Bugle 4147 - Urine with a chance

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4147 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a suspendedly animated world.

I am Andy Zotzman coming to you live and pre-recorded from the shed,

my shed, which is very much becoming the abbey road studios of the coronavirus lockdown era audio newspaper podcast recording industry it's friday the 3rd of april 2020 and nothing has ever happened on this day before because this is the first year of the rest of history uh joining me from various different parts of the world firstly in New York City.

It's Hari Kondabolu.

Hello, Hari.

How are you?

You asked me that question every time I'm on, Andy.

I'm not good.

Things are bad, Andy.

There's a global plague.

Hey, how are you, Hari?

During the global plague, how are you?

You must be well, you know,

because there's a global plague.

Usually,

you're pretty downbeat when there's no global plague, so I was hoping maybe with a global plague, you might have just like flipped your polarity the other way.

Oh, like perhaps I'm like, thank God.

It's almost over.

This is what I've been waiting for for this whole time.

Take me home, father.

And joining us also from Mumbai, India.

It's Anuvabh Pal.

Hi, Anuvab.

How are you?

I mean, India is having an interesting...

Interesting time with the virus.

You were locked down at four hours' notice.

That's correct.

Hi, Andy.

Hi, Hari.

You know?

Things are bad in India, but I feel like every other day in my life in India the last 30 years, there's been a pandemic of some kind or the other.

This is an actual pandemic, but you know, we've been through a range of like almost pandemics on a regular basis.

So,

all of you are finding it odd that a country of 1.3 billion people was shut down with four hours' notice, right?

But look at all the benefits, right?

One of the main benefits is that we're such a chaotic, sort of insane, overpopulated country, that if you add some more chaos and insanity, it really just gets into the mix.

Just think of it like a cake.

You know, if you've already got flour and batter, just adding more flour and batter is just going to make the cake fluffier.

So, you know, we just had four hours to get all our essentials run around in

a very populated, insane country.

So

it wasn't difficult at all, apart from the fact that a bunch of people died, a lot of people starved.

Other than that, everything was fine.

That's even darker than what I usually say.

Wow.

As I said, we are recording on Friday, the 3rd of April, 2020.

No anniversaries this week, no dates to let you know of.

This is the beginning of time.

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

This week, a free alternative news bulletin.

Now, the news around the world has been 99% virally infected by the virus.

Even if it's not about the virus with the news, it's hard to shake your hypochondriacal instinct that it is, in fact, at least tangentially about the virus.

In fact, coronavirus has now killed 94% of the other news stories that it has come into contact with, which is an extremely worrying statistic.

It is highly contagious from a news point of view.

However, here at the Bugle, we've never been entirely concerned with things that are actually happening.

We've always stroved to also bring your attention to the events and stories that are not happening and therefore are not covered by other news outlets.

So, for these pestilently virus-only news times we are living through, this week's section of the bin is a free alternative news bulletin made up entirely of stories that are not happening to help take your minds off the ones that are happening.

Read by our resident newsreader, Pertwin Range.

Thank you, Andy.

The headlines today: Donald Trump, the partially elected President of the United States, has stepped down from his post after becoming trapped in a greenhouse by a sudden, rapid-onset fear of leopards.

I'm not coming out, said the now former president.

I've heard they're everywhere, and they have very sharp teeth.

Vice President Mike Pence was unable to take office after being placed in suspended animation by God, the prominent Christian deity, who issued a statement saying, come on, America, you must have better than this.

And sports news, finally, the NBA are reportedly trialling a new height-sensitive basket which automatically adjusts its height depending on the stature of the player about to try to pop, dunk, or flap the ball in.

NBA Commissioner Arthur Triffitt told a freshly pressed conference that the sport had to make itself fairer or risk alienating the under 6 foot 6 inch community.

The hoop sets itself at a height 51.7% above the player's standing height, a coefficient calculated by dividing the height of the current basketball hoop by the average height of an NBA player.

Now, said Triffid, we will see who can really play the game.

He also announced the introduction of a second scoring receptacle elsewhere on the court.

It will be like a giant cat flap, he said, low down near the halfway line.

Four points if you get it in, without knocking the cat's milk bowl over.

And finally, the weather.

It's getting hot in here, so take off some, but by no means, all of your clothes.

Andy.

Bertwin, thank you very much.

I hope that news has helped you out a bit in these troubled times.

There is nothing wrong with that NBA idea.

That's brilliant.

You kidding me?

Then we can actually know who's good at basketball and who's just tall.

Yeah, exactly.

I've long thought this is a great floor in that sport, Harry.

I know you're a big fan.

Big fan.

Yeah, it's got to change.

And we must have the technology to do that now.

Top story this week.

Well, as always, these days, the same top story that has been top storying around the world since

the start of the year.

Essentially,

the coronavirus has proved to be an absolute master strategist of a disease that has, to all intents and purposes, dismantled the world as a functioning entity in three months of mayhem.

And how has it been affecting your lives on a personal basis, first of all?

I mean, Hari, New York's been horrifically affected by this.

How are you getting on?

Well, my life is essentially the same.

I'm in a studio apartment with no pants on.

Oh, you mean no trousers, Hurry?

Yeah,

that's what I meant.

So that's about the same.

The only difference is my girlfriend can't go to work, so she's also here,

which means I kind of have to alter my behavior.

Like, I can't just do what I normally do.

I have to make it look like I'm doing work.

Which in the past there was no worry, just do what you're going to do.

And now it almost feels like there's this pressure to show that what I'm doing is actual work, that I actually do have a quote-unquote job.

You know, because you can't just explain, like,

I know I'm watching old NBA videos, but it's all part of the process

that was never a problem before.

And now, all of a sudden, I got to justify my whole existence, Andy.

Well, there's a lot of people around the world

struggling to justify their existence if I'm using myself as a statistical sample of one

Anuvab how how are things

are you in

your flat in Mumbai

and you know

like Harry you know I generally don't do much so not much has changed from a life and earning perspective but I am being exploited Andy Harry that I need to bring this up.

This is my weight event.

My neighbor,

Mr.

Ramesh Patel, has been showing me various statistics about how people of us 60 are affected by the coronavirus and why he's particularly susceptible to it.

And I realized that this whole thing was a ruse because he's basically having me vegetable shop for him.

I have essentially become Mr.

Patel's servant without realizing this.

So my immediate change, Harry Andy, is that I am now domestic help.

I like how you said his name, and initially I was like, can you say his name?

And then I was like, huh, Ramesh Patel in India.

I'm sure no one will figure this out.

Exactly.

Exactly.

My apartment building has 14 of them and we have 12 flats.

Politically, there has been a worldwide ballet of incompetence, ingenuity, complacence, overreaction.

And it prances on this ballet, the untrained choreographers ruling our world, basically just shouting from the wings, for sake just keep waggling your legs about it at least looks like dancing

and it's it's a

truly global problem there are eight only 18 countries in the United Nations catalogue that have still not officially recorded a case including Yemen I mean some places get all the luck don't they well they've just had it too good for too long there has been a worldwide extremely distressing rise in the number of incidences of celebrities singing needlessly and a wide range of responses by different governments.

We keep being told that this virus does not discriminate, but clearly it does discriminate.

It discriminates against countries with blazingly incompetent leaders.

And I think it's

it's very odd.

I mean Britain and America we seem to have erred on the side of recklessness in terms of delaying lockdown and failing to test.

Hari, have you enjoyed the the reaction of your beloved president to this enveloping crisis?

Sometimes I find it very entertaining and then I remember its reality and then it's no longer entertaining.

It's uh it's terrifying.

He uh tried to put a positive spin on what's going on by talking about how great his press conference ratings are.

Uh

it should be noted that nine eleven also had incredible news ratings.

Uh that had nothing to do with uh

you know, the president at the time.

We were all scared.

We were hoping for information.

But Trump, it's like we need to figure out what's going on.

And what's important about his press conferences are

we hear all the things he says and we know those are things not to do.

Unless the doctor, Anthony Fauci, is there, at which point he'll be like, well, actually,

or

what I'm saying agrees with the president.

It actually doesn't, but I'm going to say it agrees with him so he doesn't get upset that what I'm about to say will contradict every ridiculous thing he just said.

So it's been a roller coaster.

I mean I guess this is a time for world leaders.

They've been forced into doing what they seldom want to do and that is look at themselves in the mirror.

And the problem for Trump is that his mirror is one of his old two-way mirrors from his Miss World days that he used to snoop on.

Look, that's hearsay, obviously.

But the point is, having Trump in charge now,

that's not exactly the soothingly or authoritative political bomb that America is looking.

It's not that phrase just what the doctor ordered I'm not sure any doctor in this circumstance would order order a megalomaniac delusionist obsessed with himself that is going on no prescription form perhaps dr.

Doom

possibly I think he might be his running mate in the in the November election actually he's not handling any criticism well I mean he never handles criticism well but like the press is not even I don't even think they're really criticizing they're asking him pointed and thoughtful questions Yimiche Alsender

of PBS was yelled at by the president.

Do I have to say by the president?

By Trump.

For telling him what he said about governors asking for equipment they don't need, which is something he said on Hannity.

And he got very upset and he denied saying it and felt that the media is not nice.

He just wants them to be nice and he thinks they should be more positive.

And then days later, Yamiche Alsender asked why the U.S.

is well behind South Korea on testing per capita and he did not like that one bit he was upset and said quote you should be saying congratulations instead of asking a really snarky question

and by snarky he means factual

And by congratulations, he means kind of doing your job

and this follows previous incidents with Pete Alexander of NBC when he just asked what do you say to Americans who are scared and then he yelled at Pete Alexander John Carl asked does everyone get a ventilator that needs one and then Trump respied don't be a cutie pie

which

I no one knows what that means no one knows don't be a cutie pie if I was John Carl I would respond but I can't help it.

Andy Annabel, what I've decided to do is I've come up with three potential things the media can say that he would accept.

Mr.

President, Harikundabolu from the Bugle, how is Barack Obama responsible for this pandemic?

And is there any truth to the rumor that coronavirus is also originally from Kenya?

Here's another example.

Mr.

President, Hari Kundabolo from the Bugle, I have a question that many of my colleagues in the media are too afraid to ask.

Can you grab me by the pussy?

And

finally,

Mr.

President, Hari Kundabolu from the Bugle, how have you been able to handle this crisis in such a remarkably calm, selfless, and focused way while remaining so goddamn handsome.

Follow-up question.

Can I suck your dick?

It just seems like at this point

people would watch any press conference other than the one that has Donald Trump.

I've been reading a little bit about Andrew Cuomo and his brother and how that's become viral.

And yesterday I was watching President Trump.

And at one point, he said, this virus operates differently than human beings.

I mean, is it true that people in the United States

are just latching onto any other press conference, like maybe from Anthony Fauci or anybody else?

You know, I don't know if this is

a standard belief, but people like their leaders when they seem competent, when they seem like they know what they're doing, as if they can actually lead.

as opposed to making us feel more scared.

Sounds a bit old school.

So yeah, yeah, I mean, I do think we're holding on to any kind of leadership whatsoever.

I mean, sometimes I just listen to old Barack Obama's speeches.

They have nothing to do with what's happening now, but it makes me believe like, huh, if he was in office, perhaps I would be less afraid of imminent death.

So you're basically suggesting that what they should do, instead of letting Trump loose with a press conference, is just get Daniel Day-Lewis to dress up as Abraham Lincoln and do the Gettysburg Address every day.

And that would just help.

That would probably be better for America.

that's not at all what I said but yes that is exactly what we should be doing

Trump's exit strategy for for getting out of this this this mess he said he said a little while ago

one day it's like a miracle it will disappear

The science has not entirely supported his theory of the miraculous end to the coronavirus crisis.

And I guess it's that kind of rigorous, evidence-driven, long-term strategising of which the world turns to its great leaders at such times.

But even if, I mean,

if it's going to disappear, I don't think it's going to disappear like a miracle, because that would be an extremely shit miracle that takes months and probably years to happen and leaves hundreds of thousands of people dead in its wake, as well as untold economic and personal devastation.

That is not exactly getting everyone steamingly hammered at a wedding on top-grade Vino, is it?

That is not a good miracle.

No.

No, it's not, because it leads us to believe perhaps the miracle is that when we're all dead, there will no longer be a virus to disturb us.

That's something that's a pretty low bar.

That's the most obvious thing.

Anuvab, let's move to the

Indian reaction.

Now, we mentioned the four-hour notice period given by Narendra Modi before shutting India.

Now, he's not a leader who will turn down any open goal shot at causing massive social chaos.

We saw that, I think, the first time you were on the show with the removing of the majority of banknotes from the circulation at a, I think, a three-minute notice period for that, pretty much.

I mean, four hours,

that's barely even enough time to panic by 78 tins of Smurf Getty, these spaghetti shapes in tins in oddly blue sauce, which I managed to get hold of before the lockdown.

Here, I'm collecting my tokens.

I want that talking vanity Smurf doll if it's the last thing I get my hands on.

So, the upshot seems to have been, you know,

millions of people sort of stranded, unable to get home, therefore having to walk home or find any way of getting home

across any.

What's the kind of level of mayhem that Modi has helped unleash here?

You know,

Prime Minister Bodhi has got into this habit of showing up on television about eight in the evening and he makes an announcement a few days before.

He did this before taking away most of our currency.

And he did this recently when he announced that the whole country was going into lockdown.

So

basically, I think, you know, he really enjoys creating this sort of anticipation and panic leading up to his speech.

And in that time, 1.3 billion people are usually thinking the worst.

Among the things being speculated was that he would declare an emergency, he would kill everybody, he would shut off all the electricity and water.

So what he ended up doing, which is a total lockdown,

it actually had a calming effect for a bit because people have expected far worse from him.

I mean, the interesting thing here, gentlemen, is that, you know, I mean, Hari, you know India well, Andy, you know India well.

One thing India is not is chaotic and overpopulated.

You know, and

Finland has a lot to learn from us.

I mean, you've heard of Germanic efficiency, but it actually came from Indian efficiency.

And one of the basic things that you're not going to have when you shut down a country with no notice is you're not going to have undocumented millions and millions and of undocumented laborers suddenly finding themselves with no income and no shelter having to walk pretty much the length of Europe to go back home.

Now that's what ended up happening the next day and one of the things the Prime Minister said very sensibly is we were not anticipating this.

To which Shekhar Gupta, the editor of the Indian Express, succinctly asked, if this is not what you were anticipating, what were you anticipating?

So we basically had the greatest mass migration we've had in India since the partition, where a country that, I forget which country,

but some country in the world drew a border between India and Pakistan, and people had, actually, people had more notice than Prime Minister Modi gave us

to choose between India and Pakistan than they have to walk from one country to the other.

I think if I remember correctly, Cyril Ratcliffe drew the India-Pakistan line and Indians and Pakistanis had a month to sort of get across.

Lots of people killed each other, but there was a month.

Modi gave us, he gave a speech at 8 p.m.

and he said by 12 o'clock everything was going to shut down.

without adding in his speech that tiny requirement that essential supplies would be available, groceries would be available, that you would be able to shop for medicines.

Those tiny details he did not think important.

He left it out of the speech.

So what happened after he finished his speech at 8.30 was the entire country rushed onto the roads.

And a country of 1.3 billion became a coronavirus hot zone because of his speech.

Let's look for the positives.

There's been a reduction in pollution in India due to the lockdown.

We've heard stories similar to this from China and

elsewhere as well.

The coronavirus is proving to be one of the most effective militant eco-warriors in the history of the green movement.

It has done what Greta Thudma couldn't have even dreamed of doing.

It's reduced pollution in India.

I mean, look,

a lot of people are very upset about this because the IQ Air

visual 2019 world map gave gave us a leadership position.

It said 21 of the world's 30 most polluted cities were in India.

The city of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh is so polluted that when you basically open weather.com, it says don't go there.

And we've lost that leadership position.

You know, Andy Harry, my grandmother

in the last 15-20 years has not seen a blue sky over Calcutta where she lives.

There was a bright blue sky yesterday and she refused to believe that she was in India.

And I think that this is going to have significant mental health issues for the agent if the air starts clearing up like this.

I have a follow-up question.

I was doing some math,

math, Sandy.

Thank you.

And

correct me if I'm wrong, but if Modi gave Indians four hours to get ready,

four hours' notice,

using Indian standard time,

that means that

Indians started reacting to this two hours after India had already shut down.

I I I was at the I was at the grocery store Hari at 2 in the morning and I was surprised to find it shut

because

you know I have a relationship with my local grocery store.

I said I'm coming to you by 10 p.m.

He knew I meant 2 a.m.

He should have kept it open.

He knew that.

We have a relationship.

We're We're both Indians.

We have that understanding.

And, you know, he shut it down.

You know, now I have nothing to feed Ramesh Patel and I don't know what to say to him.

But this would be one of the upshots of the global shutdown.

I mean, time when you spend so long sort of just in your in the same place, unable to move, time kind of mutates in various strange ways.

And it is possible that the Indian five minutes, which is approximately 45 to 120 minutes of time elsewhere in the world, could actually just become the standard length of, you know, say school classes.

You sit your kids down and you've got to keep things a bit looser at home.

You say, we're just going to do an Indian five minutes on geography or the history of the penguin.

or whatever.

And this could be one of the lasting changes that we see.

Yeah, and you know, I've thought a lot about this, guys.

You know, I think it's essentially because you guys in the Western world have Christianity, you know, this notion of

definitive time and guilt, that there's this much time on earth, I have sinned, and I need to do all this stuff to get better so I can go to heaven, right?

The good thing about having a religion that gives you karma is that time is infinite, right?

So, the whole point is, you know, yes, I'm going to die, but I'm going to be reborn as a centipede,

or I'm going to be reborn as Sir David Attenborough.

But the point is,

you know, I will show up.

I will show up.

So, 8 p.m.

might mean 8 a.m.

It might might mean 7 p.m.

And I might show up as myself or as NTP, but I will come.

People give us a hard time about time.

I know you guys have both performed here.

You know India.

You know, 7 p.m., the show might start at midnight.

You know, yeah, we're a little flexible.

But that all has to do with Hinduism, I think.

Just one last point I want to make is that Hinduism has already presented a solution to coronavirus, which I think you guys know and have been following.

The Modi's ruling party, the BJP, India's right-wing party,

have presented an immediate solution to coronavirus.

The cow is holy, where I'm from, and they have presented cow urine as a vaccine for coronavirus.

It is also true that they presented cow urine as a vaccine for cancer,

for any other physical ailment, for divorce, for other domestic things.

But as of now,

the right-wing parties are peddling cow urine as a solution.

And given where the world is, it stands as good a chance as hydrochloroquine or whatever else.

Trump demands that the FDA allow cow urine onto the market.

He's been demanding it for months.

And by some reputes, he's something of an expert in

other forms of urine.

Anyway, that was ages ago.

Let's look at Indian policing, Anuvaba.

They've been dealing with this lockdown in a pretty entertaining way,

including the use of fancy dress, which is not generally

a huge.

I mean, I guess actually, I don't say that.

Police do wear fancy dress every day.

But I mean, there's degrees of fancy dress, and wearing a police uniform, I guess, doesn't

necessarily stretch quite as far as, for example,

putting a helmet shaped like the coronavirus on to try to warn people to stay inside.

That's correct and Adi Hari I want to know what you guys think of this.

There are two things going on.

There are policemen at various street corners now wearing a helmet which has a corona type virus on top of it.

So it looks like they're out for Halloween and if nothing else they're frightening motorcyclists which is a good way to clear up roads.

The other thing going on in the southern state of Kerala, which actually has one of the higher rates of infection because because Kerala is a tourist hotspot.

Kerala is also where a lot of migrant labor comes in from the Middle East.

So Kerala policemen have done a video where six policemen are doing a Bollywood hand-washing dance.

It's gone viral on social media and you know and it's quite a good dance.

There's a bit of belly dancing in it.

There's definitely hand washing, hip shaking.

And I think this is a new strategy that they are trying to use their curves to flatten the curve.

And you know,

both of you know Bollywood.

You know that there is no conflict in Bollywood screenplays that a little dancing cannot fix.

You know, my only complaint with this is that some policemen, while doing it, they have face masks on and they're doing the hand washing thing and dancing, but three of the six look tentative and that's disappointing because you have to be all in.

And I guess I just want to know how

your countries are dealing with this,

or how the police in your countries are dealing with this, because policing is a big issue here.

The last thing I'll say is that this is the happy bit, but the sort of not happy bit is there are also lots of policemen across India just hitting people with sticks and telling them to go home.

So that's happening en masse as well.

So

is this policing different in your respective countries?

First of all, let me say that is a fascinating tact,

like to beat up people for their own safety.

Don't you know it's for your own safety?

I have no choice but to beat you mercilessly for your health and well-being.

It's a foundation of British schooling throughout the glory days of

the day.

I mean, I forget which country set up the Indian police service.

It was such a long time ago,

I can't remember.

Oh, it was ages ago.

But as a migrant laborer today said to the Mumbai Mirror, he said,

this is the kind of policing where a man shows up in a uniform, hits me with a stick, and only three minutes later explains my crime.

That's the comment.

It's good to see the justice system working so quickly and efficiently.

I mean, are the police being gentle in the West?

Are they being persuasive?

Are they being.

I know in Spain policemen are serenading people.

I haven't left my home in weeks,

so I'm not really sure what is going on outside.

outside.

I'll have a quick look at the arguments over testing, which have been raging around the world.

There have been a lot of war metaphors used in the fight against this virus, particularly here in Britain, where we need no second invitation to roll out a war metaphor.

But actually, it's proved quite opposite, I think.

And people have been complaining, so we've got to stop thinking of this like a war and talking these kind of outdated terms.

But it's a very opposite way of looking at it.

Because when you look at the coronavirus testing, the Germans were way, way better prepared.

They started with a flurry of well-organized activity.

Britain has been just kind of cobbling shit together, hoping for the best, and then relying on the general public to bail it out of tricky situations.

And America was just pretending the whole thing wasn't happening.

So it has been, frankly,

uncanny.

And here in Britain, the government, yesterday, Matt Hancock, the health secretary, who himself has been suffering from the coronavirus, Boris Johnson is still in isolation,

looking very sad.

I mean I don't think he's enjoying this Boris Johnson looking like a kid who's always

wanted a pet kitten and then what he's been given has grown up into not an ordinary cat but a psychotic lunatic in an outfit from the movie Cats and you can see that disappointment on his head.

His lifelong dream is not working out how he planned it to.

But the government, Matt Hancock yesterday really talked decisively about ramping up testing.

And this was, I think, the 30th consecutive day that the government has talked about ramping up testing.

And they're now ramping up, talking about ramping up testing as well.

And they're going to want to ramp up that ramping up too.

If they ramped up the testing as effectively as they've ramped up talking about ramping up testing, all 67 million people in this country would know whether or not they had the virus.

And we'd know then we could all enjoy a glorious new era of guilt-free national prejudice against each other based on whether or not we've got the virus, which is a big step forward because it's got nothing to do with race, religion, sexuality, country of origin, or any of the classic scapegoatages.

So, I mean,

this is what I'm holding out for.

I want a newly prejudiced Britain that can be brought about by coronavirus testing.

You know, one of the ways in which we've kept infections really low in India, we've had, as I speak to you, a little over 3,000 cases.

And we found one of the best ways to keep coronavirus low is just not to test.

It's,

you know, I mean, I live in an Indian family, and we find the best way to resolve conflicts is by not bringing it up.

So if it doesn't come up, it doesn't exist.

I don't know how you guys are dealing with this in Western society, but we don't really have a coronavirus problem because it's best, you know, not to know.

In Indore, which is a city in Madhya Pradesh, some doctors went in to do some tests in a slum and that stones were thrown at them, they were beaten up, thrashed and thrown out of the slum so that's another way to deal with it which is just to beat up the testers so they're too afraid to come back

well i mean it does seem that the the numbers around it's very hard to interpret but somewhere between one million and uh eight billion people uh have contracted the coronavirus so it's a pretty wide ballpark um that we're uh we're trying to uh interpret here.

Here in Britain, they've transformed a conference center in London, the Excel Centre, into a field hospital in nine days.

This is Britain we're talking.

Nine days.

I mean it's devastating for the government.

It's taken them 10 years to destroy the health service and then it's been built up again in just a couple of weeks.

The Queen is to address the nation on Sunday.

And there have been leaked copies of her speech, various different versions doing the rounds

online, including this one where

word for word

she says, people of Britain, the people united will never be defeated.

The people united will never be defeated, over and over again for an hour before throwing a brick through the window of a branch of McDonald's.

Another version of the speech simply says, Maybe you guys could try asking God to save small businesses, the self-employed in the economy in general for Brit.

I'm absolutely fine.

And

another version, we're going to start with some lateral crunches, people of Britain.

Okay.

And one, two, three, four.

That is what we need from our monarch right now.

We need more home fitness stuff.

And the final version, which I think is the most likely, she's just going to come on our TV screen and say, I'm the fing queen.

I ordered this virus to suck Britain's bald.

Y'all with me?

Sweet, Caroline.

That, that, that.

So we're just hanging on for the queen on Sunday.

It's going to make it all fun.

One piece of non-virus news.

Hari, you are our Space Age footwear correspondent at the Bugle.

And

researchers are building

a special contraption to put on people's legs that will boost their running speeds by 50%.

Now, I mean,

in this kind of increasingly crowded sports calendar, we're talking about the Olympics being rescheduled for next year.

There's also World Athletics Championships that are supposed to be done next year as well.

I guess if all the races are 50% quicker, you can just get all those events done in, you know, two-thirds of the time.

Right.

And destroy every single record that had existed over the course of human existence.

Yeah.

This is great.

I mean, it shows the redemption.

You know, it's humanity overcoming

the past world that we've emerged from.

If people are running 100 meters in 6.5 seconds, we'll know that we have fully recovered from this virus.

It's also nerds destroying sports, so there's another great angle on it.

I mean, if I

if this technology existed, what I would hope for is a time machine to go back

to my high school years so I could give myself those shoes.

And when we ran a mile in gym class, I would shock everybody.

Can you imagine that?

Like a superhero.

Like, he always ended up last, but it was a long con the whole time.

That's what I would do if I had a time machine.

Also, I would kill Hitler.

That brings us to the end of this week's Bugle.

I did promise last week that we would have an exam for all of those of you who are homeschooling.

I have a Bugle history exam, but we've overrun spectacularly.

So instead, I'm just going to set you some homework of just think about everything that's happened in the world.

And that will be your history homework for this week and we'll have the history exam next week instead.

Thank you very much for joining us from your respective

flats.

Chris also has been in attendance, albeit muted through this call and throughout he's using some bizarre filter on our video call that has given him the face of the bugle logo in an extremely disturbing kind of android fashion.

Chris you actually terrifying this is how I look now Andy.

I mean

six six hours a day on Zoom calls, you know, it's gotta...

It changes a man.

It's turning into a cyborg before our very eyes.

Buglers, thank you very much for listening.

Stay safe, as always, and I hope you're all dealing with...

the strange times we're living in and I hope we're bringing you some entertainment to at least take your minds off things for a little bit.

We'll be back next week with another show and we will play you out this week with some more lies about our premium level voluntary subscribers.

To join them and help keep the bugle.

Go and go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the demo.

Doug Daniels has performed a comparative study and discovered that the hit TV series Game of Thrones and the Crown, the latter of which details the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth II, share 86% of the same dialogue and 97% of all plot lines.

Doug is not entirely sure what to do with this information.

Gordon Finleyson is also a keen amateur research enthusiast, and he calculated that if the Olympic Games had been resurrected in 1752 instead of 1896, then Jane Austen would have been a professional gymnast instead of a novelist and would have claimed golds in the all-around and uneven bars disciplines at the 1796 Games in Rome, age 20, followed by a slightly disappointing bronze in the vault at Calcutta, 1800.

Melissa and Guy Cole once played peacemakers in a drunken fistfight on an aeroplane between Garry Kasparov, Harrison Ford and Kofi Annan.

The dispute was over whether R2D2 was a character in the Star Wars movie franchise, a chess move or an ancient Inca citadel in the mountains of Peru.

Melissa and Guy calmed the three celebrities down by suggesting that they might all be right.

Heidi Hodges believes governments go the wrong way about dissuading people from eating harmful foods.

It's no use warning people about the theoretical dangers to the health of fatty foods, says Heidi.

Far better would be enforced rebrandings to put people off eating the stuff in the first place.

Peanut butter, sounds nice.

Squirrel paste, not so.

Sausage, yum, merciless tube of death, no thank you.

French fries, don't mind if I do.

Coronary-inducing shitbreads, I will give those a miss.

David Cuzocreo has doubts over whether it would be possible these days for the 1950s to happen.

I can't see the 1940s coming back anytime soon, on numerical numerical grounds quite aside from anything else, observes Doug.

So sorry 50s fans, your historical goose has baked and eaten itself long ago.

No offence.

Andre Bocage is often frustrated by the inconsistency of towels.

A hand towel is more than enough to dry not just one hand, but an entire pair of hands, notes Andre.

But when I tied drying my entire kitchen with a kitchen towel, I looked like a right turnip.

And don't get me started on beach towels, that is a long story.

Norman Oxlade is of the very firm opinion that in the event of future government lockdowns, the first thing that should be done is replacing all pavements or sidewalks with quicksand.

Everyone who ever watched a half-decent movie as a child, notes Norman, lives in eternal dread of sinking to an agonising death in quicksand.

I guarantee no one would even think about setting foot outside their houses.

And finally, Andy Kronk is disappointed that the word encroach so often has negative connotations.

It's a lovely word to say, thinks Andy, and I wish it meant something nicer.

Maybe we could swap it with the word key, which is a piddly little word for something so important.

Pass me the car encroaches, I'm going for a spin.

Do you see my point?

Here endeth this week's lies.

Bye-bye.

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.