Bugle 4151 - Boris Babies

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers, Baggiornio los Bugleros for our European listeners and welcome to issue 4151 of The Bugle.

I am

I'm not really sure anymore.

I mean my name is Andy Zoltzen but who am I?

I mean it's a it's a difficult question to answer.

It's I've no idea time and date have ceased to exist as concepts.

In fact I don't know much anymore.

What I do know is if I had a hammer I'd probably accidentally put a nail through a water pipe again.

If we were if we allowed and indeed taught pigeons to drive they'd probably stop taking jealousy shits on our cars.

The volcano an erupting mountain of pasta that splits bolognese sauce all over the place when served could be the dish that saves the restaurant industry And when all this is over, the first thing we should do is have a global ceremony at which all 7.whatever billion of us nod sagely and say, Yeah, we fed up a bit there, didn't we?

It's

still strange times, buglers.

I'm pretty sure at some point this week the lockdown started going backwards.

And as sure as breakfast follows lunch, I woke up the day before I thought I'd gone to bed.

But anyway, here we are.

It is Friday, the 1st of May, 2020, and joining me from Australia, Alice Fraser.

How are you, Alice?

I am well, Andy Zaltzman.

I spent the morning with my adorable baby niece, so

everything is good in the world.

And then I found a red-back spider in the pool filter, and that took things downhill in rapid order.

How big is it?

Are they quite small?

They're about that big.

They're very beautiful, the female red-back spiders, but they will kill a child.

And importantly, I was with a child.

Right, I see that's a bit of an issue.

Well, I guess, you know, if there's a message from this week's bugle, it is death to all spiders.

Joining us from...

It's that the spider owns that pool now.

Joining us from New York City, welcome back to Josh Gondelman.

Hi, Josh.

Hi, Andy.

Thanks for having me.

Great to have you back.

How are things in New York?

Well, I haven't seen any spiders, but the rats have become incredibly confident.

The city's rats, they're no longer scurrying.

They've got kind of like a swagger to their walk now.

And I've seen them crossing the street, which again feels ambitious.

I don't like a rodent that has like a megalomania to them.

It's a green man, not a green rat, at the crossing.

Absolutely.

And also, it's probably a good time to be a rat.

When you think of the history of

human pandemics, this is one that they are absolutely off the hook on.

And they're probably thinking, well, you know,

let's just enjoy it while we can.

I feel like they're worried because they got blamed for the last plague.

And I think they're like, don't pin this shit on us.

Also, possibly taking confidence from their president as well.

So

we are recording on the 1st of May 2020, May Day, May Day.

Never a more appropriate day to record a satirical podcast than May Day of this year.

It's interesting, the origin of May Day as a distress signal.

There are various theories as to how this came about, the term May Day, May Day.

One is that because May Day, the

day, signaled the approaching of summer, if you're in the correct hemisphere, of course, the medieval church issued a May Day warning to alert its priests to the fact that the warmer weather could lead to an increase in licentious behaviour and diabulous groinular urges.

Hence, May Day, May Day, May Day would be

sung from the church rooftops.

Another theory is that the notoriously panicky, risk-taking, and accident-prone 19th-century British general, Grevelliard Montclotchet,

would often implement high-risk battlefield strategies.

But when things went wrong, he would struggle to admit that he'd messed up and start stumbling on his words in a kind of Hugh Grant style and say, I've Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.

And the rest of

his staff would see that as a sign that things had taken a terrible, terrible turn.

And a third theory is that it dated back to Henry VIII's time, and when he was choosing a wife, choosing a new wife to replace the one that he'd recently,

shall we say, separated from in one of his various modes of separation, which came of course in various degrees of physical literalism.

When he was choosing a new wife, he liked to be presented with a selection of anonymous portraits of eligible princesses, noble women, and or just assorted young hotties.

These would be labelled Maid A, Maid B, Maid C, through to maid J, J, very much like goal of the month, but with 16th century women.

He used the term maid, so he wouldn't be swayed by their social status, only their looks and personality

as painted by the skillful portrait artists of the day.

Anyway, on one occasion, shortly after swiping down on his previous date, stroke wife, he picked the first portrait

or maid A.

That was of the Transylvanian Countess Enid Dracula, who had a reputation for being, shall we say, something of a man-eater.

Henry's courtiers and Lord Snutterbridge, the recently appointed pimp royale who'd replaced the executed lord nantwich knew that countess enid would be a catastrophic wife for big henry panicked and shouted mayday may day may day and summoned up an emergency short-term catherine from the crown reserve of catherines to distract henry whilst a far less flattering portrait of enid was painted anyway those are the theories i guess we'll never know anyway the uh may caller about a hundred years ago now uh replaced

uh in the early days of aviation the previous alarm message of holy f ⁇ ing shit, shit, shit, this is what happens when we fing play with physics.

Henry VIII very much the pioneer of conscious uncoupling.

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

Well, a free giveaway this week, in the bin, an automatic clapper.

when you want to express your appreciation for someone doing a socially useful job, but don't really have the time to do it yourself.

Simply play this sound effect from your phone.

And also in the bin, poetry, or poetry, as discussed, has had a real resurgence

during the lockdown.

And our in-house poet Gannicus Straffage

has written for us his latest poem about the current situation:

Coronavirus, you are only small, not tall at all.

You You are far from big, unlike a large pig.

You are tiddly in size, therefore harder to see than wasps or flies.

You are not bulky, but you seem quite sulky.

Nevertheless, you are a massive.

That was Coronavirus by Ganicus Straffage in the bit.

It's very William McGonagall levels of class, right there.

I like it because it rhymed and then it didn't.

That's the test.

Like all the best poems.

Yeah.

Slick it up.

Top story this week.

Children versus the virus.

Well, this coronavirus, in common with most other major political figures of our times, has generally not bothered itself with children and has focused mostly on the old.

But children around the locked down world have been having a tough time of it.

They have been, well climbing up the walls, frankly, which is good exercise and something to do.

Again, that helps them learn about physics and statistical risk and how to administer elementary first aid to themselves.

But these are

interesting times for a generation that will carry the effects of this crisis, this lockdown and its aftermath, through the rest of this century in their personal and working lives.

Alice, you are our correspondent for everyone on the planet under the age of,

well, let's say, well, 44, which is how I see children at my age.

What is the news from the world of kids?

Well, exciting news out of Switzerland.

Children are now allowed to hug their grandparents again, so all the battles for Omar's respect, love, and the inheritance of Nazi gold, Edelweiss, and timepiece fortunes can begin again.

Actually, it's not just that they're allowed to hug their grandparents.

In Switzerland right now, hugging your grandparents is compulsory, even if they smell weird or are bastards

i think that's kind of nice but i think the kids will agree it's way more exciting and badass to hug your grandparents while it's still illegal it's like a little you know i guess they're a little punk

yeah it's never really been kind of extreme sport or you know sort of countercultural expression of uh of rebellion yeah the last two months hugging your grandparents has been the coolest it's ever been real edgy

also if kids can't have you know if kids don't get coronavirus, but they can still be carriers, it's just like a nation full of tiny, adorable, grim reapers.

Well, it was always the kids who wouldn't hug anyone that you used to suspect of being sociopaths.

But now when a hug might be a death sentence,

you have to wonder about the real huggy kids.

A Swiss scientist has claimed that children cannot transmit the virus.

Other scientists have claimed that children can transmit the virus.

So, you know, science, you are really not covering yourself in in glory at the moment a third set of scientists claim that children are the virus

but because it's switzerland they're going to pretend not to take a stance and that any either science side could be right

it only applies to swiss children that swiss children are unique in not transmitting the virus uh i guess if that's the case we have to ask why is it you know their genetic neutrality as you suggested is it uh an excess of mountains is it holes in cheese or is it i think most likely that swiss children have been brought up exposed to the single-handed backhand in their star tennis players?

That having grown up watching Roger Federer and Stanislas Vavrinka playing with such beautiful, elegant single-handed play, that's made them less susceptible to the virus than the Spanish and Serbian children who've grown up watching the more functional, less aesthetically pleasing two-handed backhands of the likes of Nadal and Djokovic.

We don't know.

I guess these are some of the many things that science will have to study as we learn more and more about this virus.

Also,

in Switzerland, it's only children under 10, apparently, who do not transmit the COVID virus and can hug their

grannies and granddads under 10, specifically.

As soon as you...

I don't know if the coronavirus has a bit of an OCD thing about single-figure numbers

or simply that on their 10th birthday, Swiss children become lethal vectors of contagion, as we've always suspected them to be.

Another angle on this is that scientific research has also suggested that it's at precisely the age of 10 that the human brain starts to develop an understanding of the concept of inheritance, which is why the Swiss government doesn't want children aged 10 or over risking their grandparents' lives.

Well, they aren't taking some precautions, right?

Like when you make physical contact with your grandparents, you have to use some PPE.

You have to hug them through the holes in a large piece of cheese.

It's a coming of age thing.

You know, when you're 10, you put on your long pants, you take your hair down, and you stop hugging your grandparents.

It's like a bar mitzvah for Swiss people.

That's right.

Also, for teens, right?

You don't want teenagers haven't been touching anyone in weeks.

You don't want someone hugging their own grandparents, becoming physically aroused.

The hormones are out of control.

Family show, Josh.

It's actually very similar to a bar mitzvah in that when you come of age in Switzerland, you get some Jewish gold.

It's just

not from your relatives.

Meanwhile, in Spain, Spanish children are allowed out for the first time in six weeks.

They're allowed out to play in the streets, and they can return to their traditional pastimes of eating tapas at midnight, bullfighting, and staring morosely out of an oil painting at you, wearing full child-sized adult clothing while someone with dwarfism does menial tasks in the background.

Boy, that is such a stereotype, Alice.

That is not what Spanish kids do.

What Spanish kids do is just traditional cultural Spanish activities like riding a bicycle for weeks on end, patiently passing a football through midfield, or looking at a pig and thinking, your legs, my tumb, it's a date in 18 months' time or more if I'm treating myself.

Well, apparently Spanish people have been taking the time in quarantine to stock up on their siestas so when the lockdown stops nobody will be allowed to take a siesta for another eight months.

You know, it's a great time for people to be allowed to go outside in Spain.

It's almost electronic music and ecstasy season on the beaches.

Just a beautiful time.

But there are concerns that there aren't going to be enough people to harvest all the ecstasy and electronic music this year due to the lockdown.

So

there could be lots of electronic music that just goes to waste.

Yeah, those fat baits rotting in the fields.

Really, the goal behind this, right, is to let the children out, is to avoid turning an entire generation into a nation of competitive esports champions.

And I think that's no goal.

They're just going to get too good at gaming if they have to stay inside.

You don't want competitive esports players.

When you play sports and esports at the same time, the winner is always

friendship, or in the case of esports, loneliness.

Yeah,

the real victory in esports is the friend you didn't make along the way.

Here in Britain, there's talk of a phased reopening of schools, despite many in the Conservative government deciding that schools are no longer necessary.

The junior education minister, Millicent Radish Grief, was overheard speaking at a press conference saying there are going to be called decent jobs for these little funding Hoovers, so what's the point?

However,

there are now discussing ways of having a staggered reopening so that schools aren't overburdened and can maintain some form of social distancing.

There's one option that they reopen

with no children, another that they reopen with no teachers and just children allowed to roam around the school on their own.

Another that they reopen with teachers but no lessons or teachers giving lessons at night to an empty classroom and pupils coming in during the day to just osmose the learning, the waves of learning that are still rebounding around the room.

Another that there'll be children will have to have classes individually, but so that say a class of children,

say 30 children, can get through an entire lesson.

They're each going to be taught massively intensively for 90 seconds of furious teaching each.

Another option to try and

keep control of social distancing is a reduced syllabus in which children are only allowed to learn one subject for the rest of their school careers.

That subject, of course, being drama, because as discussed, that is the skill they're going to need, the ability to pretend that they're living happy and fulfilled working lives.

Regarding

exams,

there's a lot of kind of confusion of exactly how how all the exams that are no longer going to be done are going to be marked.

And the latest proposal from the government is to use Victorian phrenology to work out how well the children would have done in their exams based on the shape of their heads.

It seems as good a way as any.

We're going back to the old ways in so many different facets of life.

This

seems the logical step.

So here's some great news out of Australia.

A book has been, a children's book has been commissioned to be published as a film, the children's book Nullabaloo Hullabaloo, which was written in Bunnaloo in Australia.

The author, Fleur Ferris, she grew up on a small farm in Patchy Wallock in northwest Victoria before moving to Melbourne and then to Bunnaloo.

Apparently, it's going to be made into a Hollywood movie.

And I have no jokes about it.

I just like saying those words.

This is how I picture all Australian news.

Like, to me, a newspaper in Australia is just like hullabaloo, mullabaloo, and kind kind of a doo.

And then a politician says something obscenely racist.

Well, the author Fleur Ferris was a policewoman in Melbourne and then a paramedic.

So she'd just seen too many bad things.

So she retired to Bunaloo to write this children's book.

To conclude our Bugle Children's section, the latest installment of our Bugle Homeschool Exams.

Obviously, school exams have been stopped, but we at the Bugle are as a fount of all learning

helping anyone who is homeschooling with a series of exams to keep their children educated and informed.

This week, geography.

Get your pens and papers ready.

Question one, are rivers a metaphor for life?

They start off fresh, exciting, running around all over the place, then they settle down and end up meandering, getting fat and then just giving up.

Question two, using maps, graphs and pictograms, outline the correlation between tectonic fault lines and A.

Snake populations, B hip-hop stars, C the production of world snooker champions and D ice cream flavours.

Question 3.

Outline the geological evidence presented in an influential late 1960s research paper by the seismologists Terrell and Gay that the world is a great big onion.

If Terrell and Gay were correct in their assumptions, will global warming in fact make the planet smell absolutely awesome, like a giant fast food van at a sporting event?

Yum!

And finally, question 4.

If you had to install a new mountain range somewhere in the world, where would it be and why?

Choose from the following options.

A new Ural Mountains, the current Urals are a piss-poor mountain range to divide two such famous continents.

B, along the Netherlando-Beljamic border, the Shifo-Reichard range, going up to 5,000 meters in height, could be installed overnight, really just to see the looks on the faces of people who are used to cycling everywhere without having to go uphill.

C, a new mountain range in Central Asia called the Huralayas to partner the Himalayas but break the patriarchy of mountain ranges.

Or D, across the English Channel.

If we're going to do Brexit, let's fing do it properly.

Virus around the world news now and well it's not getting any

better

really

this this this story.

It might be getting slightly better in the short term but it seems to be getting bleaker and bleaker long term.

The United Nations Agency, the International Labour Organization, has warned that almost half of the global workforce,

that's 1.6 billion people are in quote immediate danger of having their livelihoods destroyed due to the economic impact of the virus the pesky little influenza parody virus jerk that has ground humanity to a quivering standstill with its morally abominable microscopic guerrilla campaign of sometimes symptomless terror it's served the world an unwanted undrinkable cocktail of mayhem stagnation and slow motion panic without even a parasol or slice of lime to pep it up and the world's economic house of straw is being thoroughly blown down by an invisibly small big bad bad wolf.

Lessons should be learned.

Next time, we should definitely, definitely build our economy out of wood.

If half the world loses their job, I mean, that's going to be terrible individually and for the greater economy.

But we should really spare a thought for the other half of people who just have to keep going to work while no one else is.

Just getting up in the morning like this shit again.

I think we need more creative solutions.

Don't cut the total number of jobs in half.

Just keep everybody going to work two and a half days a week.

That's a win-win.

That is a genuinely good solution,

I think.

I mean, in fact, you could even spread it out because that's 3.3 billion is the working population of the world.

So that's still

well less than half the world's population.

So if we just get

children and old people working again as well, I think everyone could be basically on a one-day working week.

Six-day weekends, we can build a better planet.

Oh, all the tourism that's going to get done on a six-day weekend, all the shopping, the economy is going to be booming with people working one day a week.

I don't think it's going to work that way at all, Andy.

I think what's going to happen is we are going to invent new jobs.

We are constantly inventing new jobs.

Who would have thought, even five years ago, that there'd be such a thing as a social media image consultant?

And yet, now there's more than 95% of the world's population has that job.

Well, in the United States, they're going to create some new jobs where 50% of the working population will be conducting celebratory flyovers to salute the other 50% who are doing essential jobs.

They did that this week.

There was a flyover over New Jersey and New York to salute essential workers.

And the only way that could have been less effective is if they had started shooting bullets down at the disease.

Well, I mean, we're doing better than before the suffrage, you know.

Back in the olden days, I don't know if you remember, Andy, 51% of the world didn't have jobs.

And in fact, we're not allowed to have jobs.

It's bad already.

I read this, this is true.

100,000 Hollywood actors are currently out of work and tragically among them 32,000 Hemsworths.

I'm sure that's an old measure of weight, isn't it?

The Hemsworth.

The Hemsworth, yeah.

It's like 215, 230, depending on what they're training for.

I'd like to buy a hemsworth of coal.

The ship was pulled over with 10 hemsworths of cocaine in the stough.

Well, it's a knock-on effect, of course, because the more hemsworths you take out of the economy, the less female lubrication there is.

This could be the driest year on record.

Wildfires abound.

Bushfires, we call them at the same time.

Family show.

Family show.

Please don't applaud that.

Do not applaud that.

I'm not here for standards.

You're just encouraging her.

It's interesting that the the jobs, the new jobs that may emerge from the mayhem to replace the the jobs and businesses that are that are uh dissolving before our eyes.

Uh I mean in in Britain certainly there is there is hope that uh people working for all the official inquiries into everything we fed up uh in this crisis could could provide employment for between two and three million people.

In the USA, that could be up to 35 to 40 million people.

Other jobs that could come into are being panic planners.

We have wedding planners, so I mean you can have another unnecessary planning industry advising people

what to panic by when the next crisis arises.

Research and development, there's been a lot of scientific research and development emerging in the aftermath of this, developing technologies to help us through future epidemics,

including scientists needed to develop a powdered hospital, which you can just keep in a silo and then just add water and it will just turn back into a hospital as soon as you need it.

And codger cocoons, if you can an

automated cryonic freezing pod.

for the old to live in so that when a virus breaks out they can just be put into suspended animation for as long as it takes.

Surely that's more humane than what we're doing at the moment.

A hypochondria consultant.

I think hypochondria consultants is going to be one of of the big growth industries of the next 10 years to help people worry about other things and the things they really should be worrying about.

It's a very valuable life skill.

And in terms of manufacturing, I think the big growth sector is going to be zorbing balls.

Because when you think of the social distancing regulations that we're going to need to observe, but also the need to transport ourselves physically from place to place to get the economy going again.

The zorbing ball is the perfect compromise because basically it keeps you in your own protected, protected, hermetically sealed, virus-free zone at approximately a two-metre range from everyone else in Zorbing Balls.

This is the way to get the world moving again.

We need manufacture to make 8 billion Zorbing Balls and this planet can get back to business.

There are no downsides to this, apart from uphills.

Uphills might be tricky, but other than the...

the physical downside, upsides, there are absolutely no downsides to it.

I anticipate a big boom in the work for hula hoopists, just large hula hoopists keeping each other at a distance, and also medieval knights with full jousting armour.

No one's going to cough at you if you're thundering towards them at 50 kilometers an hour on a war horse.

Trump sent 1,000 suits of medieval armor to New York at Cuomo's request.

Well, since you mentioned your glorious leader,

Josh, he's

been on characteristically terrifying form

this week.

He's claimed to have seen evidence that the coronavirus is basically an act of biological war by China, evidence that his own scientists have not seen or

produced.

Do we just have to accept that the credibility, the threshold of credibility for evidence in the court of Trump is different to a court of law or a scientific research paper?

Well, I'm seeing a lot of headlines that say Trump suspects certain things about the virus, which is like the wrong

word, because that implies he's capable of deductive reasoning.

If you can suspect something, he babbled that maybe the disease came from a Lavin chat, or he ejaculated that, or he

hormonally intuited.

It's all very kind of animal-brain with him.

So I think we just have to choose our verbs more carefully.

The standards of

his believing something are just that the flicker of a synapse in his brain suggested that it might be true.

And it doesn't matter where that synapse came from.

He could have stuck his fingers in an electrical socket for all I know.

He just gets on TV and oh sorry.

He just gets on TV and says whatever is in his mind for 60 minutes every night.

And before I saw him doing that for months, I thought, you know, maybe Dave Chappelle is going out with a little untested material a little quickly and Trump is just blowing him out of the water.

The thing about Trump is that people keep accusing him of saying stuff when he actually doesn't say anything.

Like, all the words are very much sort of abstract impressionism.

It's jazz chat.

It's word association.

Here's a quote.

He said, when

he was asked if he was suggesting that the coronavirus was not naturally occurring, he said, no, we're going to see where it is, where it comes from.

Theory from lab.

The bats, the type of bat, couldn't have been here or there.

A lot of theories.

We have people looking at it strongly, scientific people, intel people.

These are not the the words of a man who knows what words mean.

Hey, let's give him some credit.

He knows what words are.

Look, he doesn't make statements, that's for sure.

Statements imply sentence structure.

He just does, he just does sort of,

you know, this,

it's a beautiful use of words in a poetic way.

It's just, it's free association.

The silences are where the meaning is.

He kind of, the way he talks, it's so like stammering and fragmented.

It's like someone caught him cheating on his wife with the coronavirus.

Well, people always misquoting Trump.

I understand why people accuse, you know, the left of misquoting Trump, because it is actually impossible to quote him.

You just, if you try and quote Trump, your computer autocorrects it.

Some breaking news from America, one of America's leading oil companies is stepping up to do its bit for the public coronavirus effort.

The oil industry has been undergoing turmoil.

Prices fell a little while ago below the psychologically crucial zero dollars per barrel mark

and storage is almost fully full.

Anyway the oil company Lovely Butterfly which recently rebranded from its old brand name Toxico to make it sound more environmentally friendly without actually doing anything to justify that tag.

LB have filled up Lake Nugget in the Barton King Memorial Nature Reserve on the Idaho-Kentucky border with 100,000 barrels of excess crude oil.

It's the least we could do, explained Moresby Quarus, the CEO, chief exculpation officer of Lovely Butterfly, who added, people can just come and help themselves to free oil whilst times are tough, and they can probably help themselves to some free, ready-basted fish and birds to eat as well while they're at it.

So a nice gesture from a beleaguered industry.

Well, there's that saying, you know, like a fish needs a bicycle.

A fish doesn't need a bicycle because a fish has a car and that car is currently full of crude oil.

Alice, in Australia,

the lockdown is being slightly eased.

Yes, indeed.

Different states are doing different things.

But for example, in Australia, it's just ticked over to us being allowed to invite two people over to our house, so that everyone is now playing the game of who's their favourite relative

to invite over more than one at a time.

Apparently, New Zealand is not approving of

our apparent laxness, because even though they seem to to have completely illuminated the virus, they still think that we're going about things in too reckless a fashion.

That is a classic Australian-New Zealand beef, which, if anyone knows history, dates back to the mid-90s dispute between the rappers Outback Shakur and the notorious Kiwi.

And is that a joke that insults the intelligence of the show's audience and the nationality of one of its hosts?

Yes.

Am I capable of better?

I would argue I am not.

I also two people two people over your house at a time that is a a valiant effort by the Australian government to jumpstart its floundering threesome industry

it's been one of the few growth sectors in the global economy in the last 10 years

Also this week marked the 250th anniversary of the arrival of Captain Cook in Australia, the British exploring celebrity

who spent a week or so in Australia, Australia, then fked off to look for somewhere else.

Cook claimed Australia for the British crown under the Finders-Keepers rule of Imperial Conquest, which had a legal loophole in it.

That to be considered to have found it, you had to have done so within the last 30,000 years.

Anything earlier didn't count.

That was the loophole that Britain exploited with Australia.

Scott Morrison, the

current Prime Minister of Australia, said the date represented a merging of histories,

which is shortly after he'd merged an annoying wasp with his newspaper.

We got to stop.

I mean, you say that satirically, the Finder's Keeper's rule, but actually, the rule was called Terra Nullius, and it was, yeah, no one lives here, even though there were clearly people living there.

We got to stop celebrating the first time white guys show up to a non-white culture.

The only exception being the Beastie Boys, who I will continue to celebrate because they didn't commit genocide.

Unlike the Venga Boys, which is a little known fact, the Venga Boys is short for Vengeance Boys, and they are out for vengeance, and they are back.

Yeah, that bus was coming, and you don't want to know what's on it.

The poor citizens of Ibiza.

Oh, don't kick them while they're down there in the middle of that terrible techno recession.

Right, I'm now out of cultural references to deal with this bit of banter.

By saying,

I brought nothing to the table there.

Nothing.

Nothing whatsoever.

Can we talk about cricket?

Here in Britain, the Prime Minister is back at work.

Boris Johnson has returned to work having, well, as people say, beaten the virus.

I don't think he beat the virus.

I think the virus beat him comfortably on points.

He survived the virus because while he was supposedly beating it, the virus totally demolished the finging country.

I guess next time, tactically, if you're looking at this as as a fight, maybe don't showboat so much in the first minute of round one.

You cannot psych out a virus.

He's also returned to it and had a baby in the meantime.

His partner Carrie Simmons has

had a baby boy.

Congratulations to Simmons on her first child and to the Prime Minister on his X plus one child, where X is a number between, I don't know, five or six and whatever.

Sorry to get a bit mathematical, especially in this time of confusing statistics.

But there is some hope, though, that it will soon be possible to reduce Boris Johnson's rate of transmission down below the crucial R1 point.

But we can't quite pin our hopes on that.

That yet.

He is, however, back to take control.

Take control of our national bus that he so heroically drove into a swamp in the early days of this crisis.

And his own personal spin on the King Canute goes paddling at the seaside story.

But I guess if there's one man who can drive a bus out of a swamp, it's a highly trained expert with a large backup team to plan the practical and logistic side of things.

But Boris Johnson is going to be very good at shouting, come on, boss, you can do it, and waving some Union Jack pom-poms in encouragement.

So we have a Prime Minister in the...

He does love a bus.

Yeah,

he loves a bus.

He absolutely loves a bus.

He is back.

There's a feeling of relief here in Britain that Boris Johnson is back.

Maybe you can't relate to it.

Let me explain.

Basically, imagine you're being anesthetised for an operation.

And just as you're going under, you see the surgeon walking in, and it's Freddy Kruger wielding a chainsaw.

And then you wake up mid-operation, and it's no longer Kruger operating on you.

Instead, it's Hannibal Lecter.

It's that same feeling of relief, you know, that things...

It's a little bit better, probably.

Possibly.

Anyway, it's changed.

At least it's the person who technically has this job title.

Thank you, Dr.

Lecter.

R-level, of course, is the language used by scientists to refer to the rate of infection per coronavirus victim.

But actually, originally, it was historically used to refer to the levels of aggression on a pirate ship

it's like the scoville scale for chilly hotness

Boris Johnson described we're talking about what you know at what point Britain's going to start relaxing the lockdown he said this was the moment of maximum risk but that is That might be true, but it is only true because at the previous moment of maximum risk, he took some massive f ⁇ ing risks.

so I guess we have to acknowledge that now and take try and make sure there is not another moment of maximum risk some point in a few months time he says Britain is past the peak

and then carried on to say leaving us all to enjoy a fundamentally altered world in which millions and millions of people have been upheaved in a fundamental and irreparable way Team GB.

When he says Britain is past the peak, I don't think he means for the disease.

I just think he means the nation is in decline overall.

Although, I do think he would be accurate to say that COVID-19 is past its peak.

Like, when you're a pandemic, how much better can you do than infecting Boris Johnson?

You've peaked right there.

Well, he has had this new baby.

Everyone loves a new baby, and people are celebrating his little fruit of lust.

It has to be hard for the uncounted legions of other Boris babies he may or may not have had.

Do I need to say may not?

Not, he definitely had them.

The massive babies he so far refuses to take credit for.

It's funny, though, that he refuses to take credit for the babies, because he took credit for the Boris Boris bikes and they weren't his idea.

Maybe all babies are Boris babies.

He should put them on public racks for people to take and return.

Boris babies, they're pretty good.

A little heavier than other babies, but that's the technology.

I think you've just outlined the future of parenting post-virus.

He promised maximum transparency from the government, Boris Johnson, which is rather like hearing the Pope promising a rave with free boos, hot chicks, hot hunks and heroin.

I don't really believe him, and I don't really want it to happen anyway.

I don't want maximum transparency now, looking into a deep void of despair about what life will be like for the foreseeable future.

This is the time I want him to lie to us.

Not before.

I want good, productive lies now.

Well, Mr.

Johnson said that keeping the reproduction rate down is going to be absolutely vital to our recovery, and he means the virus, but I think it also serves as a word of warning to his penis.

Sports news now.

Well the main sports news is there's still no fing sport and this has got well beyond a joke.

Alice I know you're obsessed arguably to a fault with the administration of professional tennis.

What's been going on there?

Well Roger Federer backed by a number of other tennis stars has made a plea for a merger of men's and women's governing bodies in the sport of tennis.

So apparently at some point men's and women's governing tennis bodies are going to merge.

Four.

Yeah, they are.

You'd like that federer, you pervert, wouldn't you?

Oh, yeah.

Put it something, something, something, love.

I don't know.

I mean, it's that.

I mean, it's either the...

I don't know quite what they mean by merging.

Either it's this sexual congress or maybe they're going to do like a Frankenstein-y monster thing.

I would love to see a four-armed, four-legged Federer Williams Frankenstein monster play mixed doubles as a single entity, like something out of space jam.

Also, if they do that, it solves the social distancing rule by just smashing tennis players together.

I think that that's the core of it, right?

In this era of social distancing, I think Roger Federer is just desperate for any kind of merging bodies.

Well, that brings an end to another viral bugle.

Thank you very much for listening, Buglers.

We'll be back next week.

Alice,

anything to plug other than the last post, of course, which Carrie, what episode are we up to?

Into the 140?

Something like that.

We've been doing one a day since the 1st of January.

It's so much nonsense.

But also my stand-up special Savage is available on Amazon Prime.

So if you want to watch something that has me in it, you can watch that.

Josh,

anything to plug?

Sure, I have a new podcast called Make My Day.

It's a comedy game show where one guest competes and they always win.

And

my book, Nice Try, is still out.

You can get it on e-book or audiobook if you don't want to have a thing delivered to your house.

Buglers, thank you very much for listening.

We will play you out with some more lies about our premium level voluntary subscribers to join them or to contribute whatever you want to the ongoing existence and independence of the Bugle.

Go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Thomas Hornigold thinks glaciers are overrated.

They take ages to get where they're going, they leave rubbish everywhere, and they need very specific conditions in which to exist, complains Thomas.

Sure, they look pretty from a distance, he rails, but as a means of getting water from A to B, they're hopeless.

Give me a proper liquid river any day.

It must be said that Thomas was very disappointed as a child to discover that glaciers do not contain frozen fish.

It would be logical if they did, he grumbles morosely.

Dominic Legars-Moore once had to dissuade a theatrical impresario friend of his called Neil from attempting to launch a new musical production called the Stalagmites.

The Stalagmites was due to comprise eight brave little children who helped captured RAF pilots escape from a German prisoner of war camp camp built into rock formations growing from the bottom of a secret cave.

Neil did reluctantly accept Dominic's advice.

Margaret Bell came to the rescue when the persistent if deluded Neil then suggested that the production might still work if the heroes were instead little insect stalagmites that bit the camp guard to distraction, thus facilitating an escape.

Margaret said, Maybe you could slake your thirst, Neil, for writing musicals involving both German history and caves with Otto in the Grotto, about the 19th century statesman Otto von Bismarck's quest to unify Germany via a series of secret candlelit underground meetings with the leaders of the 39 states in the German Confederation.

I'm still not sure it's a guaranteed ticket shifter, equivocated Margaret.

Alexandra Schwab jumped into the breach to suggest that a more ethical and visually striking alternative production would be ETT, the Extra T-Rex trial, a Steven Spielberg-themed courtroom drama musical about the legal wranglings over a planned double sequel combining E.T.

and Jurassic Park in an alien dinosaur spectacular.

Alexandra did warn Neil that he would have to drop the caves and German history shtick though.

Azalea Wilberg, as a further alternative, suggests Babushka Babushka, a musical using the songs of Kate Bush about a Russian grandmother who travels around in a car formerly owned by the ex-American first lady, Barbara Bush.

Azalea says, musicals using songs already written by famous pop stars are popular for whatever reason.

You could even get 94-year-old Olga to drive the Barb Busch car back in time to have a secret romantic liaison with Martin Luther in the Bergstasgarten salt mine in Bavaria if you really won't shift on the Germanico historical subterranean theme, Neil.

And to conclude our History of Germany themed pieces of drama collection of lies today, Tony Weylard was long convinced that Star Wars character Yoda was so-called as an acronym shortening for his full name Johannes Dahlsbrücken, a young German who was fired into another galaxy and time in a covert 1930s experiment that went disastrously wrong.

It would explain why Yoda's mastery of the English language remains incomplete even at the age of 900, speculates Tony.

Here endeth the lies.

I'm going to bed.

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.