Bugle 4150 - Bleach? Nevermind

The Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers!

That fine no need to applaud.

I'm Andy Zoltzmann and this is issue 4150 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world, albeit a world whose visuals are now sepia-tinged with nostalgia for the olden times of three months ago.

The world is still

in an extremely static way.

I am still in my shed, which I have not left for three months, other than when I haven't been in it.

And I'm joined this week in the 150th episode since the show relaunched.

The man who joined me for the first of the relaunched shows in a very different New York City than the one that exists today.

Hari Kondabolu.

Hello, Andy.

Hi, Hari.

How are you, and how's your city?

Oh, things are great.

Things are absolutely there's there's like no traffic and

you know, the streets are pretty clear,

so I have heard.

And

yeah, I can't imagine anything being better than this reality.

Things are fan.

Is this better than my normal negativity up front?

I'm trying to use

positive sarcasm.

Yes, that's good.

You know,

it's an introductory, it's a gateway to genuine optimism, so you've got to be careful.

Also joining us from up the road here in South London, it's Nish Kumar.

Hi, hi, Nish.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Hurry.

Hello, Buglers.

How's your bit of London, since I haven't seen more than about five yards from my house since we lost?

I've absolutely no idea, Andrew.

I've absolutely no idea what's I have no idea what's going on.

Andy, when I was a young man, one of my favourite films was the film Wayne's World, where a man makes a television show from his own house.

And I am very much living my dream at the moment, Andy.

I've gone full Wayne's World and I'm making a TV show

from my box room.

And listen, all I can say is

my neighbours don't really understand what I do at the best of times.

And they certainly don't understand why three and a half weeks ago a man stood outside in the street disinfecting camera equipment, which he then abandoned, and I then took inside my own house.

So, at the moment, it's best case scenario, they think I'm making a TV show, and worst-case scenario, they think I am writing, directing, and starring in my own pornography.

Just

full citizen caning

a porn movie in my bedroom.

Right, you sure it's not like a jihadist ransom movie that you're doing?

It might be the first jihadist pornography.

That's a very interesting sexual term.

Citizen caning.

We were just doing some citizen caning.

Yeah, it was

meant as a filmmaker reference to Oswood Wells writing, directing, and starring it.

But of course, citizen caning is the sexual move where you achieve orgasm by remembering a childhood sled.

Rosebud.

I'm hungry.

I'm very hungry now.

Family show.

Family show.

We are recording on the 24th of April in the year 2020.

Happy birthday to the Hubble Telescope, which was launched 30 years ago.

Today, the Hubble and its distant space home has been celebrating its 30th birthday, or at least pretending to celebrate, but internally suffering a personal crisis of confidence about what it's doing with its life, where its best years have gone, and

worry about the world's constant quest for younger, fresher satellites.

And you've got to look back on the 30 years of Hubble and think, pretty f ⁇ ing disappointing, not a single fing alien.

Seriously, what was that all for?

We can see the stars with our own fing eyes.

Thank you, you jumped-up magnifying glass.

The 26th of April, Sunday is Hug and Australian Day, which is going to be a tough one to observe in these lockdown times.

And also, it's Get Organized Day, which I think, in light of current circumstances, we might like to think about expanding to more than one 365th of each year.

Maybe

anoint this third millennium, the get organized millennium, for humanity to get around to all the shit it's never quite done.

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

Again, it's a homeschooling section.

In England, the heads of English schools have issued a statement this week saying, see how you f ⁇ ing like it, suckers.

Your children are a pain in the ass, aren't they?

Or at least that was the subtext when they announced that it's unlikely England schools will go back before the 1st of June.

So this week in the section in the bin, we've had the history exam and the maths exam.

Now we have the Bugle science exam.

We at the Bugle have always taken our founding principles to inform, educate and mislead very seriously indeed.

And this is your Bugle science exam for homeschooling.

Physics.

Atoms move faster the hotter it gets.

Humans, by contrast, often get a bit lethargic when the sun comes out.

So do you conclude A, humans are not made of atoms?

B, atoms are absolute f ⁇ ing nutcases, probably off their tiny minds on some kind of narcotic, or C, atoms think they've made it when they find their way into a human and simply clock off.

Question two, the 17th century Dutch scientist Johannes Bon Joviticus calculated that the melting point of rock was 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

But what are the melting points of A, toast, B, a football, C, hearts, and D, a giraffe?

Question three: Chemistry in two parts.

A, what the f is chemistry all about?

And B, if you combine nitrogen tetrachloxide with bihydrogen sulfur sulfonate, radioactive in a Gutian infractor, and electro-cobble it to a comolecloid of feral aluminum, and an oxygen standin, or proxygen, does it A, upgenerate into a semi-gaseous blobble, B, isohypogenate spontaneically, C, deplode, D, importune an antivert intrapolation, or E, become a sausage.

That

is your science exam to put to your homeschooled children.

And I hope it's going well for any buglers who are enjoying that particular journey into your own personal inadequacies.

Sorry, into

getting to know your children much, much better.

But top story of this week, it's fine.

It was all a hoax.

Everything's absolutely fine.

Not quite.

No news is no good news at the moment.

It's still rumbling on here in Britain.

The constantly vomited, gobbled, and rechundered diet of context-free statistics, half-ar pseudo-promises, and political obfuscations has rumbled on unabated.

We still have the weekly clap, the celebrity sing-alongs, the stomach-churning sense of grinding pessimism.

Not much has changed.

Hari and Nisha, we're now several weeks into this lockdown process.

What have you personally learnt from this era of lockdown?

I've learned two major lessons, Andy.

One,

I can go three days without a shower until I pass out from the smell.

I assumed it would be four days, but no, three.

I also learned I need to be more active once the lockdown ends, since my life now is about as active as it was was before the lockdown

i'm going to die

uh nish what what are what what are your uh i think in modern parlance takeaways from uh this um

couple of couple of key takeaways uh firstly if you leave me in my house uh with a functional coffee machine and no real reason for me to leave the house, I will consume an amount of caffeine that essentially turns it into a hallucinogenic drug.

When I was on my seventh cup of espresso intensivo strength, 13 out of 13, by what metric, I have no idea, but in terms of its impact on my blood pressure, I believe it's the Richter scale, I had turned coffee into a drug that was capable of making me hear Jefferson Airplanes white rabbit and see the pink Floyd hammers.

Unfortunately, there was no way for me to trim it, so I ended up shaving the entire thing off.

And so for about two weeks, I looked like the world's worst Bollywood Leo Sayer tribute act.

It's a horrible look.

The one thing I've learned is that cleaning out your cupboards is not an act of spiritual cleansing so much as a harrowing delve into failure and regret.

Andy, I've seen the stuff that's at the front of your cupboards.

It's like you live in a Victorian rag and bone shop.

Never mind.

How is your status as

home school?

I'm going to say deputy headmaster, Andy.

I've met your wife.

She's eminently the more sensible of the two of you, although that is not saying much given your output.

Well, I mean,

it's going all right.

So far, we've done

a history module on the Bodyline series of 1932-33.

This week also did an in-depth study of linguistic evolution using the development of the word how's that

through the history of cricket and the various adaptations of that word into things like howse and

so really studying understanding how language develops and changes through usage.

Next week we're looking at the physics involved in the impact of a round leather-coated object weighing five and a half ounces with a flat wooden object.

And we're also looking at a biology class on how to cut different types of grass to extremely short lengths to gradually degrade over a five-day period.

So,

you know, learning, my kids are learning an awful lot about the world.

Andy, is there any risk that this admission would lead to your children being taken away?

Well, I mean, that's the great thing about

lockdown.

They've got no choice.

Have you talked of anything that isn't directly related to cricket?

The way I look at the universe, Nish, I don't think there is anything that is not directly related to cricket.

So

no, we did look at a picture of a guy Leonardo da Vinci in a book yesterday, but I reckon if you squint your eyes hard enough, it looks a bit like the

John Player League match between Gloucestershire and Somerset in 1983.

Masks news now, and well, a lot of questions are going to be asked in the aftermath of this if

humanity survives long enough to reach the aftermath of it.

Questions such as how the f did it happen?

What the f do we do now?

How the f do I manage to lose two pairs of glasses without leaving the fing house?

And whilst whilst we know that heeding warnings can make you look a bit square politically, might it be a good idea for humanity to heed some f ⁇ ing warnings in the future.

And

one of the greatest questions, I think,

is about the human relationship with the face mask, because the frankly horrifying prospect of the face mask becoming an unavoidable part of life of the foreseeable future is hoving into view around the world.

Harry, in New York, I think

you've already got to wear them outside.

Is that correct?

Yeah, yeah, which is sad for people people with lip rings and tongue rings because that's now a waste.

Right.

Yeah.

Makes my mustache and beard a non-entity,

which is a bummer since the growth of facial hair is an Indian superpower.

Yep.

Down right.

Completely wasted.

It's just another example of this virus being racist.

I'm also worried about what it's going to be like for comics.

Like, if we ever get to perform again, are we all going to have to wear masks on stage?

Because then we all look like gimmick acts.

You know what I mean?

Like, here comes Dr.

Laffey.

Do we not all wear masks anyway, Harry?

Oh, Andy.

It would be nice for our parents to pretend that we're doctors for once.

Yeah.

Yes, he wears a mask.

One prescription of a hot dose of chuckles.

How do you see that the mosque, the masked future of humanity?

Well, I'll go a different way from Hurry re-performing comedy.

I don't know how much any of you guys were aware of some of my gigs that were happening quite close to the lockdown, but I was planning on returning to doing comedy in full protective equipment anyway.

Just to sort of dodge the various missiles that are being deployed by members of the audience.

Listen, I think.

Stop the bread going in your mouth, I guess that was.

Yeah, exactly.

Hey, I'm trying to quit carbs, Andrew.

Gotta keep the bread out of my mouth somehow.

I think, um, listen, I think if we end up, uh, uh, there's a part of me that would really like us to all wear masks.

One, because I spent a lot of time as a child reading comic books and I can pretend that I'm a superhero.

And secondly, it'll really be one in the eye for all of the people who have been slagging off women wearing burkas for years.

It'll be a real, like, nice revenge policy for all of the people who have been yelling at burkas.

And I include in those people, our Prime Minister, who compared women who wear burkas to letterboxes.

And I'll never forget where I was when his father said if I was a female fighter jet pilot, I would expect someone to say, don't wear a burka.

And the reason I'll never forget where I was when he said that is because I was sat next to him with my head in my hands as part of Channel 4's election coverage in December.

I mean we're all

wearing burkas now.

Suck it, Boris.

If you'd have been wearing a burka, you wouldn't have got ill, you f ⁇ ing idiot.

While we're on the topic of burqas, can I just double down on France?

Sorry, that plays very well in post-Prexium Britain.

But it just feels like they've tried to ban burqas, and they had this whole thing where they banned facial covering, which was just a way to, you know, to f with Muslims, right?

It was just a way to upset Muslims.

And now all of a sudden, everyone's wearing masks.

So

I find that insulting after all that, now you think covering your face is a good thing.

And secondly, what upsets me more is that they're f ⁇ ing hypocrites.

The only thing worse than bigotry is hypocritical bigotry.

Die with the hate you have in your heart.

Double down.

Further proof that this virus is really everything al-Qaeda could ever dream of being, but actually getting some shit done.

There have been very few occasions when I've thought to myself, wouldn't this world be better if all we could see of people's facial features were a pair of terrified and/or regretful and or resentful eyes?

And

the various trial schemes around the world over history that have been conducted into this have done little to persuade me that it benefits humanity.

And is it going to reach the stage where having a whole uncovered face becomes like smoking, that people will be bunking off work for five minutes to go to special shelters where they're allowed to have a whole face a few minutes before putting the mask back on, returning to reality.

Well, I think it's going to change what we find sexual, you know, like it'll be like, whoa, is that an ankle?

Oh my god.

I think I just saw some ankle.

Oh my god, was that the space between her eyes?

Like all of a sudden it takes on this like.

We're getting Victorian again.

This is what Brexit was all about.

Going back to the Victorian era.

I mean, on a personal level, you know, it's just make it much harder for me to look as sultry as I like to look generally in my everyday life.

I worry about restaurants, you know, being able to reopen but only feed people through intravenous drip,

which

might lead to some exciting developments in the foodic

industry.

There are...

That's the end point of molecular gastronomy at the end of the day.

Blumenthal's always been working towards being able to feed you a lobster beesque via IV.

And then there's the logistical issue that there's been a lot of coverage about how Britain in particular has totally failed to provide masks for the people who definitely need them without then telling everyone else to wear them as well.

So people are going to have to make their own improvised masks, which obviously will be massively ineffective, but not as massively ineffective as not wearing a mask, which is even more massively ineffective.

So what can you use?

Beekeeper's mask?

Might as well.

A GIMP mask.

That does work, if only because it makes people give you an extremely wide berth on public transport.

The helmet from a medieval suit of armour worked for Henry V.

One of those rubber hull head masks of celebrities or political leaders.

They're fine as long as you don't breathe in or out and don't use the Donald Trump one.

That really does not play well with this virus.

Canvas from a classic artwork, that works very well if you can break into a gallery and cut off a triangle of art.

It should be at least 400 years old.

I'll deal with a biblical scene for added divine protection.

Maybe Caravaggio's John the Baptist noggin on a platter from the National Gallery for anyone listening in London.

The reverse mullet

brushed down over the face.

That works, that stops the virus.

The Elizabethan ruff adapted to hold a window box with fast growing herbs that cover your mouth, yellow, nosal area and also give you something to nibble on if you get peckish.

That's another alternative.

A large nan bread or fajita over the face, held in place by a John McEnroe style headband.

That could just about do a job.

And obviously, a sombrero adapted to have a curtain rail around the outside with some curtains that you can open when you don't need to be facially covered is probably the best option for those without access to medical equipment.

The CDC is suggesting that we make a mask out of an old t-shirt and some paper towel.

So, basically, arts and crafts is going to save us, Andy.

Apparently, Martha Stewart should have been the head of the CDC.

Now, the big question here is which t-shirts will take the hit, right?

You got to sacrifice some key t-shirts.

And I've decided the t-shirts I'm going to use for mass are my old Smashing Pumpkins Zero t-shirt, right?

And my thank God we never had to deal with a pandemic in our lifetime t-shirt,

which I was going to invest thousands in before the pandemic started so thank god I waited

I'm gonna be using my old Smith's t-shirts just to doubly irritate Morrissey

I'm gonna deface his merchandise and then use some of it to keep a brown man alive

take that Moz

on the subject of t-shirts there's a famous t-shirt slogan that says you don't have to be an unhinged populist lunatic to become leader of a country with more than 200 million people in it but but it sure as hell helps.

And we've seen during this crisis some slightly curious behaviour.

Bolsonaro, the Brazilian president, he's been joining anti-lockdown protests and coughing without covering his mouth.

Last week sacked his health minister, Luis Enrique Mandeta, after the two clashed over whether Mandeta's approach to the crisis using things like science, evidence, and common sense was the right approach or not.

Mandeta himself said, science is light, and it is through science that we will find a way out of this.

Wise words, depending on when you say them, during a chat with your partner in a sticky phasing relationship, science will find a way out of this.

That's maybe not the right thing to say.

And Hari, your great leader,

President Trump, has been

on a daily basis entertaining the world with his

masterclass in how to be the exact leader the world does not need at a time like this.

Basically, I think Trump as president in a pandemic is like entrusting a rhinoceros to ride a kid's tricycle.

And once you've helped it onto its seat, there is no possible way it can end well, and it just gets more confusing and unpalatable when you realize the rhinoceros is really enjoying itself.

Yeah, it's funny that he's not your leader.

It's so hilarious, Andy.

Yes.

When I watch his press conferences, I laugh and laugh and laugh.

You should have an efficient leadership like ours.

Our leadership is so committed to this fight against coronavirus that the head guy contracted it.

How do you feel about that, Harry?

The de facto Prime Minister is.

I feel envious.

The de facto Prime Minister of the UK is, from my personal experience, a man who can't tell brown people apart.

And the government's best strategy appears to be our Home Secretary, Pritty Patel, trying to deport coronavirus.

Well, at least your leader didn't suggest that we inject ourselves with disinfectant

to stop coronavirus.

This is the President of the United States, which, by the way, he's right, because that would kill us and that would end coronavirus.

Exactly.

I can't tell you.

I mean, it's an interesting way to go about it.

I suggest blasting disinfectant directly into people's lungs.

And I have checked some of the bottles of disinfectant that we've got in our house.

And it might be that he's just got the words mixed up because it says, if ingested, seek medical help immediately.

Yeah, it's right on there.

Rather than if seeking medical help, ingest immediately.

So you can understand it's not that different, really.

It might be that you just scanned Reddit.

He's a very busy man.

It's very hard work being president of a large country.

To be fair, it never said on the bottle, it has never said on the bottle, do not inject intravenously.

It never says that.

It says in jest.

It led to the BBC's coverage of it.

Meant that the BBC, because the BBC, you know, it's a public service broadcaster in this country, and so it has to adopt the same sort of dry professorial tone to whatever bullshit the president of America has spouted.

So, in the article covering it at the bottom,

there was an article written by a BBC health reporter with the headline, Disinfectants Don't Work Inside the Body.

As that person was writing that, they must have taken every ounce of state-induced

non-bias to not write, are you finging kidding me?

He also seems to be banking a bit on sunlight, killing it.

I can't believe he hasn't already suggested garlic and making a sign of a crucifix or a foil elsewhere, malleting a wooden steak through the virus's heart.

And on the subject of the disinfectant, he said, if it could knock out the virus in a minute,

is there a way that we can do something like that by injection inside almost a cleaning?

And he's not far away from suggesting a full exorcism.

I mean, clearly, we know it's election year.

He is pandering to the Christian right.

He wants to bring exorcisms back into mainstream medicine.

I'm waiting for him to suggest that we shrink the army

into

tiny little specks that could enter and

kill the virus from the inside.

Well, I mean, don't even say these things out loud.

It just can't be too bad.

A couple of weeks ago, at one of his

sort of daily stand-up comedy routines, he said that he sort of...

He's the only guy that's got any f ⁇ ing gigs at the moment.

Yeah, I know.

And he did sort of...

I mean, he sort of suggested some he made some sort of wise crack that seemed to be him like suggesting that he'd had sex with a lot of models as part of a conversation and I thought well that's really bad and then this morning I found myself saying out loud a sentence I never thought I'd ever say I wish the president of America would stop suggesting you could inject disinfectant into the human body and go back to bragging about banging models when asked about a deadly global pandemic.

That is on a par with unexpected sentences I've been forced to say in the last 12 months, including England have won the Cricket World Cup and maybe we don't need another Batman movie.

I will say the one good thing about him saying that have we thought about it, you know,

trying disinfectants within our bodies is that the people that will likely try that are Trump supporters.

So, you know, I don't want to think too much about the election, but

that's helpful.

He said it would be interesting to check whether

it's injection into the lungs would work.

Interesting to check.

It's not really interesting to check it.

About as interesting as checking whether if you urinate towards the moon, the moon automatically flushes.

Or whether you can cure malaria by dressing up like a giant mosquito and singing the Chuck Berry song My Ding-a-Ling.

Or

whether if a butterfly flaps its wings on Mars, a shark nado occurs on Saturn.

None of those would be interesting to check.

They were obviously not the case.

They would be fun to check.

Maybe that's what he meant.

Maybe he meant it would be fun to inject people with disinfectant directly into

their lungs.

Maybe he's just got bored of violating

your democratic heritage and political dignity, Ari.

Yeah, they won't let him fist the corpse of Martha Washington.

So he's just looking at it.

Jesus Christ.

He also said, this is a direct quote.

And I do want to quote this in defense of Donald Trump.

He did say, I'm not a doctor, but I'm like a person that has a good you-know-what.

I think that's a lyric from my ding-a-ling, isn't it?

I watch reruns of The Office Now, and I think, God, I wish Michael Scott was the president.

Or David Brent.

Thank you.

Thank you, Harry.

Taking medical advice from Trump, I would say, is like taking medical advice from the bugle.

No, actually, it's worse.

This week we've got a Jew and two people of Asian origin.

At least we've got three people whose families hoped they'd become doctors, even if they were not.

Actually, doctors.

There we go.

We're doubling up on the doctors' jokes.

Trump also said that Boris Johnson was back to his old self.

No, look, I'm pleased he's well again, but I don't want him back to his old self.

I want him reborn with a new vision of life.

Yeah,

you don't want the Christmas carol to end and for Scrooge to wake up and go, oh, God, that was a weird dream.

Anyway, back to kicking orphans.

I have a broader philosophical question.

At what point are the doctors, who are always either stood or sat in the vicinity of Donald Trump, violating their Hippocratic oath by not rugby tackling him?

At what stage are they...

I mean,

at some point, surely...

First, do no harm.

He's telling people to inject bathroom cleaner into their body to kill a virus.

Like, at some point, somebody has to high-tackle this motherfucker.

Just clothes like stone-cold Steve Austin, the jackass.

Every time Fauci goes up to the microphone, I hope he says, first of all, President Trump is a f ⁇ ing moron.

like every time i wait for it

wikipedia has better fact checking than instructors at the very least one of them should have a microphone themselves and just say citation needed after everything he says right

in germany all states in the german nation have announced plans to make mosques compulsory to combat the virus's spread well that's it's not surprising andy Germans are very good at unifying for the purpose of getting rid of things like the Berlin Wall or Insert World War II joke here.

It doesn't get old, Germans.

You're fed up big time, Germans.

We're not going to forget it.

You're fed up big time.

Carl, you're becoming more British than the British.

Yeah, I was going to say, Harry, who said that your time studying studying in London left you with no lasting influence?

It's been another textbook week for the man who puts the cool dude into the phrase, the president of America's incompetence constitutes an existential threat to the survival of the American people during this global pandemic.

Not cool, dude.

Big business and the virus news now.

And of course, we're all in this together, and billionaires have been just as restricted as the rest of us.

Some of them reduced to one or at most two or three or four of their private islands, or a much reduced range of luxury yachting options, and an increased difficulty in finding a workforce to power and operate their giant 100-metre-high animatronic mega-effigy tribute statues of themselves.

But a report for the US think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies, has suggested that the wealth of eight leading billionaires has jumped by over $25 billion

in under a month up to the 10th of April as the lockdown kicked in.

That's just under a billion dollars for every million Americans who filed for unemployment during the shutdown.

$25 billion is like 1,000 celebrity-loaded TV fundraisers all at once.

And yet people are sewing aprons for nurses in their homes.

$25 billion

in under a month.

Earth, you are a f ⁇ ing silly planet sometimes.

These Pluto celebs include Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who famously sliced off one of his own breasts so he could earn money more efficiently.

The private equity mega chiefs, Joshua Harris, those markets aren't going to play themselves, folks.

The obviously fictitious future preneurial Loonwiz 1980s kids film character Elon Musk.

Musk's longtime rival Pilau Snork, who's teamed up with the home improvement entrepreneur Esquequiel Chillange to offer easily installable home moats for people who want to keep themselves extra safe in lockdown.

The vertical instamote that can surround an apartment in a high-rise block with a protective micro lake in under a minute has sold particularly strongly and also making a massive profit.

Ahmed from my local news agent shop who shifted incredible units after encouraging everyone in the area to collectively build a 50km high paper mache statue of a nurse in tribute to the NHS.

Yes, typical, wouldn't it?

The guy who sells newspapers telling everyone to do paper mache, profiting from other people's good nature.

In 2013, Forbes magazine, and this was sort of a yearly practice for a while, as a sort of fun,

you know, I guess like a sort of fun and finally piece for a financial paper, would calculate the net worths of fictional characters like Bruce Wayne and Tyron Lannister.

And they would do a rich list of fictional characters.

And the top of the rich list, perhaps surprisingly, would always be Scrooge McDuck.

Right?

So Scrooge McDuck, for those of you who don't know, is an elderly Scottish anthropomorphic Pekin duck with a yellow-orange bill, legs and feet.

He typically wears a red or blue frock coat, top hat, glasses and spats.

He's portrayed as speaking with a Scottish accent.

He is the uncle of Donald Duck and is a character loosely based on Ebedezer Scrooge.

So he moved from Scotland to America and his nephew is Donald Duck, and then he has three other nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louis.

And he lives in a house with a big bang and he has gold coins that he can swim around in, right?

Now, when Forbes calculated his net worth, they calculated it to be $65.4 billion.

Jeff Bezos' net worth is currently $142.5 billion.

That means people who could imagine a talking duck who would

manage to successfully navigate the complexities, both geographical and from an administrative bureaucracy point of view, of immigrating from Scotland to the United States of America, where he would end up formally adopting his nephews and setting up a house with the capacity for him to swim in all of his money in the form of individual gold coins, could not imagine the amount of money that Jeff Bezos has.

That puts it all in perspective.

I'm sure you could measure it out in

cricket bats full of oil or whatever, whatever it was we did yesterday.

There are 900 independent bookshops in Britain, roughly.

Amazon could give every single one of them a quarter of a million pounds and it would cost it two hundredths of one percent of its global value.

So

it's got a bit to spare, I think, in

layman's terms.

When I was looking at the rich lists, one of the other names that, a familiar name that pops up on there, is someone who's worth $46.9 billion, and that person is Mackenzie Bezos.

So if you really want to get rich, forget playing the markets.

It seems like the best job you can get is divorcing Jeff Bezos.

It's finging outrageous stuff.

Also here in the UK, our billionaires are very much on their bullshit.

Philip Green is claiming UK taxpayer relief to pay his furloughed employees, despite the fact that his company is owned by his wife, who is a resident of the famously low-taxed principality of Monaco.

Richard Branson is demanding a government bailout for his airline.

Now, so far, the government have basically resisted his calls for a bailout by, I mean, I'm assuming, at least on internal memos, using the phrase, go f yourself, you mullet twat.

Canoes made of mushrooms news now.

Hari, you are the the Bugles

boats made of vegetative stroke fungal matter correspondent.

An exciting breakthrough this week in the mushroom canoe industry.

Yeah, the id

this this uh this person, I don't have the name in front of me, but doesn't matter, uh made a

apparently the news is slow enough to share this story, which is she made a a boat made of mushrooms.

Yep.

Yeah, that's Ka Katie Ayers from Nebraska, twenty-eight-year-old student.

Well, first of all, let me just say that I'm uh I'm a little bitter uh because it's

she made a canoe out of mushrooms, which is uh a lot better than my kayak m that I made out of lettuce.

It uh just couldn't hold the weight.

I mean to be fair building a ship out of iceberg lettuce was just a bad omen.

Thank you.

Thanks.

We will keep you up to date, buglers, with all the news in mushroom canoe technology over forthcoming decades.

Sport now and well just quickly on sport this Tuesday the 28th of April from 8pm

I'm co-hosting the Muscular Dystrophy UK virtual quiz.

There was going to be an actual quiz in May at Lords Cricket Ground but due to this

rather annoying virus that you may have heard about that has been cancelled.

Instead there is an online quiz featuring me, Gabby Logan, Ryan Side, Bottom England cricketer, rugby player Charlie Hodgson, athlete John Regis, and our fellow comedian Alex Horne.

To find out how to take part, go to lockdownfundraiser.org to all the money for muscular dystrophy UK, a fantastic charity that helps the 70,000 people in the UK who live with muscle wasting conditions.

And charities' incomes have been devastated by the cancellation of fundraising events during this pandemic.

So if you can contribute anything to the charity or join in with the quiz please do so um uh Hari you are a basketball fan for reasons that elude me frankly and you know I can watch pretty much any sport but basketball basketball I just

I've just never got I've never got but there's a lot of what I like about it Andy partly is that it takes less than six hours right well that's really my main beef with it to be honest what is it 48 minutes of the very fact that you're measuring the sport in hours shows you how little you know about appealing to Andy's offspring.

Yeah, it's days, not hours, days.

Yeah.

But there's a Bulls documentary that came out.

It was called The Last Dance about the last

Bulls championship and all the drama around it and what led up to it.

And, you know, everyone's been talking about it, and I was excited to watch it.

And I started watching it.

And I realized that it was a mistake because as a 1990s Knicks fan, this was very painful to watch.

because the Bulls broke my heart every year.

It's like the kid who bullied you in high school becoming more successful than you, and then you watch a documentary about them bullying you and becoming more successful than you.

Like you finally think to you, thank God it's over.

It was ages ago.

Now let's relive it

while being trapped at home with no other sports on.

For the benefit of British buglers,

the Chicago Bulls is a basketball team, and Michael Jordan is the one in Space Jam who wasn't Bugs Bunny.

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

Thank you very much for listening.

The Bugle has finally entered the 21st century.

We're doing YouTube stuff and Instagram, apparently.

And

there will be

videos,

and you can get snippets of the recording

via YouTube.

So do have a look at that.

And yeah, there'll be some absolute high-class additional content as well at some point in the next 10 to 50,000

years.

Andy, I've got three words for you.

Bugle TikTok.

Let's get some people doing some lip sync videos to your bullshit

on TikTok.

Genuinely a good idea.

If I know the Bugle audience, and I think I do, we're about to be absolutely crushed by an avalanche of lip sync videos.

I'm going to make, I'm going to get some 15-second clips of Andy available

because people can download them.

That's awesome.

Yes, please.

Yes, please.

Thank you for listening.

Any

Nish, your TV show is currently on.

Can people see it around the world or is it UK only?

If you live in Britain, you'll be able to see the first four episodes of the MASH report as recorded from my house.

And if you live abroad, you s technically can't watch it, but you all seem to be able to.

Judging by my Twitter feed, you're all watching it anyway.

I don't really understand how you do that, but I'm very pleased you do.

So, yes.

BBC iPlayer and then however else you people watch it.

Hari, anything to plug?

Sure.

I'm part of a six-part PBS documentary called Asian Americans that comes out in May.

Also, I'm in a Spelling Bee documentary, of course I am.

This guy has got a brand called

Spelling the Dream that comes out on Netflix

in the middle of May as well.

And

I've rescheduled a bunch of shows for August, October, November, and December.

And so if you want to buy tickets now,

it'll be easier when we reschedule them a second or third time.

So, but yeah.

Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Oklahoma City, all the big ones.

All up for sale.

Also, you can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Hurry Kundabolu.

But good luck with that.

Thanks all again for listening.

The Muscular Distro for UK Virtual Quiz is Tuesday night at 8 p.m.

the 28th of April.

Until next time, Buglers, goodbye.

And we will play you out with some more lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers.

To join them, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Zaltzman Lipsings.

Zoltzman Lipsings.

Heather CS chirps in by interpreting the slogan, you can't empty the bath if you've concreted over the plughole, as a piece of advice not to take a short-term headline grabbing approach to problems which might have adverse long-term repercussions.

The always practical Heather notes, whilst concreting over a plughole is a short-term big ticket way of getting your bath water to stay in the bath, whilst also stopping spiders clambering up into it, it does leave you in something of a post-bath logistical bind.

Joe Schaefer is a big fan of Melinda's phrase, don't fight an octopus with a scimitar made of salt.

It reminds us, says Joe, of taking the appropriate action for the problem at hand, not just using our favourite solution for everything.

Joe is also an amateur slogan monger himself, his proudest creation being, no one ever won a Grand Prix on a sofa, no one ever crashed a sofa into a tree.

It's all about finding the balance between risk and caution, confirms Joe.

Christopher Carlson has thought long and hard about the famous riddle, what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening, and thinks that the conventional answer, a human being, is wrong.

He thinks the correct answer is in fact a performing circus donkey that, having spent the morning as a conventional quadruped, had an accident when doing its Derek the Walking Donkey act at a matinee performance and had one of its legs bitten off by the circus's tiger.

The last time Rose Andrew can remember thinking about Javier Perars de Cuear before the former UN Secretary General's recent death at the age of 100 was in the year 2012 when she had a vivid and it must be emphasized absolutely non-erotic dream about the ex-Peruvian Prime Minister turning up uninvited at one of her friends' weddings.

He then grabbed the microphone, sang a medley of hits from the 1980s, his time as UN Secretary General, and then pulled the mask off his face Scooby-Doo style to reveal the former US President Abraham Lincoln but with a teddy bear on his head instead of a stovepipe hat.

Read into that what you will.

By contrast, Nick Broad has never had a dream about a current or former UN Secretary General, but he does have recurring nightmares in which the renowned intergovernmental organisation is Secretary Generaled, or is that Secretary General, either way, by cartoon rabbit Bugs Bunny.

Nick does not consider Bugs Bunny's flippant attitude to the world appropriate for this job, even if his catchphrase, what's up, Doc, might be appropriate for these times that we are currently living through.

Here endeth this week's lies.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very 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.