Bugle 4146 - What would Draco do?

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, Bug.

Oh, who am I kidding?

The Olympics is off.

Right.

That that's it.

This f ⁇ ing virus can go f ⁇ itself.

Come here, you little crown-faced tosser.

Where are you?

Let's duke it out.

Mano de viruses have hands.

Come on anyway.

You don't want to, do you, you sneaky little sub-microscopic shitbag?

I've got a stick.

I will whack you with my stick.

Right, that's it.

I'm going into training, rocky style.

I'm running up and down the steps outside my shed.

Well, it's one step about an inch high, but the point stands.

Also, my cricket net's a bit in the way of it.

But still, I'm going to take you down, you pathogenic prick.

You can't even see me.

I'm too fast.

I thought they said you could punch.

Is that all you got?

I've seen scarier daffodils than you.

Please, give me my support back.

I am the hollow shell of a human being, formerly known as Andy Saltzman, coming to you live from the shed again for this issue 4146 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a, frankly, panicking world.

Joining me this week from his orbiting production booth 50 miles above the Earth's surface, it's producer Chris.

Hello, Chris.

Hello, Andy.

Sorry, I was on mute because I still haven't mastered online video calling, even though that's all I've done for the last 10 days.

Well, that's just your natural state of existence as a producer on mute where you belong.

And

joining me from the other side of the world, putting the down under into lockdown under curfew.

It's Alice Fraser.

Hello, Andy.

I've been in full quarantine for six days and I am not enjoying it.

Really?

Oh, that's surprising.

It's no fun.

It's no fun.

Just being in a little room all on my own.

Turns out I'm not that great company.

Well, I've had a fascinating week of homeschooling in which, well, we'll go into more detail on this next week.

I'll give you a full day-by-day breakdown of my homeschooling efforts.

But suffice it to say that our little physics experiment for me to try to explain the difference for my children between nuclear fusion and nuclear fission went very, very badly wrong indeed

apologies to anyone living within a 50 mile radius of our house we are recording on the 27th of march 2020 uh on this day In 1915, Mary Mallon, also known as Typhoid Mary, became the first asymptomatic healthy carrier of typhoid to be identified in the USA.

She was put in full quarantine for the second time in her life and was never released for the remaining 23 years until her death.

Now, in the current circumstances, I don't think that story is at all a worrying warning for any of us.

Not at all.

We can just ignore it.

Let's just ignore it.

Let's forget that ever, ever happened.

23 years in the shed.

I mean, I love my shed.

But even that, I mean, there's just not enough old sports footage to go around.

On this day in 1710 was the birth of Joseph Abaco, the Belgian cellist and composer.

He dies at the age of 95 in 1805, so he's in a very high-risk category.

Do not listen to any of his music unless you are at least two meters away from your headphones.

As always,

some sections of the bugle are going straight in the bin.

Today is World Theatre Day.

Not a great day for theatres around the world currently being, as they are, not allowed to open.

But to help you get through World Theatre Day, the Bugle presents micro versions of the great works of theatre for you to act out in your own homes.

Firstly, Shakespeare's Smash Hit Hamlet.

Bloody Lmate, make your f ⁇ ing mind up.

Aeschylus's Agamemnon.

Hello love, you look cross.

What's the matter?

Chekhov's Three Sisters.

We are family.

I got all my sisters with me.

That's basically all you need to know about that one.

Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.

You're right, it is going to be an awkward family Christmas.

Mummy stroke, darling.

And Arthur Millers, the Crucible.

Well, if you can explain why she had a broomstick, a cat, and a cauldron, I'll let her off.

Two out of three would be fine.

All three, I'm afraid it just looks bad.

Also,

in the bin, a home exercise section.

Chris, now you are

renowned for being

a keen exerciser.

for whatever reason.

How are you getting on stuck at home?

Have you been going out much?

I've got my plank up to three minutes and

that's the latest.

Side plank, big plank, small plank, one arm plank, one footed plank.

I just need to leave the house, please.

You're allowed to leave the house for a sanctioned one hour.

I'm not allowed to leave the house at all and it's

no good.

Well, you can do a home triathlon.

The current government-advised home triathlon is have a bath, do the crossword, and then see if you've got any snacks left.

Other

means of keeping fit under current lockdown conditions include a WNR, it's a new form of exercise which stands for Wasps Nest Release, in which you release 50 wasps into your living room.

And by the time you've swatted the lot of them,

you've burned equivalent calories to playing eight consecutive sets of squash with a peak era Jahangir Khan.

And well, what the French have come up with gymnastique toiletienne or known in British as bognastics.

That is going about your daily, shall we say, toiletular rituals whilst also getting some exercise to do this.

Put your toilet rolls, your precious, precious toilet rolls, now worth more than gold itself.

Put them on a holder high up on the wall by your, as the French would say, chaise porcelain des exflagrucians des amonieurs, forcing you to do some very important lumbaric and trans-tortular stretchels to reach your your paper on a hopefully at least daily basis and no towels of course dry your hands by doing 250 consecutive star jumps so your everyday rituals can help keep you fit also in the bin this week well talked about homeschooling we on the bugle over the forthcoming weeks we will be giving you buglers

exams to set either for yourselves or for your children if you are homeschooling them over the forthcoming weeks beginning with the key subjects of mathematics, here is your Bugle mathematics exam.

Question one, put the following numbers in the wrong order.

8, 5, 121, 17,

8,000, 0.3, and 356.

Question two,

it needs a bit of historical knowledge, this one, but it's primarily a math problem.

So multiply the following numbers together.

Pay attention.

You can write them down as you go along.

The number of wives of Henry VIII, multiplied by the number of disciples of the prominent alleged Messiah Jesus H.

Christ, multiplied by the number of founding states of the United States, multiplied by the number of words in the published novels of Dean R.

Koontz, correct to March 2020 if you were listening to this in the future, multiplied by the total number of beats per minute in the top 40 UK chart hits of rock legends Def Leopard, multiplied by the total weight of plankton in grams that would have been eaten by celebrity whale Moby Dick if the novel Moby Dick was allowed to play out in real time, in real life, multiplied by the number of spanners in a SidChrome toolkit, multiplied by the distance in miles travelled by the Starship Enterprise in all episodes of the original 1960s Star Trek series, multiplied by the number of world snooker champions who were born in the Mayan region during the classic period of Mayan civilization in the first millennium AD.

See if your math skills can get that right for you.

I mean

I enjoyed watching Chris try to do that maths in his head for about the first three goes round of that.

That was excellent.

The weird thing is I actually stopped concentrating and it got to the end of it and I actually realized I knew what the answer was.

I'll say it at the very end of the show for anyone who doesn't want to spoil it.

Yeah, yeah, don't give it away, Chris.

Next question, question three.

Pi, the renowned number that's got something to do with circles, has been calculated to 50 trillion digits or something like that, loads anyway.

But if circles were less round by a factor of ironically 3.14%, how many fewer digits would be needed to work out what pi was and why, and how much smaller would a football be?

Please show you're working for that.

Question four, James Joseph Sylvester, the English mathematician, said mathematics is the music of reason.

But the question is, what type of music is it?

Is it A, freeform acid funk, B, T V sports show theme tunes, C, three nuns singing a rude hymn, D, Beethoven times Hendrix over Daphne plus Celeste, or E, Hermann's Hubbards, who were ironically partly an anagram of maths.

And finally, for your maths question, which of the question five, which of the following mathematical theories has been conclusively disproved?

A, Kepler's third principle of toast dropping.

B, Keith from Accounts's last theorem, C,

two out of three ain't bad, D, the five-second rule, E, the law of Archimedes' scrotum, which is something to do with how quickly a naked man's private parts dry when he jumps out of the bath and runs through the streets,

or F the Borg McEnroe paradox.

Anyway, so please write your answers down and then burn them at a safe distance.

That section in the bin.

Next week, history.

Top story this week.

Well, it's still virus news.

Coronavirus, the irritating micro bastard that has havoc the world into panic systems of megachaos, continued to toddle on its anti-merry way.

The renowned pathogen and its disease buddy, COVID-19, has come up with the intriguing strategic masterstroke of having a baffling range of symptoms ranging from no symptoms at all to rapid and unpleasant death, leaving its primary target species, humanity, in a state of globally viral bafflement, and has unleashed an administrative shit allanche that could take decades to recork.

And as we came to record today,

just minutes ago, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister Minister of the United Kingdom by repute has announced that he has been diagnosed with the coronavirus and is now having showed mild symptoms is now governing in self-isolation as an added concern at least one of his girlfriends is pregnant and also we've heard this week that Prince Charles

heir to the throne of this pestilent nation also has tested positive and the irony of someone who's never got to wear the crown being afflicted by a newcomer virus named after crowns must sting particularly hard.

Yes, Bojo has the rona.

He's fallen prey to the virus, which proves that viruses are no respecters of high office.

We can only hope that he has a mild form of the disease because it would be terrible optics to have him need a respirator and have to kick a suffering nana off an ICU bed.

Obviously that would never happen because there are probably special respirators for the cabinet in a bunker somewhere.

You know they definitely have that.

You absolutely know that Churchill got revived quietly at least eight times from various alcohol and cigar-induced organ failures.

That man did not look after his organs.

Well, as you say, the virus is no respecter of status, making it a very un-British virus,

without wishing to be trumpetly xenophobic about it.

Yeah,

clearly, it will attack the rich and powerful as much as anyone else.

It is, if you will, somewhat ichoronoclastic.

And now, questions.

No, I will not.

Questions may be asked about the wisdom or otherwise of the strategy of opening the stable door and asking the horsey not to bolt too far or too fast and to be back in time for sugar lumps at 6pm and ignoring the fact that the horsey had all its possessions packed in a rucksack, sunglasses on its head and an airline ticket tucked visibly into its chest pocket.

But we can save that for when this has played out and whatever tragedies it brings.

For now, we are in Britain and indeed around the world in the FFC stage, the fingers f ⁇ ing crossed and giving thanks to the miracles of modern medicine and its equally miraculous workforce.

Alice, how's I mean,

since you were last on the bugle, you have transferred hemispheres.

How's

the virus going?

Does it go the I forget?

Does it rotate in a different direction below the equator?

Not up with the signs.

Well, we're going into more and more lockdown because they asked us politely and then we went to the beach.

That happened here a bit.

Even Britain went to the beach.

Scott Morrison.

You don't have a beach.

You have little piles of rocks rocks next to some wet stuff.

But yeah, in Australia, it's been fascinating because Scott Morrison of the Australian Government has released a series of very clear instructions to the people of Australia, which are incredibly confusing about what you should do and what should stay open.

When asked what jobs are essential jobs, categorised as essential jobs that you should still go to, he said all jobs are essential.

He's also insisting that hairdresser appointments are an essential service that must be kept open, but you shouldn't go to the hairdresser for more than half an hour.

I mean, everyone's got their addiction.

But I reckon he's just preparing for a full apocalypse.

I think hairdressers are going to be essential when everything goes to absolute shit because we all need to get our mohawks in shape for the Thunderdome.

I've always wondered why stylists get so much work in post-apocalyptic economies.

You've got your thugs, your guards,

your scrappy street kids, your warlords, and your hair and nail specialists.

I mean, half an an hour in a hairdresser is more than I've spent in a hairdresser in a year beginning with two.

So I think I'm going to manage to self-isolate from my coiffur.

Other, well, in Britain,

off-licenses have been added to the list of kind of socially crucial outlets that are allowed to remain open because there is absolutely no way Britain can possibly get through this level of isolation and social restriction without access to to copious quantities of alcohol.

Yeah, get drunk and get a trim.

Other world leads have been affected.

Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau are also operating in isolation, although they've not yet not been diagnosed as suffering from the virus.

Whereas Bolsonaro of Brazil and the Mexican president Lopez Obrador are essentially going around licking babies like ice creams and firing a t-shirt cannon adapted to fire viruses into their adoring fans.

They are not giving in to the demands of science and common sense.

Well, Mr.

Putin is, though.

Vladimir Putin has been seen making a surprise visit to an infectious disease hospital in Komunaka, which is a settlement on the outskirts of Moscow.

I just don't think Vladimir Putin making a surprise visit to anywhere is a good idea.

I think he's going to shock people into heart attacks.

But he went there wearing a full hazmat suit, which has led to some crazy memes.

I think it's the first time I've ever seen Putin with a shirt on, to be honest.

Yeah, I mean, it's a strong look for him.

I mean, it has brought out the best and worst in humanity, this crisis, very much like other things do, for example, war and life in general.

But unfortunately, in the current climate, many of those from whom it has drawn the worst are rulers of large countries.

And obviously,

leading the way is

Mr.

Trump.

Trump, as always, has said some

controversial things.

He's said that he wants America back to business by Easter, which is not very far away, assuming that he's referring to this Easter rather than, I don't know, some future putative Easter when, I don't know, the Messiah's second coming is ended by crucifixion to the sequel.

His thinking is that the economic damage is worse than

is necessary for the lives of his citizens.

The cure is worse than the problem, said Trump Stiltskin this week, which is reminiscent of Captain Smith saying, well, it's a shorter distance to port if we try to go through the iceberg rather than around it.

So, full steam ahead.

Trump said, We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself, words that in an ideal world would have been uttered repeatedly by every single Republican voter as they walked into those polling stations in November 2016.

And he added, the whole concept of death is terrible.

He's pretending to be a Christian.

He's supporter base.

Death was cracking PR for your special boy, wasn't it?

Geez, as his mates called him.

The

Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick,

heroically pretty much advocated the sacrifice of the older generation on economic grounds.

He said, those of us who are 70 plus will take care of ourselves, but don't sacrifice the country.

He said, no one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, are you willing willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that America loves for its children and grandchildren?

And if that is the exchange, I'm all in.

Before one assumes setting an example and slaying himself, humanely, of course, in a touchingly humble act of penance to his spiritual lord and master and saviour, economics.

Perhaps he straight away after that speech, he went and pumped millions of dollars into a TV advertising campaign targeted at the viro-vulnerable community, showing himself willfully pegging out for the greater good in a range of fun ways, drowning in a vat of strawberry jelly, human catapulted across the beautiful Appalachian Mountains, or humped to death by giant mechanical sex robot George Washington.

There could be no greater act of patriotism, surely.

Despite the inference of Trump's and Patrick's suggestions, the cyanide for Septuaginarians movement has not yet had that much political traction, but watch this space.

You wouldn't consider that it would be a viable political position to just put an entire generation on an ice flow and send them out to sea, but apparently it is.

Yep.

Well there you go.

They have passed in America an absolute whopper of a rescue package

passed by the Senate $2 trillion.

The sum was chosen in honor of the fictitious wrapper, $2 trillibucks, who would, if he or she existed, currently be in self-isolation with suspected symptoms.

Their sacrifice would not have gone underappreciated, and that's good to know.

And that's a lot of money, but I guess when you're 23 trillion in debt, what difference does an extra couple of trill do?

You just whack it on the tab.

There are probably already some American eggs in American ovaries that are more than willing to settle up when the time comes.

The Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell described it as a wartime level of investment.

And of course, it did come slightly after European governments did exactly the same thing as

her.

I mean, the cure is worse than a problem is a reasonable thing to say if he means like the health impact of high rates of unemployment and an economic shutdown.

That's a measurable health impact.

It's quite bad.

But it's not worse than the problem if you consider that without trying to prevent the virus, you get an economic impact of lots of people dying dying of the virus and also of preventable diseases that could be cured if the healthcare sector wasn't collapsing under the weight of the virus and also the population being centimated by one in 100 people dying and also everyone having lung conditions forever and ever and ever.

Like, I don't think he's thought it through.

Although I think you could say that about almost everything that he's ever said.

Over 3 million people in America registered to claim jobless benefits for the week ending on the 21st of March.

That's a new American record for Trump to add to his supposed collection.

Here in Britain, the government is forking out money it clearly does not have to cover lost earnings and wages for millions and millions of people.

The hospitality industry, retail, entertainment, sport have all been absolutely, appallingly affected by this.

But what about those other industries that fly further under the radar of public consciousness like crime?

Well, Penelope Lopscombe, the head of the BIBTF, the British Institute of Burglars, Thieves and Fences, and Alan the Claw Strivington, CEO of the Crims UK pressure group and former boss of the notorious Strivers Gang, issued a joint statement slamming the government for its lack of support for the criminal community.

The statement reads: With everyone locked in their homes, it has never been tougher to pull off a successful break-in, particularly with the government clamping down on people heading off to their second homes in the country or by the seaside, which is naturally a core part of our members' business models.

This has affected everyone in our sector, from large organised drugs gangs to small-time petty crooks.

Over quarters of our registered gangs have had to lay off or at least furlough their members.

In all, 42% of gangs have been officially disbanded or been forced to merge with rival gangs.

Furthermore, the statement continues, restrictions on movement make shifting stolen goods on for resale extremely logistically problematic.

And as most fences are self-employed, it has been devastating for them.

Furthermore, as they generally do not declare the exact source of their income, they do not qualify for the government's new bailout package for the self-employed.

Even furthermore, with people increasingly concerned about their personal finances in these times of uncertainty, the average ransom paid has collapsed by 73.6% in less than a month.

The upshot is that many of our members are being forced to turn away from crime to earn a decent living, which in turn could have a devastating impact on the secondary dependent industries which rely on the crime sector.

Police, who are now reduced to stopping people having unlicensed picnics, lawyers, burger alarm installers, insurance companies, car sale rooms, psychologists and counsellors, and mobile phone manufacturers who depend on people having to buy new phones when some bastard nicks theirs and the police don't have time or resources to get involved.

The statement concludes, the government has described this as a wartime situation, but for us in this ancient industry which has contributed so much to the national economy, culture and TV schedules over the years, war presented opportunities amidst the chaos.

Now we see only restrictions.

The government has long provided support, assistance and even knighthoods to white-collar criminals.

It is time for them to step in for the rest of us to prevent the possibly terminal decline of our entire criminal sector and with it a way of life that has been part of this great British nation ever since Stonehenge had its roof nicked and all the copper stripped off its sarsen stones the day before its official opening.

So, moving words.

It's a terrible business, Andy, and you'd think that the fagans would be all right because children generally don't seem to get the virus, but a lot of fagans have lung conditions.

I know,

it's difficult, difficult for everyone.

I mean,

no one really knows.

One of the difficulties,

as you touched on, is people sort of ignoring the rules, not knowing quite how to go about it.

There's a lot of talk about the two-metre

isolation distance between you and someone who is not

living in the same house as you when you go outside.

I mean, it's quite hard to ensure that.

The human brain is not really trained to work out a two-metre distance by evolution.

Because I think a saber-toothed tiger could jump from five metres.

So, I mean, that's the distance, the natural distance we estimate.

Well also, I mean this is maybe a new,

maybe this is making some room for new jobs in the post-coronavirus or during coronavirus economic landscape.

For example, basketballers now no longer able to play against one another

could lie down in between you and another person to show you the distance.

There's a lot of room for professional hand washers.

Professional cough explainers are very important because if you accidentally cough then you feel you have to explain immediately why you were coughing and then then you're not sick from the virus.

Oh, I was just eating some biscuit.

A lot of room for people who give out lip injections who are going to go out of business in a mask-filled world.

Maybe they can offer their injecting skills to the beleaguered health workers.

And also, I think Mary Kondo is going to be out of a job because it turns out a whole lot of things that don't give you joy are actually super useful to have around in a shutdown.

Bet you're missing all that old shit now when you're out of your mind, bored, and looking for craft supplies.

I can't believe I got rid of that rusty old weight set.

Another business opportunity is, well, coming to the food sector with restaurants having to close down and supermarkets overloaded.

Contagia Yum is a new chain of drone...

Contagia Yum is a new business that offers meals dropped by drones on edible lettuce parachutes from a safe height of 1,000 feet.

You just have to hope that they land in the right garden.

You have to enviously watch your neighbours chowing down on your

lovely lamb shank.

If you want, there's some new government advice has just come out, and the government have been criticised for slight nebulousness in their advice, which is partly justified.

But they have issued very clear advice on how to ensure a two-metre distance between yourself and other people.

This has just come from Downing Street.

We advise people to buy a helicopter, to then trim the blades to a meter length that's six foot seven and a half inches if your chopper is from the 1960s or 4.37 cubits if you have the Sikorsky Biblical Avenger H42.

Chop holes for your legs in the floor of the helicopter cabin and remove the tail section of the aircraft and as much of the frontal portion as you can as well without it totally collapsing.

Attach large weights to the remaining parts of the helicopter frame to stop it actually taking off.

Squish it down a bit so the blades are as close to head height as possible and gerry rig the engine of a decommissioned military tank to your lead-weighted chopper suit to enable you to move around.

When you are entering an area where you think you might come into contact with a non-sanctioned PIH, brackets that's potentially infectious human, simply switch the helicopter on so the blades rotate.

You will find that most people will grant you the full two-metre virus safety moat, if not considerably more.

So, we all know now

exactly how to get around this.

Of course, people are turning to the cause of the virus.

Trump's cabinet pastor blamed it on gay people.

He said that the coronavirus is a result of the wrath of God, which is an excitingly retro way to approach a virus.

I mean,

if it is true, if it's true that God caused the coronavirus in vengeance for gay people, either God's wrath has come down disproportionately hard on old people with lung conditions, or not washing your hands enough makes you gay.

I'm not

entirely sure how that works out, but sure.

I mean, if that's true, then pretty much

that will sound bad.

I was going to say pretty much every child in the world is gay.

Keep it in.

Keep it in.

All children are gay is now the episode title.

Well, prayer is, I mean, currently, actually, in terms of, I mean,

this disease is currently uncurable by medicine

and prayer is achieving a survival rate in excess of 90%.

Some say as high as 99%

now others say this is the same as actual medicine or not praying.

And the control placebo-based research in which rather than praying people recite baseball statistics to a wax effigy of Florence Nightingale is actually proving slightly more effective.

I mean Florence Nightingale one of the great hand washers of history.

You know, new problems call for new heroes.

We need the list of our great hand-washing heroes: Florence Nightingale, Pontius Pilot,

Lady Macbeth, Howard Hughes,

Jack Nicholson's character in As Good As It Gets, Mark Spitz, the Olympic swimmer.

I mean, he really took it too far, just basically lifted his entire life to a basin.

There's a huge speculation about the potential availability of tests, accurate or otherwise.

Just give us a test, vaccines and

non-religious cures.

Donald Trump just this morning has held a press conference in which he told people, I've heard if you drink a bottle of household bleach, two litres of cheap vermouth, and a chocolate milkshake, you'll be cured within minutes.

Give it a go, folks.

And that's presumably led to

some extremely dangerous incidents around America.

Well, of course, people are trying to stop the spread of the disease in different ways.

Different governments are presenting people with different options.

New York has given advice to people to only bang your flat mates.

In those words,

Basically, yes, they've said, do not look outside the home for sexual contact.

Only bang people inside your household.

Which, let's hope, is either your spouse or your flatmate and

not something else.

That is a sitcom waiting to happen now, Alex.

The only bang your flatmates sitcom.

I mean,

don't you already have like nude and afraid dating shows in England?

But I mean, this is the the thing.

They're having to replace traditionally intimate moments with more hygienic alternatives.

For example, giving birth to your child into a piece of cling film so you can hold them gently but hygienically.

The end of weddings, you may not kiss the bride, you may only tap elbows with the bride.

And of course there's a boom in the sexting industry, which is difficult.

There's some very specific specific rules that sexting needs to comply with, which is not particularly good for people who aren't comfortable with expressing their intimate feelings.

For example, everyone in England.

So I have a list of tips for people who are now forced to engage with over-the-phone sexual contact.

If you are sexting and you're using language, be specific but not clinical.

You have to be specific but not clinical.

Commence lubrication is too graphic.

Words like insert are too engineery.

Time scales are important, like it can't just be let's have sex, we're having sex, we've just had sex.

There is a beginning and middle and end, but no detail.

You need to fill it in with a little bit of colour.

Equally, you know, you can't do it too quickly, but you also can't just sex back and forth for a week describing a singular act in minute detail.

You're not Dickens, and even the imagination can get chafing.

You need to be very careful about singular and plural.

Look at my boobs is sexy.

Look at my boobs, singular, not sexy.

You need to agree on terminology beforehand.

You can't have a yonny person with a cock person.

They're two different worlds.

It would never work.

Equally, you can't have a vulva person with a willy person.

They'd never respect each other.

If you're going to the world of pictural sexualness, which I've never really understood, the whole dickpic thing is basically just saying, just look at it.

And I don't understand whether.

Written off great swathes of wonderful Renaissance art.

Well, that's the thing.

If you're doing a piece of art or if you're sending a dickpic, there's no reciprocal thrill other than like, ooh, red.

But even if you're sexting back and forth with your partner or friend,

you know, you don't know what's going on.

Even if it's sort of contemporaneous, if there's a little pause between your sent message and their response, you don't know how they're reacting.

They're either passionately unfolding their genitals or they've gone to make a cup of tea or they're working on their grammar.

You don't know if they've gone quiet because they're bored or if they've gone quiet because they've just shoved their whole fist into their mouth.

But apparently in this time, even

in this time, despite the ban on intimate conduct, Tinder usage has gone up because people fing love window shopping.

So be careful out there.

Be careful of everyone.

Well, now for a coronavirus outbreak, person of the week.

This week, Draco, the man who gave us the currently hip-term draconian measures.

But who was he?

Well, Draco, or Dracon, was the first recorded lawgiver of ancient Athens.

He worked in the late 7th century BC and played a key role in the evolution of Athenian democracy, which was a key stage in the evolution of the political attack ad, which elevates our species even today.

He came up with

the first sort of written codified laws.

Spoken laws up to that point were considered too vague and imprecise.

So, if you can't imagine what that's like, imagine maybe a prime minister giving a press conference and telling you what you kind of can and kind of can't and or should and shouldn't probably do and or not do.

It was kind of like that.

So, Draco replaced the prevailing system of oral law and blood feud

by a written code to be enforced by a court of law, or the bloody lawyers getting a finger in the pie, as always.

Are you married to one?

Well, yes.

And is the reason she has her finger in the pie?

Because she just made the delicious pie.

Yep, that quite quite piece of time.

I think it is lunchtime.

Draco introduced the death penalty for even minor offences such as stealing a cabbage.

Now, it is clearly a matter of time before that comes back in the current panic-buying circumstances.

All of Big D's laws, however, were repealed by the rather less cantankerous Solon in the 6th century BC, but his name lives on in the term Draconian.

Now, Now we don't know much about his personal life, Draco, other than the fact that he is definitely dead.

He never did karaoke or ate a Big Mac, read into that what you will.

He played snooker very quickly and would have struggled to find a nickname in modern-day Australia.

Dra Draco,

Draco, Draco.

But for our rulers and overlords who are currently donning their what would Draco do wristbands, we've run a computer simulation on what Draco would actually have done in the current circumstances.

And he would have imposed the death penalty for coughing more than three times in a minute.

He would have banned grandparents.

And after all, it's only emotional ties that make us miss our relatives, isn't it?

I mean, it's the emotional thing, isn't it?

Alice, do you miss Herbert Balthazar Whippersnap Fraser?

No.

No, well, he died in 1765, so you have no emotional attachment to him.

You don't give a shit.

That's how it works.

Also, my family only became Frasers a couple of generations ago.

Spoiled the joke.

But that's my job.

Joke, spoiler, extraordinaire.

And also, Draco would have launched a a distracting military strike on Iran.

So, yeah, I'll be interesting to see how closely people are following him.

In celebrity news now, the coronavirus has affected celebrities by revealing to us how many of them are just completely off this planet without their team of people advising them to do everything.

There was a viral video.

Right here, Alice.

I'm sitting right here.

I'll miss my team.

Yeah,

You're not a celebrity in this dimension, Andy.

Oh, yeah, sorry, I forget.

There's a viral video of a bunch of celebrities singing Imagine out of key that's gone viral for the wrong reasons in that it seemed to be just a very poorly judged video of very rich people imagining a world in which things weren't as bad as they are for other people, maybe.

Something about connection.

Also, Madonna has come out with a series of videos, including one of her in a bath, talking about how the virus is the great equalizer while surrounded by rose petals and what appears to be milk.

Also singing one of her own songs into a hairbrush worse than most people would sing that song into a hairbrush.

But you know, you know, we can't judge other people.

I'm sure she's coming from an interesting place.

On the bright side, some things are still unchanged.

Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are still apparently in a blood feud with Taylor Swift, which is reassuring.

Either they haven't noticed the coronavirus or they think their weird beef is more important than the coronavirus.

That's where you need Draco to come in to end the blood feuds with some written legislation to deal with he didn't deal with celebrities, that's his problem.

Yeah,

it's a shame, but every comedian I know has turned to live streaming, so maybe we'll have some new celebrities soon.

Sports news now

It's not getting any easier

right well that brings us to the end of uh this week's uh this week's bugle.

Um uh Alice uh I hope you have a really busy busy week

in

your isolation chamber.

I'm working an enormous amount, but I just want a hug.

I'll email one.

Can you do that?

I don't know.

I'm out of the technological loop.

No, you cannot.

But

I've tried.

Believe me, I've tried.

Buglers do keep safe, and

yeah, these are strange times.

I hope you're enjoying our coverage of this utterly baffling story.

Alice, obviously,

there are no live shows in which you are appearing in person, but what have you got to plug that people can look at on a screen?

Well, it would be the Melbourne International Comedy Festival right now.

I'm doing a live show on Instagram every evening in Australia slash about 11 a.m.

in the UK, and that's in the run-up to the release of Savage on Amazon Prime on the 17th of April and I'll be doing a live watching party and probably talking to maybe a celebrity guest.

Also I do,

if you, I'm not sure if you've heard of it, but there is a daily satirical news podcast set in an alternate dimension

that comes into the podcast feed every day.

It's called The Last Post.

The host is quite funny.

There's someone who sounds a lot like you on it, Andy.

You might want to have a listen.

You get some tips from him.

He seems to be quite successful.

Right, okay, rub rub it in.

Until next week, goodbye.

We will play you out with some more lies about our premium subscribers.

To join them,

go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Bye.

Jeremy Olson wonders how different the history of the world might have been if rice and potatoes had been native to the Italian peninsula.

I don't think the Roman Empire would have been nearly as impressive, speculates carbohydrate of aficionado Fician Jeremy.

They'd have had a much starchier diet, felt sleepier after meals, and not bothered invading nearly as many places.

Alexei Yeshchenko hopes that the current global hiatus will offer an opportunity for the world to contemplate many things about things, including the benefits of hiatuses.

Without a good hiatus, remarks Alexei, we can forget how good a good hiatus can be.

We should definitely take some time out from our current timeout to think about taking more time out in future at some point.

Alastair Sinclair is never comfortable hearing religious leaders talk about their congregations as flocks.

Alistair comments, it always gives the impression that they only want us for our wool, milk or flesh, and that they're probably training dogs to corral us into small spaces.

Claire Kehoe, or Kehoe, delete according to correct pronunciation, is a little disappointed that there has never been an installment of the Spider-Man movie franchise in which the eponymous hero who famously does whatever a spider can is killed and eaten by a woman he met on a Tinder date.

The franchise has a duty to reflect all the realities of spiderhood, argues Claire.

Katie Reed, who has always been of the opinion that zebra chess would be an intriguing if confusing spectator sport, hopes one day that the international aviation industry will acknowledge the efficiency savings possible with increased use of ejector seats.

They could just kaping people out wherever they needed to get to, says Katie, instead of flying everyone to the same place.

And finally, Julian Danton once wrote to the United Nations suggesting that they try airdropping harpsichords by parachute into war zones.

Sometimes, explains Julian, you have to break a destructive chain of thought and events by doing the unexpected.

And a large, seldom-played relic of the Baroque musical era floating down gently from the sky, looking like a piano but then not sounding like a piano, could be just the peacemaking ticket.

Zero!

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you 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.