Bugle 4152 - Plague!

The Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, Buglers.

I am Andy's Ultimate.

It is Friday, the 8th of May, 2020, and this is issue 4152 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a viral world.

And exciting news just breaking.

The UN has just passed Security Council Resolution 2519 declaring that the year is 1999 again and the world is going to be allowed another swing at the 21st century and with it of course the third millennium which historians have recently claimed was the rubbishest start to a millennium on record.

So that's

good news.

I guess we can cling to that to discuss the turning back of time and other issues that are actually happening.

Joining me from an extremely safe distance in safely distant parts of California, Baratunde Thurston and Nato Green.

Hello.

Hello, Andy.

Welcome back, Baratunde.

It's great to

have you back on the show.

Great to be back.

Great to be here with the great Nato Green.

What's up, Nato?

Hello, Bartunde.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Buglers.

Shalom all.

Nato, you were saying

you've been ill.

Yeah, since my last appearance on the bugle, I got sick.

I might have had COVID.

Don't know.

So I tested negative,

had a fever for six days, and I was told to self-isolate until 72 hours after the end of the symptoms.

I don't know if you've had a COVID test, but the way that you do it here is that you drive into a parking lot outside the hospital, and a small but incredibly powerful Filipina nurse in full protective garb takes a swab.

I'm not that good at estimating distance, but my educated guess is that it was about four meters long.

And she takes the swab and

grabs me firmly by the back of the neck, like I'm a misbehaving dog who needs to be shown the bad thing he did by shitting on the baby and inserts the swab into my nostril and then straight back.

I knew that you could go up your nostril but not straight back.

I didn't know that was an option and but she held my head so that I couldn't pull away and jammed the swab straight back into my head

and it hurt so much that I peed a little and started confessing to crimes I never committed.

I told her where the bombs were planted.

I I told her how to find bin Laden, all the things.

And so then I was sealed off in a room in my house,

and my wife just left food on the floor outside my room.

And

yeah,

we cosplayed.

Like, I was in solitary confinement for smuggling rhubarb pie into the prison yard, and she was going to throw me in the hole until I crack and snitch on the rest of the pie smuggling syndicate.

So

it's a little bit of a weird experience because it's like I was sick for a week with a fever and wondering if I was about to die.

And either I had a false negative and I did have COVID, or I just had a cold and I'm a whiny wimp.

And

doctors don't know.

Doctors diagnose is pending.

Well, I mean, that's the thing that people have been trying to find a vaccination for being

a whining wimp for centuries, millennia even.

And

it doesn't appear that we're any closer to it.

Baratinda, how are things in Los Angeles?

Things are good down here.

I'm safer at home, which is the language of my mayor.

And I think NATO and I shared governor as opposed to shelter in place as if there were armed gunmen running on the loose, which of course there are because it's America, but not above

any other way.

And unlike NATO, I'm not going to plead COVID sympathy.

I probably had it, but I don't want to talk about it or like kind of create this whole narrative, like I'm really tough and I stuck it out.

And yeah, I got swabbed too, but you don't hear me like making up a whole thing.

Hopefully I just did my civic duty and shut up about it.

So yeah, I'm good.

I'm here with my fiancé.

We are, I'm so grateful that we moved from New York City last year, knowing this was coming, but not telling anyone because it would ruin the real estate market.

And

yeah, I feel pretty lucky, all things considered, both about like my specific home situation and my like political home situation to be in the capital of the Western Pacific Federated States of America is just really lucky.

Like I could have ended up somewhere else and a lot worse things would be happening.

Well, I made a surprisingly competent curry this week, so it's been a hugely productive time for me.

What kind of curry was it, Andy?

It was a paneer tikka masala.

Oh, yeah.

And

so very British of you.

as British as it's possible.

Classic British dish.

Just

culinary appropriation of the highest order.

Did you cook it by walking over to your neighbor's house and planting a flag on their food?

Well, I mean, you know, I mean,

we cannot abandon everything that has made this country great.

It is a time of change, but you don't throw all the babies out with all the bathwater.

You got to maintain those core values in times of rapid change, I guess.

We are recording on the 8th of May 2020, and we're celebrating 75 years since VE Day victory in Europe, the end of the Second World War, European phase, wild celebrations as the world

finally cured itself of the disease of Nazism and left itself with an immunity to more world wars, although the, of course, the richectomy surgery did leave deep scarring and took a considerable time to recover from it sorry I know it really irritates people using medical analogies to describe a war but yeah it's just the way things go also today is World Donkey Day I don't know how you guys are celebrating World Donkey Day the

eighth of May

have you ridden a donkey anywhere or not

I'm just gonna try to make an ass of myself today Andy

there we go we're in it now welcome back

I've just been shouting it's on like Donkey Kong at my children all morning.

Of course, we all bang on about the combustion engine, powered flight, the internet, the lie, the conspiracy theory, and cricket is the greatest inventions in history.

But what about the donkey?

On World Donkey Day, we celebrate the contribution of donkeys to human civilization, great donkey moments of history, such as when Jesus, the renowned donkey stunt rider, performed the first ever loop the loop on his donkey.

Pedro Plod was his name, when he clopped the beast off the top of the Tower of the Temple in Jerusalem.

Of course, the celebrity Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes penned a heart-rending tale about a donkey's brush with death after the hungry animal accidentally ate a bag of what it thought was sugar but was in fact heroin in his masterwork Donkey O D.

Thank you.

Thank you, thank you very much.

I'm literally here all year

in this shed.

Top story this week.

It's getting biblical.

The plagues are coming upon us.

It was always inevitable, I guess, that the old biblical plagues that proved so effective back in the day

would make a comeback.

And well, NATO,

as a fellow Jew, obviously we know quite how effective biblical plagues can be

in terms of

political

progress.

You are our biblical plague correspondent.

Just bring us up to date with the latest plagues that have been affecting America.

That's right, Andy.

So the first thing we should acknowledge is that the last time I was on the bugle was around the Jewish holiday of Passover, which celebrates the story of the Exodus, which is

whence the plagues come.

And I wrote a bit of business about some plague jokes that Chris cut from the show.

And

I just want to take a moment to acknowledge that the onward march of time has proven me right and Chris wrong.

So, and has required us to bring back the plague jokes that got cut for time

last time.

So, you know,

in religion, you have these stories that last across thousands of years because of the enduring symbolism and metaphors.

And they continue to teach us and they reach across centuries to teach us and inspire us.

For example, these biblical plagues from the book of Exodus, in which the Jewish people need to stay in the house to avoid a plague.

And those kind of metaphors

are really powerful today.

In the book of Exodus, there are 10 plagues sent by God to punish the Egyptians for enslaving the Jews.

In this case, we started at the angel of death,

which makes the other, the previous nine plagues seem kind of not that bad.

Like

rivers of blood seems kind of okay.

Frogs, I could take that.

Cattle disease was one of the biblical plagues.

We should all give up beef anyway because of climate change.

So COVID is the angel of death plague.

And then God, in her ineffable wisdom, said, crap.

I shot my wad at plague number 10.

I should have started out at a smaller plague and then worked my way up.

You know what I mean?

Like, I should have started out with a lesser plague, like not being able to get the song Bittersweet Symphony out of your head,

and then worked my way up gradually to the pandemic.

Like, if you start out at 10, you have nowhere to go.

So, God had to back it up a little bit.

And so, here we are with murder hornets,

is the next biblical plague that we're facing in the United States, is a species of hornet that appeared in the Pacific Northwest, capable of killing a human.

Murder hornets originally come from Chinese sweatshops like the coronavirus and MAGA hats.

And the murder hornets are so named for their slaughter phase, in which they find honeybees, decapitate them, and then feed the bodies to their young.

And that's how you know that they're a cruel and destructive species, because a more humane murder hornet would eat the entire honey bee and not waste the head.

Everyone knows that honey bee cheeks are a delicacy.

Murder hornets have a distinctive look.

They're quite large.

They're about the size of a matchbox.

They're described as having large yellow-orange heads, prominent black eyes, and a black and yellow striped abdomen.

And their children are named Eric, Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Baron, but they only love Ivanka.

I'm sorry, that joke was beneath all of us.

So,

Angel of Death, check, murder hornets, check.

What else have you got?

Earth.

Gargantuan fing hailstones.

There's hail now that's been spotted that is

six to nine inches across.

The biggest one seen of the gargantuan hailstone was in Argentina, but there's also gargantuan hailstones turned up in the Dakotas.

They can shatter car window.

Anything else?

Gypsy moth infestations, which can destroy the entire food supply.

The gypsy moths is the more politically correct name of that type of moth that were previously called the queer kike moths.

But

the name has been modernized to be more politically correct.

Anyway, so now we're at four, we're at four of the ten plagues.

We've got plagues, hornet tail

moths.

I am crying, Uncle.

I don't know about you, but I think Trump should let the Israelites go.

Like, I get the message.

And in this version of the story, Trump is Pharaoh.

Israelites are anyone who doesn't watch Fox News.

And go means not die.

Well, I mean, it's exciting times for

Bible Bible fans.

Murder Hornets, as you say, also known as the Asian giant hornets.

There is no evidence that they were created in a laboratory researching insect warfare by Chinese hand industry Emperor Yuan Di in the first century BC.

We don't know that, but no smoke without fire.

Trump's advice: if you've been stung by a giant hornet,

you could be able to cure yourself by swallowing an agricultural pesticide or hitting yourself repeatedly with a badminton racket or other swatting device, or releasing swarms of giant hornets so more people get stung, thus accelerating the chase for a hornet vaccine.

Barretton, have you ever come across a murder hornet in your travels?

Yeah, I call them police.

You know, each, we have different languages, even though we both speak English.

I'm not sure how you refer to them over there.

No, I have not come across this particular breed.

And I thought it was, it actually gave me sympathy briefly for, I was like, maybe immigrants are bad.

Like, it just crossed my mind.

And I was like, man, this is like a really, I'm in a bad place right now.

I'm like, they don't just call them murder hornets.

They're like Asian.

You know, they're Asian murders.

So they have to add this like other label on them.

And I'm sure that like does something deep within our psyche to just avoid those people and blame them for those things.

But otherwise, I feel pretty lucky.

to be among the last humans to experience this planet.

It's pretty exciting.

If you've never seen a murder hornet buglers, picture a regular bee or a wasp that has been cross-bred with someone who makes outright YouTube videos in their bedroom.

They basically look like that.

Overconfident, angry and disconcertingly unhuman.

They're the world's biggest hornet, no less, the size of a matchbox, unless you get really long matches, but

considerably less useful and well-behaved than matchboxes.

Also, if you find the matchbox not a useful size comparison, they're one millionth the size of a football pitch, if that is the reference of size that you prefer to use.

Andy, could you tell us how big they are relative to

a cricket bat?

A cricket bat.

Well,

I'd have to do the calculations on that, but I imagine you could probably,

if you froze murder hornets,

I'm guessing probably about 400 murder hornets per bat, but I'm not sure.

Andy,

give me the length of the hornet, and I'll come back to you with a stat in a little while.

Well, it's about two inches long, the murder hornet.

I love this real-time research.

Yeah,

it's matchbox length, Chris, but I assume it's going to look like a little match.

Could I modify the research assignment, Chris?

So, what I'm interested in is not just a sort of length comparison, but actually a volume comparison.

So, essentially, how many murder hornets to combine to replace

a cricket bat.

That's more interesting to me.

Would it actually be useful as a a cricket bat?

Get the fielders away from

around you.

Anyway, the

use the honey from all the dead bees to glue them together.

Yeah.

We're making progress here as a species.

I can feel this.

We're trying to survive.

As you were saying, Nato, the MO of the murder hornet is to invade a beehive, decapitate the bees, take their mangled corpses back home to feed their hornet kids.

No wonder they grow up to be such bastards.

It shows the importance of responsible parenting.

They then put the dead bees' heads on spikes, pour encourage et les autres, hold show trials of any surviving bees to sow further despair in the oppressed bee community, then douse the hive in kerosene and casually set it on fire by flicking one of the matches they keep in their own bodies over their shoulder whilst mouthing you next to an ant's nest.

In summary, these things do not f about.

The hail, I mean, hail has been a go-to play for deities the universe over, really,

since the idea of plagues began.

And it's an absolute belter, really, as meteorological signs of divine anger go.

Terrifying, visually spectacular, umbrella-ruining, and make a real dent on a sinful individual's car.

And

yeah, the biggest hailstone in, yeah, as you said, it fell in Argentina back in

back in 2018.

And on Tuesday, they had hailstones the size of cantalute melons in South Dakota, admittedly, only very small cantalute melons the size of golf balls.

But still,

basically, I think the signs are lock up your firstborns, essentially.

Buglers, if there is a message from this show, lock up your firstborn.

It seems to me that we're in the phase of Earth's unsubtle messaging to humanity.

Like we've been, there's been an attempt to communicate with us that maybe we've overstepped our bounds a little bit.

And so you lower the air quality, slowly increase the acidification of the rains and the waters, very minuscule every year raise the sea level and now Mother Earth is just like I'm bombing you with ice like that's apparently you've not picked up on these memos I've been dropping for the past couple hundred years so murder hornets and and ice bombs and

it's as if no one saw the documentary the happening starring Mark Wahlberg in

which the earth tries to make humans kill themselves to stop destroying the earth.

The moths in Washington state,

which was also the recipient of the murder hornets,

it does slightly suggest that God, like so many people around the world, mistake Washington, D.C.

and Washington State as the same thing, which I guess is

easy to do.

Washington State's trees are reportedly deeply concerned, but refusing to move, a spokespine for all trees in the state said that's just what the moths would want us to do.

We will not give up our way of life.

Given the suffering that Washington State is going for, I do have to

leer suspiciously at Canada as a possible source of this and the misdirecting with the anti-Asian rhetoric, but really we don't know.

And these both striking Washington state puts a lot of suspicion on them.

Right.

And this is,

what was that 19th century election that came down to basically warmongering with

regarding the West Coast states and Canada?

Are you talking about the

possibly the presidential election of 1844, in which James K.

Polk ran for office and said, I'm going to do three things in one term, and then I'm not going to run for president again, and those three things are Texas, California, and Oregon.

And then he was elected, did those three things

through war and plunder, and then left office and dropped dead a month later.

That is the kind of political efficiency that we need today.

Talk about term limits, my goodness.

Right.

Talk about a politician not lying on the campaign trail.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Well, just looking at other potential plagues.

There has been locust problems in Africa reported on the BBC this week.

There was a plague of darkness in the Bible,

metaphorical darkness.

I think that's already in full swing.

And the water changing to blood, that

could well happen in Britain.

We'll know when Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced that the government has achieved a record amount of blood donations as per its targets, but only by squirting some red food colouring into tanks of water, which is essentially the way the government meets most of its targets these days.

There are other things that could be signs of biblical vengeance.

Internet speeds, too slow to stream films and HD.

That's probably 72% likely to be divine punishment.

And no sport.

I mean,

the plague of sportlessness, I think, is probably the toughest thing humanity's ever.

I mean, I am as atheistic as a sausage, but even I can tell when the Almighty is not alrighty.

American News Now, and Donald Trump, your spiritual leader and overlord, hacked into the Lincoln Memorial this week to do a virtual town hall interview.

Stroke embarrass himself, his office, his country, his gender and his species, delete according to political affiliation and or grasp on

reality.

He sat beneath the feet of the Lincoln statue, which features a 28-foot tall version of the already six foot five inch four-time All-American stovepipe wearer of the year and celebrity assassination victim.

About 20 minutes into the interview, a strange look came across Abraham Lincoln's big marble face.

There was a twitching of the cheek, a furrowing of his marble brow, a twitching of his famous whiskers, and then, unless my eyes deceive me, a trickle of urine down his marble leg.

Now, we've heard of statues of the Virgin Mary crying tears of blood, or indeed tears of tears.

Well, here was a statue passing liquid judgment on the man who laughably occupies the office that Abraham Lincoln himself

once held.

How did you guys feel about

this latest installment in Trump's unique

four-year performance art piece?

I think the current president has been doing his best to live up to the historic achievements of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln was president, of course, during the Civil War, which saw the deaths of over 700,000

American soldiers.

And I think this president is working his way up to that number as quickly as possible.

And so to be seen in the same light as that president, obviously a little smaller, but he's well on his way to being

a great statesman and a great mass murderer of American people.

That's as close as I could get to understanding why the hell that would be allowed to happen, other than

cult-like

obligation on the part of the media that supported it.

Well, they're also both known for their great oratory.

Lincoln

said four score and seven years ago, our forefathers embarked on building a new nation.

And Trump said, Have you thought about injecting yourself with disinfectant?

So

those are both historic speeches that will be studied by students of American civics for generations to come.

Well, sorry, NATO correction generation.

Single.

Let's not look too far.

The last remaining generation.

And what else do the two men have in common?

I guess the fact that both would be completely appalled by the other's version of the Republican Party and both paid hush money to a porn star.

I said, no, it wasn't quite that with Lincoln, was it?

Definitely both had something to do with getting in trouble with an actor, but I can't remember exactly

what was.

But

the Fox News interviewers tore into him like a dead kitten into a nuclear bunker.

And Trump basically trumped it up as only Trump can with a cocktail of delusionist fantasy

that sort of take people's attention away from the fact that he doesn't quite have the courage to go around his country killing people with his own bare hands yet, but do not rule it out, depending on how the polls are looking in September to October.

Listen, I had a thought, which happens a couple times a week.

And in this case, I was thinking about

the willing sacrifice of so many Americans by our current leader and how that didn't have to be the case and how he actually could have made a lot of money off of supporting life.

by having MAGA masks and selling them through the White House store, big red, flaming blood masks

that all his followers could wear to prove that they support evil

for a price and obviously made in China for fair trade.

But missed opportunity to make money and make people not die.

It's a real shame.

I feel personally,

tragically, vindicated by what's unfolded because Trump and a lot of the right wing has been calling for the reopening of the country.

And last month I came on the bugle and I told you all, I said, don't get carried away publicizing this thing about how COVID disproportionately kills black people because then the right wing will get excited about COVID.

And sure enough,

they got excited about COVID and wanted to reopen the economy.

I regret to inform you that the whites are at it again.

They want the restrictions lifted so they can simultaneously let black and brown people die while still maintaining enough black and brown people to pick their vegetables and butcher their chickens and deliver food and do everything else that keeps the economy going.

They want to have their cake and eat it too, and by cake in this context, I mean ethnic cleansing.

But the most horrifying implication of this is that now is that I said something on the bugle that then became true.

And the idea that the bugle is actually a source of prophecy and predictive power.

Yeah.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Think about all the bullshit spewed on this podcast and then the chaos that will ensue when it definitely comes true in the future.

Get ready for the long-awaited Kim Jong-un versus Prince Charles snooker match.

That is what is going to happen now.

And he did actually predict the bleach three weeks before Trump said it as well, I believe.

I can't even remember that.

I think I've um yeah, well, I mean, as often happens when Jewish people start saying and writing things, that

they just come true.

Just can't help it.

So these are the anti-lockdown protests or pro-death protests, whichever you want to call them.

And ironically, that a lot of the same people are also pro-life

and pro-death.

It's a bizarre, I mean, pro-life until it's out of the womb, essentially.

Then fuck it, it can take its own chances.

But I mean, it's kind of

curious kind of

degree of organized idiocy, isn't it?

Or is this just what we've come to expect?

Yeah, so the anti-lockdown protests have swept the nations.

People are showing up in mass and also en masse to defy quarantine and defend their God-given right to infect one another and die.

This right is a hallowed American tradition deep in our national DNA.

When President Roosevelt gave the Four Freedoms speech in 1941, he talked about it quite explicitly.

The four freedoms, of course, were freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

And the anti-lockdown protesters are carrying those freedoms forward today.

They're speaking up for their freedom to worship guns and stupidity in order to be free from wanting a functioning respiratory system.

And they are free of fear.

You don't need masks or tests or vaccines.

The vaccine can only get you sick if you fear it.

That's based on the latest medical research from the Jackass School of Medicine.

Now, people often think that the American right wing is sort of a monolithic blob of ignorant white people, but it's actually quite diverse.

And among the anti-lockdown protesters, you see libertarians, gun enthusiasts, white supremacists, and anti-vaxxers.

The full damage of the full

diversity.

It's called diversity.

Yeah.

Armed white supremacists and anti-vaxxers was the winning combination the world didn't know it needed.

They go together like projectile vomiting and flesh-eating strep, like the Spanish Inquisition and slam poetry, like Charles Manson and America's Got Talent, like a raging rock hard erection and your grandma's funeral

is how

our white supremacists and anti-vaccines go together.

The hard way.

Oh, wow.

The thing I've been struck by with the anti-lockdown protests is the severe overlap of the All Lives Matter counter protesters to Black Lives Matter

and the Blue Lives Matter.

So we take All Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and then you get a bunch of people screaming without masks in the faces of police officers on the steps of the state capitals of this country.

And it just, maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking maybe they didn't mean it when they said all lives matter.

I don't know.

I'm just going to put that out there.

It bears further investigation.

Again, I'll put it in the Chris Skinner research pile.

And if you can get back to us by the end of the show with the murder hornet ratio and did the all lives matter community really mean all lives?

That'll be very helpful to us.

I think they meant no lives matter.

It's one of those tricky things.

It could be zero or infinity, either one.

Right, right.

One man who's also not been happy with the lockdown is Elon Musk, the obviously fictitious techrepreneur,

who has been tweeting some curious things of late.

He described the Bay Area's extension of stay-at-home orders as fascist.

This is not democratic.

He tweeted this is not freedom.

Give people back their goddamn freedom.

He'd also tweeted that Tesla shares were overpriced, leading to a 10% slump in the company's value and shareholders begging him to build himself a social media-proof, nonsense-type space pod where he can vent his muskings

without anyone else having to hear them.

The stock, of course, recovered the next day, proving that stock markets remained the bed-wetting morality vacuums that they were before lockdown.

So, at least there is some comforting normality in these difficult times.

He's still set for a $700 million payout

Musk, that's the equivalent value of 700 bottles of hand sanitizer at current market rate.

And this is despite the fact that Tesla is currently making no cars at all.

I don't see that as a problem, though, because the thing with Musk is that, I mean, he is obviously entirely fictitious as a human being.

So, if his company then becomes fictitious in the sense that it's not making anything, is that not an entirely appropriate logical end point of Muskism as a commercial philosophy?

I think Elon Musk, you know, in the spirit of kind of biblical and prophetic meanderings we've had on this episode so far, he to me is a clear sign that despite all of the progress we've made as a society, women can wear pants now.

Black people can whistle.

There's so many new freedoms.

A white guy can still do pretty much anything he wants in this society and get overcompensated.

He can try his damnedest to get thrown out of the club and he's got permanent VIP status inside the champagne room.

There is nothing this man can do that will get him removed.

And that is the ultimate value of Elon Musk, just to humble us all before the great truth of white supremacy.

Elon Musk is a poster child of how unfettered capitalist greed rots your humanity and makes you into a shell of a real human being.

He's sort of become a profiteering Elon Husk.

Am I right?

For some reason, that one broke me.

I don't know why.

I i was rolling with all of this for the past 40 years i feel like it would have been funnier if tom ballard had said it

i think i'll have that as a review of life shows

it seems curious to me like is elon trying to get to mars or is he trying to convince all of us to go there without him that's

a big question uh

at the same time while all this is happening while elon musk uh crashed his stock and then it recovered it and stopped making cars, Elon Musk and his partner Grimes had a baby,

a baby boy, and the baby's name is spelled XAE mashed together A12 Musk.

And let me unpack that name for you for a second.

This is how Grimes explained it.

X is the unknown variable, solved for X.

The AE is the elven spelling of artificial intelligence,

which of course sets up that long-awaited Legolas Terminator crossover buddy flick we've all been waiting for.

And the A-12 is the precursor to the SR-17, which is Elon Musk and Crime's favorite aircraft.

This raises the question: how rich is too rich?

When do you cross the line from market incentives inspiring innovation and entrepreneurship into decadence and madness?

I'd say that line might be the point at which you have a favorite aircraft.

That might be too rich.

Are you sure it's not when you have a favorite aircraft and name your your child after it?

Is that not the second favorite?

In part.

In part.

In part.

I should also say that the the child's full name is XAA12 Musk, but it is known as XAA Twee for short.

So

it gets worse.

I've been told, I did some investigation, apparently that name is actually supposed to be pronounced, do you know this?

No.

Kyle.

Because so here's how it it works.

No,

the X is the

Greek for chi, as in like chi, beta, whatever.

Yeah.

AE

is pronounced AI, as in the AI of Kyle, the Y.

Like chai,

right?

And the A12 is the 12th letter of the alphabet, which is L.

And never in the history of humanity has spelling X A E A 12A as Kyle,

Nothing has ever been simultaneously so pretentious and so lame at the same time.

It would be like when Prince changed his name to the symbol to get out of that record deal, and while the symbol visually combined the symbols for male and female, he had announced that it was actually pronounced Dongmeister.

That is how stupid this is.

A quick bit of Britain news now.

Things still not going too well here in Britain as we rocket to the top of the European Fatality League.

A lot of news about this consignment of protective equipment that we'd bought from some dodgy back street dealer in Turkey and the flight was delayed and then it's turned up with 400,000 protective gowns that have been described by officials as absolutely f ⁇ ing useless and the shipment is now due to be flown back.

Earlier, well last weekend the government claimed it had reached its target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of April.

It achieved this target for two days and that number has now dropped down again and it only achieved the target by counting test kits that had been sent out in the post

regardless of whether or not they had then actually been used for tests and some of which had no return envelope.

So people who rang the helper and say, what do I do with this were told to just throw it away.

So this is basically the government, what it might as well do is just claim that the death figures are nowhere near as bad by sitting next to a corpse, waving its arm around, saying, look, he's saying hello.

But, you know, these are the things that you're doing.

It makes you miss Brexit jokes, doesn't it, Andy?

Oh, God, yes.

I never thought I'd say this.

But just bring Brexit back.

You're pursuing a different sort of Brexit now.

Slower, but more permanent.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just the slow death of all hope and happiness.

And people.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, which is pretty much the subtext of Real Brexit.

Yes.

I have to admit, when I got to the British section of our news stories, I started to experience an emotion that I hadn't felt in a while, which was happiness

because I felt less alone.

Right.

And I had been so focused on my own government's failures at the national level that it never occurred to me that there were yet more incompetent leaders left in the modern world to join us.

And so I say, welcome.

This Into the Pool is filled with blood, but

it's nice, it's comfy, and it's so good to have you.

You have no idea the service you're providing to Americans by being shitty yourselves with the personal protective equipment.

Well, that pool being full of blood, there you go.

There's our water turning into blood, plague.

Well, we are approaching the end of this week's people.

Chris, you had a couple of statistical queries that you've been busy researching.

Yeah, I've rounded up in places, so apologies.

But basically, so two inches is the typical Queen murder hornet's length.

Cricket bat, blade only, I'm not counting handle,

is 38 inches, so that's basically 19 head to stinger.

But the blade is 38 inches by 4.25.

Yeah, now I went for an open wingspan because that looks more dynamic.

So it's 7.6 centimeters, which is about 3 inches.

So if you tore some in half as close as you could,

you could get 27 across the blade of a bat with their beautiful, fully flexed wings.

Now

the depth of the bat is a maximum of 2.6 inches.

So if you went for the full depth of the bat across,

you could get the hornets too deep throughout that whole bat.

So uncrushed, but with many cut in half,

you can fit 54.

So that's the volume of a bat holds 54 of the murder hornets.

But with wings spread.

But with wings spread, yeah, because I thought that looked better.

But what?

But you've got a little bit of a flourish.

They're all huddled together then.

Well, just shitloads would be the answer.

Because the thing is,

if you're going to have them spaced out with wings spread, obviously you get a lighter bat.

So that supports a more wristy player who likes a kind of touch player.

But if you want more power in your Hornet bat, then you're going to want them close together.

They'll be a bit heavier, but you'll have more Hornets, a bit more sting in your shot, so to speak.

Well, I went for the average bat of 1.3 kilos, which is in the half.

What's it?

About 2.9, 210

in our money.

And so, interestingly on that, the...

If you want to talk about the venom, the weight of the venom

in each individual one of these hornets is four milligrams per kilo.

Which is, whilst it's not the most toxic venom, it's the highest volume of venom per hornet, wasp or bee.

Right.

Which means each cricket bat would contain 5.4 milligrams of hornet venom.

Right, okay.

Someday, it is possible that sport will resume in the world.

I want nothing more in this universe than for Andy to say to another announcer and commentator, you know, the cricket bat is equivalent to 54 murder hornets.

Sorry, Chris, carry on.

Oh, just the final one, I was asked about the All Lives Matter community, which

ultimately we know they have the collective empathy of the volume of venom of less than one inside edge of one cricket bat.

Well, thank you for listening, Bugles.

I'm glad we've managed to bring some illuminating facts to this

episode.

Just before we go, the latest on what does definitely not cure the virus.

There have been a lot of kind of wacky theories about what does cure the virus.

We at the Bugle like to balance that out by telling you definitely what does not cure it.

Playing water polo without a hat on, no use whatsoever.

Covering your face and neck with peanut butter, also of no real help against the virus.

Screaming whenever you see another person, could help in terms of social distancing, but has no actual medicinal value.

Burying a set of golf clubs in a public park with bloodstains on, that doesn't help.

Or indeed, just wanting it to go away,

also of no use whatsoever.

So, do spread those definite facts about the virus.

Barreton, thanks so much.

It's been so delightful to have you back on the show for the thank you for having me back.

Yeah, do come back again.

Do you have any other shows or anything you'd like to alert our listeners to?

Yeah.

So, I'm doing a live show twice a week, at least.

It's called Live on Lockdown, and it's Thursdays on Instagram Live.

Sundays are probably the timings that folks in the UK could tune in best.

That is 3 p.m.

Pacific, which is 6 p.m.

Eastern, which is at a particular time in the United Kingdom.

But at any rate, all of those are discoverable at baratonday.com slash live.

I'm adding things, and I put out two email newsletters per week with some entertainment, some definite facts, to use your language, and then some of my perspectives.

So find me, like everyone else, in the cloud.

Night talk.

I have a couple comedy albums out that you can pick up: the NATO Green Party and the Whiteness album, Mr.

NATO Green on Instagram, NATO Green on Twitter.

Follow me on Twitter.

Come for jokes and stay for unfunny and deeply technical analysis of public health policy.

It's quite a sales pitch.

That is the sore poster slogan I've ever heard.

Yeah,

the way that Andy can

bore any non-sport fan to tears with innumerable cricket stats, I can do that with the details of hospital planning policy and will do so.

Next Saturday, Bugles, we will have the first lockdown live bugle, which will be...

Do we know what time yet, Chris?

I suggested 8.

You thought 9 might be better.

I don't think we reached a conclusion.

Alright, well, 8pm stroke, 9pm British time.

So it'll be early morning New Zealand, Australia time, mid-afternoon or lunchtime on the Pacific side of the USA, mid-afternoon on the east side.

I don't know if we've got that many listeners in between, but, you know.

You never know.

Anyway, so that's it.

It'll be a live, live-streamed bugle featuring me, Alice and Nish.

And do tune in.

Tune in for that to see how our technical expertise stands up to that challenge.

Thank you very much for listening.

Until then, goodbye, and we will play you out, as always, with some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers.

Suzanne Wheatley thinks that if telephone inventing superstar Alexander Graham Bell were alive today, rather than in the late 19th and early 20th century and if the telephone had instead been invented by Bell's great rival Harding J.

Tinkle then Bell would invent a communications device that enables the living to have video calls with the dead.

Suzanne explains his family all lived ages ago and have long since carked it so I reckon Bell would invent something to keep in touch with them.

Phil Shoebridge is much taken with this idea and despite being no relation of ancient King Nebuchadnezzar II would like to invite the much-criticized Bible-era celebrity round to his house for dinner.

Phil explains, I reckon he'd be very talkative.

After all, he really could babble on.

Yes, Phil also wonders whether Nebuchadnezzar's full name was in fact Nebuchadnezzaltine, but it was shortened, as happened to the former British politician Michael Heser Heseltine.

Johann Bengston was the first person ever to make a sandwich involving avocado, Emental cheese, smoked mackerel, garlic mayonnaise, watercress, plum tomatoes, shallots, playing cards, a pair of binoculars, Factor 30 sun cream, a compass, a roadmap and a spare hat.

That's the last time I just chuck my pack lunch in the same bag as everything else when I go for a long walk in the countryside, remembers Johan, who also claims the sandwich was surprisingly edible, if not quotes, entirely tasty.

On the subject of sandwiches, Alexis Irvin once did some experimental cookery using office stationery.

I used a hole punch and made a ring binder file using toasted for heaters as the covers and onion ringlets as the bindery bits, explains Alexis.

I then served slices of bacon, lettuce, blue cheese, tomato and portobello mushroom, each with holes punched so they could be filed according to the order in which the sandwich eater wanted them.

I was that sandwich eater and it was absolutely delicious.

Alexis was forbidden from using the hole punch and vowed never to work in an office again.

Here endeth this week's lies.

To join them or support the Bugle podcast in whatever way you can, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Don't forget, Bugle live next Saturday night, stroke afternoon, stroke next Sunday morning, depending on when you are.

It will be on our YouTube channel, which I am reliably informed does exist.

Details to follow on the Twitter feed, Facebook and website.

See you all then.

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.