone, who joined in the quiz.

Last week it is still available on the YouTube channel if you want to do it retrospectively.

And congratulations to those of you who scored close to the maximum, was it 26 out of 26 from the 37 questions after a slight technical glitch that

I maintain is appropriate for an unfair universe that

some of you just get ignored, that we are British after all.

Helen, anything to plug for our bugle listeners?

Sure, I have three podcasts: The Illusionist, which is at the Illusionist.org.

Answer me this, answer me thispodcast.com, and Veronica Mars Investigations at vmipod.com.

Alice.

There is a show that is called The Last Post.

It's called The Bugle Presents The Last Post and is a satirical news podcast set in an alternate dimension.

So if you're sick of the news from this dimension, tune in to that.

Also, I have a weekly show called A Tea with Alice.

And my show Savage is streaming currently on Amazon Prime.

Though if you don't like Amazon Prime, it's still available as a free podcast called The Alice Fraser Trilogy.

Before we go on to this week's Lies About Our Premium Voluntary subscribers, the more long-standing or long-listening amongst you, if you are long-standing, do have a sit down, it's more comfy.

Anyway, long-term buglers might remember producer Tom, the pre-Chris Chris, the George Formby to Chris's Bob Dylan.

Like so many people involved with the early years of the bugle, Tom fled the country and now produces shows in Australia, where he has a new show out about, yes, you guessed it, obviously, a Christian hip-hop group.

Do you want to hear a snippet of it?

I can't hear you.

Oh, sorry, I didn't have my headphones turned on i'll just assume it was a yes

this is an abc podcast

a brother and a sister are playing in a band together called crossfreed when we say cross you say friends cross cross when we say cross you say my name is ken lean this is my six part podcast about the christian hip-hop band that changed my life

this is a nightmare imagine how stud God would be.

He'd just be sitting up there in heaven and he'd be...

He'd just be monkey.

He'd be pinging on the Holy Spirit.

They shone brighter than the Star of David, but were destroyed faster than Sodom and Gomorrah.

And that's when I began to drink the sacramental wine.

What sort of a Christian are you?

What's with all the Jesus shit, mate?

Okay, I'm pulling over.

Does anyone have vegan vomit?

What the hell is going on?

And why am I making this podcast?

Because crossbread, we're really cool.

No one cares about your podcast kid.

Thank you Tom and now on to our lies about our premium level voluntary subscribers.

To join them go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button to make a one-off or recurring contribution to help keep this show independent and free, apart from the money that you've just given to it.

Here are this week's lies.

Andrew Ward thinks the world could do with more hidden doorways.

I think it would be good for all of us, says Andrew, if whenever we lent on a wall, there was a real real sense of, what if this leads me into a secret enchanted kingdom?

Andrew thinks that this would help recreate the sense of wonder that has been lost by our species' technological complacency.

When you can find a picture of a triceratops playing golf against a naked goddess Aphrodite after 15 seconds on a search engine, where is the magic in life, laments Andrew.

Stephen Cox had to laugh as a school student when he misunderstood the words, harvest mice.

Stephen explains, I had no idea it was the name of a species.

I just heard the words and assumed it was an instruction from my biology teacher, so I ran straight out of the classroom to get to it without listening to the rest of the sentence.

Stephen continues, it transpired the 500 dead mice I came back with four hours later were not what Miss Stipples had wanted.

It was also the first time I heard a teacher use five swear words in one sentence.

My previous record was three.

Brenda Scott is one of those people who believes tightrope walking ought to be taught in schools.

It should be compulsory for all children from age 5 to 16, claims Brenda.

It is not only good for your core musculature and balance, but it could save the environment too.

Imagine if people could just toddle between high-rise buildings on ropes instead of using power-hungry lifts to get all the way down and up again, probably stopping for a coffee in a trendy, disposable, endangered animal horn cup on the way.

I reckon this scheme could help us squeeze another 10 to 15 years out of the planet.

Derek Moss often wonders how things we take for granted were invented or discovered way back in ancient human history.

Who was the first person to see an egg dropping out of a chicken's arse and think, souffle, speculates Derek.

How did anyone discover that what worked with tea leaves emphatically did not work with penguin beaks, he continues.

And did someone somewhere feel a worm or a baby snake wriggling on the top of their foot, look down and think, ah, that's how I stop my shoes from flying off all the time?

Derek hopes to make a radio documentary on this subject.

Jennifer Allen spent 12 hours of her childhood dreaming of becoming a newspaper sub-editor.

She heard a story about a local man who'd been arrested after being found to have kept caged in his cellar 120 birds which he had poached as they roosted in the local park and came up with the headline, police finally catch locked nest monster.

Disappointingly, the local rag the following morning went with the somewhat more prosaic headline, man arrested for illegally keeping birds in cellar.

And finally, Marv Quinn thinks that one of the great regrets about the current human predilection for online social media spats is the lack of physical evidence for future generations to venerate.

We can visit physical battlefields where the erstwhile future in which we now live in the present was decided in our past, says Marv.

But our descendants won't be able to pay similar homage on the battlefields of the Twitter Wars, for example.

We can look at a field with some shrubs in it and think, for example, wow, Richard III had his arse handed to him on a plate here.

But the Twitter Wars will live on only in the cavernous hive-mind memory of the internet, and maybe in epic song, or a propagandistic pseudo-historical play if we get a bit Shakespeare on it.

Anyway, the point stands, concludes Marv.

And here endeth the lies.

Hi, buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast, Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.