Bugle 4149 - William The Bonquerer

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Lockdown, day 2973.

Britain is now one long queue with 70 million people shuffling around two meters apart, although no one can remember what they're queuing for anymore.

Europe has swapped with South America, and the Italian rebel stronghold in the northern Andes is threatening the Danish capital of Lima, whilst Bulgaria is swanning around on Copacavana Beach in its skimpy underpants.

Bolivia is reveling in its new array of coastlines and islands whilst Greece is convincing itself that being landlocked is okay once you get used to it.

In America, Emperor Trump and his feared stormtroopers have brutally repressed dissenting voices, leaving a population of only 8,000 deliriously ecstatic ecstatic lunatics and Fox News.

Canada, now home to over half a billion people, has accelerated its global warming scheme to make Baffin Island perfectly habitable.

New Zealand has invaded Norway and vice versa just to give themselves something to do.

And in South London, Andy Zoltzmann is still self-isolating in a wheelie bin, podcasting to himself, 24-7, 365, living off the sweet nutrition of his own lies.

Oh, gosh, sorry, sorry.

I'll keep having these awful flash flash forwards.

I think it's pre-traumatic stress.

Hello, where are we?

Yes, it's the bugle, issue 4149.

I'm Andy Zoltzman, and it is the 17th of April, 2020, as has so seldom been the case in history.

And I'm coming to you live from the sheds, joining me, not from sheds, in London, Tiffany Stevenson, and from San Francisco, NATO Green.

Hello, both of you.

Hello.

Hey, everybody.

NATO,

how's things on the West West Coast?

Great.

It's fantastic.

I mean, look, I don't know.

That's what I'm telling myself.

I haven't left my house in six weeks.

I've been more than half a block away.

So who knows what's happening outside of my neighborhood?

At this point, I am shaving my own head with a beard trimmer.

And

outside of my neighborhood, it could be a full-on Mad Max Hellscape or like a non-stop worldwide tea party, resurrected David Bowie concert, and I wouldn't know.

So I choose to believe the latter.

But I'm seething with rage.

I'm ready for revolution.

I'm spending a lot of time in meetings on Zoom.

And when this is over, and I'm allowed to go outside, I'm going to come swarming out of the mountains like a guerrilla soldier.

My loved ones have been calling me Comandante Zoom Guevara.

Tiff,

have you been here in London?

I mean, you might as well be anywhere in the world, given that you are not in my house, I assume.

Well, I'm in North London, very, very different to South London, as you know, Andy.

We're not running out of yeast here because I may have mentioned this before, and it is a family podcast.

But due to my being a top-heavy person

during a hot summer, I get what is known as athlete's foot tit.

So effectively, I have my own starter with me at all times.

I can knock out a fantastic sourdough at a moment's notice.

So I'm self-sustaining, is what I'm saying.

Okay, and maybe

we could make this

a new tranche in

Bugle merchandise.

Anyway, we can talk about this after I work out the finances.

Tit bread for the masses.

We are recording on the 17th of April, and today is apparently International Haiku Day

day to appreciate the

Japanese form of micro poetry and we have a few bugle hai cues for you today

people in a line for hallucinogenic leaves it is a haiku

James Bond in field greets MI6 gadget maker maker with the words, Hi Q.

Bad snooker player blaming his implement shouts, take a hike Q.

I think that stuff pretty much exhausted that

tranche of,

shall we call it comedy?

Let's not.

Also today

is Bat Appreciation Day, a day to appreciate bats, the notoriously indecisive creature.

Well, not in my house.

We in my house, we do not recognise that bats were sent to this earth by God to save us.

Sorry, I'm mixing up with Easter, bat Appreciation Day, and Easter.

I always forget.

But still, the bat deserves no appreciation from our species, the unloved evolutionary bastard of the turd and the umbrella.

Okay, locate this, you bogus dangling rodent.

Be a mammal, be a bird, but don't be fing both.

As always,

someone had to say, a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week we ask, what would the cultural and historical great figures of history have done in lockdown?

And we've done some extensive research for you here at the Bugle and we've discovered that Rembrandts, the celebrity portrait painter, would have just painted loads of pictures of himself interspersed with the odd hidden easel picture of his wife getting into a bath.

Ernest Rutherford, a science whiz, he'd have just mooched around his house splitting things, then sitting morosely on his sofa saying, oh, it's not the same when it's so big.

Michelangelo would have finally got round to decorating his own house, whilst Genghis Khan would have got very, very claustrophobic indeed and said, I just don't feel like me anymore before spending 72 hours straight on Tinder swiping right.

Einstein would have watched all the Star Wars movies and said the word bullshit at least 30 times per hour.

And Giuseppe Verdi would have written a hardcore pornographic opera just to see if it could be done.

Shakespeare, well, he would have finally tried to master the the limerick and then hacked out some scripts for low-grade Hollywood comedy films based on cross-dressing and long-lost surprise siblings.

And Catherine the Great would have just been watching YouTube videos on how to do dressage and realizing to herself I've been on the wrong side of the horse all this time.

Also in the bin, part two of your Bugle Homeschool History Exam.

Now last week we began the homeschool history exam and I assume that all you buglers with children have put the questions to your kids.

And we pick up now with question five.

Writer L.P.

Hartley famously wrote, as writers so often do, and one of the things he famously wrote whilst famously writing was that the past is a different country.

He of course meant that the food was weird, people spoke in funny sounding languages, some things cost more but some things cost less and it was a good place to have an affair without getting caught.

Plus you're always relieved to get back home after visiting.

But if L.P.

Hartley was right and the past is indeed a foreign country given the increasing trend of populist insularity in global politics and the prevalence of old people amongst coronavirus victims, is it time to send everyone from history back to the past?

Question 6.

History is notoriously full of absolute.

Note down everyone you've ever heard of, alive and dead, make a mark next to the name if they are a total ct, one point, or a bit of a c, half a point, and calculate whether or not, on average, there were more cts in history pro rata than there are today.

Question seven, it's a well-known fact that 98% of all historical TV documentaries are completely made up, but which of any of the following documentaries covers a genuine bit of history?

William the Bonqueror, how the Battle of Hastings Victor was driven by a fervent desire to go down in history as the 11th century's most prolific Schagmeister, based on a recently discovered and very X-rated tapestry.

When chickens conquered Rome, an army of giant feral chickens rampaged across the increasingly fractious European celebrity empire in the 250s AD, defeating the 8th Legion at what became known as the Battle of the Eggs.

Is this documentary about a genuine piece of history?

Jesus Christ, the garden center years.

New evidence has come to light that Jesus, the professional messiah, might have spent three years honing his miracle-making skills working in a garden centre, bringing dead shrubs back to life, turning water into fertiliser, and selling cheap fish sandwiches with hardly any filling at a seriously profit-boosting markup.

Charles Darwin, Turtle Slayer, fairly self-explanatory.

And finally, Mog on the Moon, how Neil Armstrong smuggled his pet cat Eisenhower into the Apollo 11 rocket and onto the surface of the moon.

So you have to tell us which of those was based on a real event, if any.

And finally, question eight, your last question in your Bugle Homeschooling History exam, which historical event will happen exactly 100 years from now?

How's it going being cooped up at home with your children, Andy?

Well,

it's been fine so far.

We've had two weeks of school holiday in which the days have just mulched into a formless nothingness and on Monday we go we go back to school and I think I'm going to try some Victorian schooling tactics, you know,

get a bit old school on it,

a bit of the old olive, I mean maybe not the full cane, but

yeah, I mean I think the whole point of education in Britain has always been to psychologically break children and make them pliable adults for the exploitation of the state.

So I think that's really the responsibility of us homeschooling parents right now.

What about you?

How have you been getting on?

We're doing okay.

I have 11-year-old twins and

the way that we are teaching them,

it possibly could not be more NATO green on brand.

My children are obviously fully bilingual in Spanish and we've assigned them academic essays as 11-year-olds to read about the history of U.S.

intervention in Honduras and its contributions to the migrant crisis.

And one of them did a PowerPoint presentation for the entire family about the history of pandemics, and so has been coping with the anxiety of social isolation and lockdown that we're living through by reminding us periodically that this does not compare to the plague of Justinian of

541 to 542 AD that killed upwards of 30 million people.

Well, that's always good to be reminded of the plague of Justinian at times like this.

Win in doubt.

Top story now, and again,

we are sticking with the well, the only story really in the universe at the moment.

And well, let's start in America, NATO, because I guess people will still be arguing about what would have been the best way to deal with this crisis in

thousands of years' time if A, humans still exist and B, history is still legal then, or vice versa.

But I think it is fair to predict that Donald Trump's strategy for the coronavirus crisis will not be held up as the model, best he could have done in the circumstances, gold standard, any more than that guy's effort to break the world marathon record in an old diving suit was a few years ago.

How have you rated your

much-beloved president's leadership so far on this crisis?

Well, so, you know, I mean, Donald Trump

is trying to cope with the threat of the coronavirus with his usual toolbox.

You know, they say that

every general fights the last war, and in the case of Donald Trump, the last war is bribing a porn star to sign an NDA.

So

that's

so, you know, it's it's a challenging,

science creates a challenge for him.

Like,

he doesn't believe in anything he finds inconvenient.

And science be damned.

Trump famously thought that the sound of windmills cause cancer.

He doesn't believe in the existence of climate change, asymptomatic transmission of coronavirus, or the clitoris.

So, like,

some of the things that he's doing are like trying to defund the World Health Organization,

they make perfect sense from his worldview.

You know, he's resorting to his usual toolbox of political strategies to solve a problem that is not amenable to those responses.

Like, in the case of defunding the World Health Organization, he's trying to find a fall guy to throw under the bus to blame for his mistakes.

And the U.S.

contribution to the World Health Organization is about $400 million a year.

And to put that in perspective, that's about half what Mike Bloomberg spent to win no states in the Democratic primary.

So it's a lot.

And, you know, and with all the competing priorities facing the country,

you know, you expect the, you can't expect the U.S.

government to maintain such a costly expenditure.

And so to put that in perspective,

the amount of the U.S.

contribution to the World Health Organization per annum is slightly more than the U.S.

Secret Service has spent protecting Donald Trump to go golfing.

So

it's a high priority.

But what's amazing is that

COVID does not give a shit

about Donald Trump's games.

Like science and politics have collided, and for once, politics will lose.

Oh, you politicians want to try to focus group and poll test your messages?

Cool, cool, cool.

How's that going to go?

As a swing voter, would you be more likely to vote against COVID-19 if it was called A, Chinese virus, B, COVID-69,

C, bat AIDS, D, never go outside againitis, or E, none of the above.

I love COVID, I want to die.

So

politicians can have their talking points and logos, and consultants, and spin doctors, and proxies, and they can double down and pivot and walk back and catchphrase and slogan and platform and swing voter and core constituency and donor base and stumping and fundraiser, photo op, baby kissing, pie eating.

And it is all as useless in the face of inexorable progression of infectious disease as sending me to a pants-off, dance-off competition with Channing Tatum,

which is

good for a laugh, but mostly sad and hairy.

Firstly, I know that he's

defunded the who, but can we be sure that Trump doesn't think the money is going to the guy who wrote Pinball Wizard?

I don't think we can be sure of anything these days.

I mean, to be in mitigation for Trump, we must remember that famously, as a child, he was bitten by a radioactive pile of shit.

So

there's a certain level of, you know,

pile of shittedness in his behaviour that we just have to expect.

And obviously, he's not so much a bridge over troubled water as a hippopotamus made of cesium leaping arse-first into a crowded swimming pool.

The White House issued a statement after his announcement that they're withdrawing funding for the World Health Organization

saying,

basically accusing the World Health Organization of mismanaging and covering up the crisis.

And when Donald Trump is accusing you of mismanaging and covering things up, that's like the king of Saudi Arabia having a pop at you for your attitude towards women.

Or a crocodile with blood dripping from its mouth haranguing you about how you are spoiling the peace and quiet of people trying to have an innocent picnic on the riverbank before belching loudly, saying, better out than in, and then saying, I've got to go, my dessert's running away.

Hey,

game recognizes game, Andy.

As they say.

I don't even know that

America need the World Health Organization because, you know, Trump is busy declaring national

days of prayer to deal with Corona.

You know, pray the spray away.

Yep.

I believe that's the catchphrase you guys have been using.

But also, you know, you've still got skin in the game there because you've got Bill and Melinda Gates who are, they fund as much as the United Kingdom, I think.

Something like 200 million from Bill and Melinda Gates goes into the World Health Organization, which is the same as our contribution.

But what does it mean?

Does it mean that if the defunding happens that

if the World Health Organization find a cure, then America don't get to

have it?

I think it means that if the World Health Organization finds a cure, America gets to go and shoot the cure off of them.

Right.

Yes.

Go in with guns first, ask questions later.

As I've been studying the spread of the disease, I did get slightly aroused when I learned that the percentage necessary to achieve herd immunity was 69%.

Come COVID message.

Yes.

Can he technically, I mean, I don't understand.

Can he technically overrule?

Can the federal government do that, like state by state?

Well, so I mean,

you know,

one of the bewildering things about Donald Trump is that there has been a long and growing list of things that a politician can't do that he manages to do.

And that is what happens when you end up with a president who is, A, an idiot, B, completely corrupt, and C, prepared to illegally hijack the entire apparatus of the state.

So it's a good time.

So,

I mean, it's sort of the what it's revealing to me to a large degree is like the sentimentality of liberals about politics.

That there's a lot of like, can he do that?

Well, I don't know.

He f ⁇ ing just did that.

So what are you going to do about it?

So

I guess he can.

We're like, it's not fair.

Is he allowed?

Does he need a whole pass?

Yeah.

We're looking for fairness in a system where it's totally fing unfair.

But also, I mean, Tiff, you raise important questions.

And generally,

I mean, I just, because I know the bugle has an international audience,

here's a general tip that if you're looking at America and you're seeing something that seems confusing or doesn't make any sense at all, and you're like, why is that thing happening?

The answer is always slavery.

That's whatever it is.

Like, why are there racial disparities in the death rate from COVID?

How does the Electoral College work?

Why is there so much gun violence?

Why are 40% of Americans obese?

What is the Big Bang theory?

Why is Donald Trump the president?

It's all slavery.

It's the only answer to all of that.

So the death rate from coronavirus is disproportionately affecting black people.

So like in Chicago, for instance, black people make up 30% of the population, but 70% of COVID-related deaths.

And that's alarming, also caused by slavery.

And Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Ayanna Presley of Massachusetts called for collection of racial data on COVID.

And I normally think that both of them are right about everything.

But on this, I could not disagree more

because Trump is already mad that COVID is hurting the economy.

And people are like, no, let's tell Donald Central Park V,

good people on both sides, famous white supremacist Trump, that COVID kills black people.

He'll see that as an upside.

Like,

oh, I get to keep helping my billionaire friends fleece the poor to fill their,

you know, clogged artery hearts and also kill black people?

Where, what is the problem with this?

Like, this is the most MAGA that ever MAGA.

So if you want Republicans to take seriously the public health responses to COVID that are necessary, don't tell them that it hurts black people.

Tell them that it spreads through Sean Hannity's gaze and only kills white men over 50 who own vacation homes, and the only known cure is universal rent control.

It only affects the governors who've paid for their mistresses to have abortions.

Bill Gates

said halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds.

And

also,

the organization itself has tried as diplomatically as possible to tell Trump to go himself um

and um the World Health Organization is undoubtedly not without its flaws being as it is an international organization involving a countries b people and c diseases which are wriggly little shits that often do not behave how you would ideally like them to behave undoubtedly there will be a need to examine what the World Health Organization does and how it works after this crisis because there's a need to examine what everything does and how everything works all the time, especially after a crisis.

It's just generally we choose not to bother doing it because it's generally a bit expensive, quite annoying, doesn't make anyone look good, or because it was written in the Constitution 230 years ago, or because God said it, or one of those get outs.

But this just seems to be about the worst possible thing that could be done in this current global circumstance with the virus now threatening the poorer nations of the world with potential catastrophe.

Andy, when you said that the World Health Organization involves

people, nations, and diseases, I had like a mental picture of like a UN debate chamber with a bunch of

microphones and placards, but just the diseases there

somehow instantiated, debating each other and being like, I would like the learned colleague from AIDS over there to respond to the clap.

Well, they've had to, they've had, there's so much misinformation flying around.

They've had to

open a mythbusters page on the on the World Health Organization website.

And I get about five Facebook messages a day from like loose relatives telling me that it's due to 5G or to have a really hot bath.

So they've had to like kind of go on and say, like, drinking alcohol doesn't protect you against COVID-19, which I find personally offensive.

And neither does having a hot bath, it doesn't prevent coronavirus.

So I feel those three hours a day in the bath whilst I'm downing cocktails and watching Netflix have been a complete waste.

Well, I mean, there have been a lot of claims of

what might be described as quack cures.

And here at the Bugle, we've teamed up with some of the

least influential epidemiologists in the world to have a special offer which will either cure you of or provide you lifelong immunity to both COVID and your choice out of one of the following fictitious diseases.

Disclaimer, this is all bullshit.

So you get you're off COVID as well as Constance Fripple syndrome, raffaniditis, ferval sproculism, anti-gluteal cyclopid dysclopsia, dospodostostos or Benno's disease as it's known in Spain, Glockenspiel biproximal, Gerch, Hoopla, and Kribbage.

You'll be immune to all of those for life.

If...

As well as COVID, all you have to do is not take a hot bath, not drink alcohol.

These are the ways to make sure you are are immune.

Hold a domestic claw hammer in your right hand whilst urinating.

Eat a raw carrot in 13 bites spread evenly every two hours over a 24-hour period, then down a gallon of carrot juice once every half a month for the next year and a bit.

Sleep with your foot dangling off the side of your bed in a bucket of squirrel milk and crush the dried bark of a free-range mahogany tree, mix it with alcohol-free whiskey to form a paste, and then marinade your toothbrush in it.

Those are all ways to make sure that you stay virus-free.

I should report one of the other quack cures that came across my personal Facebook feed may be of interest to fans of the Bugle expanded cinematic universe,

which is the recommendation that one thing that can stop you from getting COVID is half a glass of water

because it will rinse it down, I guess, is the theory, and then your stomach acids will kill it.

That was what was told to me in Facebook.

There's some confusion here over when you are and when you are not allowed out of your house during lockdown and there's been some

allegations that the police have been somewhat overzealous in their treatment of people who've been out and about.

We can clear up a few areas of doubt for you here at the Bugle.

If you are leaving your house because you've discovered a potential cure for the virus after leaving some bread out overnight and it going moldy and you realizing that was the disease and you need to run to the hospital to physically share the news with some real researchers like you're in a film version of your own life.

That is an acceptable reason to leave the house.

If you are an assassin with a contract to fulfill that cannot be carried out over the internet, I'm afraid that is not a good enough reason to leave the house.

That is a job that can be delayed until the resumption of normal society.

If you are just wanting to roam around checking on whether other people are leaving their houses unnecessarily, that is allowed.

You are allowed to do that.

That is a loophole that a lot of people are exploiting.

If you need to locate your escaped pet serpent, no, you cannot leave the house for that.

You have to call your local government reptile location squad, many of them sadly underfunded.

If you feel the sudden urge to recreate the walk to work of a renowned historical figure, that is allowed.

And if you need to drive your car at extreme speed for no reason, that is also allowed, apparently, judging from the number of people who have been fing doing it in the roads near my house.

I don't know whether they've been abusing,

police have been sort of abusing their

sort of power in America, NATO, but here in Scotland, they were like sort of checking in people's shopping baskets to make sure that what they'd bought were necessary purchases, like deemed essential purchases, and told someone off for buying crisps and booze.

I was like, in a place where booze is so like encouraged.

Also, booze during lockdown is fing necessary.

Like more necessary than anything else.

Like, I don't know how you delineate time unless it's by it's one o'clock, I can start drinking wine now.

There was an article that in here where I live in the Bay Area, alcohol consumption is up 42% since the lockdown began.

They all believe, they've all been reading the same stories as me: that you know, getting in the bath for three hours and drinking cocktails means you don't get it.

Let's look for some good news around the coronavirus.

NATO, you are, as always, the Bugle's sunny side of life correspondent.

You found any good news stories emerging from this global chaos?

Yes, I have, Andy.

There's some great COVID news.

The coronavirus has led to an uncontained outbreak of clean air.

Because of the lockdown, cars are off the roads and economic activity has ceased, and so air quality is the best it's been in decades.

For example, in Los Angeles on a good day before COVID, if you went on a hike and standing on a hillside looking at the view towards the ocean was like gazing at a beautiful skyline through a veil of rice pudding.

But now it's all clear.

And so with the, you know, it's a weird choice that we have where

on the one hand, we have plague and the economic and social devastation plague response has caused.

And on the other hand, we have pollution, looming, climate apocalypse, war for oil, and the social and health consequences of car culture.

And so now we have cars off the road and we have better air quality.

It's like being stuck between Scylla and Charybdis.

But I have come to realize that we don't talk enough about how when Ulysses was caught perilously between the six-headed monster Scylla and the insatiable whirlpool Charybdis, the sky above was fucking gorgeous.

So there's that.

The other good news is that Burning Man is canceled.

I don't know how much the Bugle international audience knows about Burning Man, but at the end of every summer, San Francisco empties out and about 75,000 people go to Burning Man, a pop-up city in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, where it's a combination of free-spirited art party, lots of sex and electronic music, and there's no money.

It's all barter-based and communal happening.

Stroke, Silicon Valley, libertarian fantasy land.

It's kind of weird in that way.

But because it's canceled, the Burners are famous for their creativity and they have been

emancipated from their otherwise all-consuming summer activity of preparing for Burning Man and freed up

like

some sort of mass deployment, like a polyamorous molly-dosing Dunkirk, to unleash their creative energies

with like Etsy and craft projects to fill the void left by a functioning state.

So the Burning Man people are like actively building ventilators, protective masks, and hazmat suits for healthcare workers instead of unicycles, tuxedos made of dildos and sunscreen water slides.

So that's a bit of COVID good news.

I would just like to point out sexist, where's Burning Woman Festival?

Or was that in Salem a few hundred years ago?

Yeah, the Burning Woman Festival, I think, was most of the 17th and 18th centuries.

British virus news now.

And,

well,

all great historical events have a kind of musical background.

And I think the British government's virus anthem that will always bring back that surge of nostalgia for these extraordinary times will be the Mammas and the Papa's classic hit, Trip, Stumble and Fall, which is essentially seems to be played before all briefings, online cabinet meetings, and whenever Health Secretary Matt Hancock opens his mouth.

And

Tiff, you've been particularly taken by Home Secretary Pretty Battelle's battles with mathematics.

Oh, do you mean Dolores Umbridge?

Professor Dolores Umbridge and Wormtail, which is how I describe her and Boris when they're together.

Well, yeah, Pretty can't read numbers correctly.

And they're kind of talking about testing as well and how many tests.

And I just think if COVID-19 tests were anything like means tests, then this government would be fing all over it because they love a means test.

And

every day at five o'clock, what we're watching is incompetence.

It's incredible that no one can answer the questions.

Dominic Raab has like all the authority of a supply teacher in a rough comprehensive, the sort whose car's definitely keyed when he leaves at the end of the day.

And no one can give any answers on why they're not providing PPE.

I mean, Matt Hancock came out the other day and said, we've launched a new green badge for carers.

Did you see this?

He came out and went, what we've done is we want to show that we acknowledge carers' roles, you know, that not necessarily just doctors and nurses, but key workers.

and carers in the homes.

And so what we've done is we've got a badge.

And it's like, give them PPE and money, not finging badges.

Like, like, what the f is that going to do?

The only public awareness badge I want is one that says Tory on board, that gives you license to twat one in the street, irrespective of social distancing rules.

I, I don't know, I, I, it's a tie for me between Trump and the Conservative government over to whose handling this was.

They might as well just put a placard up in place of the daily briefings going, dear British public, stay in, we fed it, we don't have any answers, but we'll all continue to behave as if the rules don't apply to us.

Yours unfaithfully, government.

Pretty Patel, in a briefing, I think it was last week now, was asked twice if she would apologise about the lack of protective equipment given to frontline workers and replied, I'm sorry if people feel there have been failings.

So apologising, not that there were failings,

or for those failings themselves, but apologising for people feeling, for the emotion people feel about the concept that there might have been failings.

I mean, in terms of abdicating responsibility, that is a triple-twisting pipe-backed somersault of a tariff manoeuvre.

It's quite possible.

The de facto Prime Minister this week has been a 99-year-old military veteran, Captain Tom Moore, who undertook to do a sponsored walk.

Now, he's approaching his 100th birthday, and he pledged to walk 25 times around his garden and aiming to raise £100,000.

At the latest count, he's now over £18 million raised for

the NHS because who needs taxes?

And

it's captured the imagination.

It's a genuine kind of good news story in these

dark times.

And it also shows how important context is because he's a 99-year-old war veteran

and he's walked two and a half kilometers and you know he's become a national hero.

Now, if I did the same, you know, I'd be lucky if I even raised 10 million quid, let alone 18 million quid.

So it's all about Amsterdam think these 99-year-old war veterans are a bit overpaid, to be honest.

Tiff, you're the um the Bugles um

uh fighting correspondent and uh

the UFC are also stepping into the sportless breach at the moment.

They are because here's the thing.

What happens when this war is a war that you know testosterone-fueled men can't actually fight?

It is a war for science.

It is a worst war ever.

What do you do when you have this excess of testosterone?

Sorry, when you've bought an excess of testosterone, as is most of the UFC guys.

I first heard about it on,

if I'm allowed to mention a rival podcast, Joe Rogan's podcast, and they were talking about Fight Island, but I don't really understand it, so I thought I'd need a male take on it.

So

just to clarify, Tiff, Fight Island is

an island that the UFC is setting up to host

its ideas, not just a shorthand for

Britain.

Yes, and all of us, unlike the Americans trying to shoot the virus, we think we can knock it the fk out.

Yes, Fight Island is being set up by the UFC so that they can continue fights, fighting during a time of corona.

And I'm not really the person to describe it, so I have a Scottish boyfriend explains a thing.

Dina White is the president of the UFC, a mixed martial arts cage fighting organization that pets some of the toughest guys on the planet against each other in brutal combat.

These guys are so tough they can fight anything.

Men, horses, viruses.

Actually they cannie fight viruses so they should just stay in the fing hoose like everybody else.

But no they're too tough for that.

These guys are harder than Charles Bronson under a pile of Sudoku.

So Dana White has brought an island so that they can all go and live on it and fight with each other and they didn't have to follow any lockdown or distancing rules because Dana will be the president of the island as well.

I'm not against it to be honest.

I imagine it'll be like an 80s movie.

Presumably rich guys with big cigars will bet on the fights and the Eastern European arm candy will do that hang where blood splashes on them during the fight and they wipe it off and lick their fingers.

Then the loser will get hunted to death by the rich guys but Jean-Claude Van Damme will come and kill them all and take all the money and I'll give it to the nurses which is a good idea so actually good on you Dana White.

It's all much clearer for us all now and it does it does show the endless resourcefulness of our great species that no matter how bad things get we will use our god-given human ingenuity to find a way of getting people to bash the living shit out of each other for our entertainment.

Other sports have been attempting to do similar to the UFC's Fight Island.

The WPBSA, the governing body of World Billiards and Snooker, are attempting to build a snookano, a fully functioning snooker arena in the cauldron of a dormant underwater volcano in the Pacific.

Sadly, this has not worked after it proved impossible to keep the bays cloth dry on the tables, the snooker tables, whilst underwater.

And the players complain that the balls moved differently to they do not underwater and that the sharks were off-putting.

Non-virus news now, and

NATO you are

a huge fan of people unnecessarily ejecting themselves from fighter jets and

so you've had a news story to keep you intrigued this week yeah so I've been stuck at home and desperate for a laugh and this when I read this news story it gave me genuine mirth and joy because laughing at someone else being terrified transcends time space and culture

so the

government investigation was just released about an incident that happened in France a year or so ago.

A 60-year-old Frenchman was given a gift by co-workers of a ride in a fighter jet.

The plane took off, and the force of the jet, combined with his overly loose seat straps, led him to float up from his seat.

Terrified and panicked, he reached out to grab onto something, anything stable to steady himself and accidentally grabbed the ejection handle and shot himself out of the plane where his parachute deployed and he landed in a nearby field.

Now,

to reiterate, the flight in the fighter jet was a gift by coworkers that he did not want, but he accepted because he felt like he couldn't turn it down.

Look, we've all done shit we didn't want to do to get along at work, but usually it's just Karen, it's just karaoke at the office Christmas party or bringing chips and dip to a goodbye party for that person that you never liked that much, but you make a f ⁇ ing go of it.

What did this guy have on the line at his job?

This is a story about someone shooting out of an airplane, but it's also a story about the savage exploitation of senior citizens in the workforce who should be able to enjoy a pension and do old people shit, like getting up at five in the morning and banging pots and pans and shuffling around in their bathrobe and doing crossword puzzles.

That's what men in their 60s have earned from a life of bloody service.

Let him reminisce about his glory days in the mid-70s doing Coke and seeing Miles Davis live or whatever.

In a workplace, if you get, if as a gift, you get a trip in a fighter plane, the only acceptable responses are, yes, I do want to shit my pants at 400 meters up.

Or no, go f yourself.

I'm 64.

Just give me a bottle of scotch and call it a day.

So that's a good story when you got home.

How was your birthday, darling?

Oh, I accidentally ejected myself from a fighter test at 500 kilometers an hour.

Oh, that's nice.

Would you like some dinner?

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

Thank you very much for listening.

I hope you are keeping safe and

as perky mentally as you can be in these curious lockdown times.

NATO, TIF, thanks very much for joining me.

Any things you'd like to plug in your current online activities?

Sure.

I have two albums out that are available to be streamed or downloaded wherever you download and stream comedy albums, the NATO Green Party and the Whiteness album.

You can follow me on Twitter at NATO Green, Mr.

NATO Green on Instagram.

You can watch Old Rope on Monday nights on Instagram Live where you'll see, actually, I've got to get NATO on, but where you'll see Andy and various other bugle people

and sort of four or five comics on a Monday, so that's fun.

Check that out.

You can follow me on Twitter at Tiff Tiff Stevenson and on Instagram for the shows.

It's Tiff Stevenson Comic.

Thank you, buglers.

We will play you out now, as is traditional, with some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers.

Until next week, goodbye.

Paul Kane resents his unrelentingly monosyllabic forename-surname combination and is fiercely jealous of all Sri Lankans.

I could say my name a hundred times in the time it takes some of them to say theirs once, weeps Paul, who has therefore put in train a legal process to give himself as middle names Elowella Kanakanamage, Warna Kulusaria and Lianarat Shilage, following an awestruck perusal of the multifarious forenames of Sri Lankan Test cricketers.

Masoud Mirohamedi wonders whether dolphins, by repute the second brainiest species after without wishing to sound arrogant, us humans, see our species as an irritant blocking their way to the top of the rankings, or as an inspiration to raise their game.

The evidence, concludes Masood, sadly suggests neither.

They just dick around in the sea, honking at each other.

Rob Arthur, quite apart from being a brief memo left for herself by British mythical enchantress Morgan Le Fay before nicking the scabbard from her brother's sword excalibur, Rob Arthur, does not think much of the whole Arthurian legend shtick.

I reckon those knights guys were tools and I don't care how round their table was, blasts Rob.

They obsessed about that silly little grail and didn't focus on infrastructure, education or social services.

They set mythical Britain back hundreds of years.

Melinda Hasbrook likes to make up corporate slogans.

Amongst her motivational mottos are, you can't empty the bath if you've concreted over the plughole, it's time to put the puppies through the post box, Don't fight an octopus with a scimitar made of salt, and a fish finger in the hand is worth two full-grown haddocks in the sea.

Sam Garman has attempted to work out exactly what Melinda's slogans actually mean.

Sam thinks the fishmonger one might be something about small, tangible achievements being preferable to large, unrealized potential, and the one about putting puppies through the post box is about realizing when you cannot solve a problem yourself and dumping it on someone else instead.

Here endeth this week's lies.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

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

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

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