Bugle 4145 - Are we key workers?

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4145 of the Bugle.

It's the 20th of March in the year 1 CV for 2020 in Old Money.

am Andy Zoltzmann.

The bugle this week comes to you from not the recording studio where we usually record, but from within my virus-proof shed.

I am huddling in my World War II Anderson shelter.

I'm surrounded by a 15-metre wide moat.

Apologies to the next door neighbours and indeed to the rest of my family who are currently standing neck deep in water in what was our living room.

But

viruses can't swim.

So a moat is a very good mechanism against them.

Current World Health Organization vice is, of course, just a six-metre moat, but I want to be on the safe side.

And please, if you're doing this at home, as the old castle designer mantra goes, don't forget your drawbridge.

Joining me by the wonders of the internet from the other side of the planet, Tom Ballard.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

If I could just plug my Edinburgh dates, that'd be great.

The show's called Grandiliquent.

It's on at 9pm at the Monkey Barrel.

It's a nice enclosed space.

It fits about 100 people.

Should be a really great show.

Tickets are on sale now, so please get involved and stack them up before they all go.

What year?

In 2020, of course.

Why?

What have you heard?

And joining me from about two miles up the road in South London,

which is as close as I ever want to physically be to him, it's Nish Kumar.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Tom.

Hello, Buglers.

Yep, we are in the bunkers.

Also joining us from his attic, it's Chris.

Hello, Chris.

Good morning and good evening, everybody.

I hope you're well.

Right.

What wondrous technology to have a four-cornered podcast

in this age of devastation?

It's great to know that essential workers are still able to do their jobs, Andy.

And I'm talking emergency services, I'm talking delivery drivers, and I'm talking podcasters.

Well,

we are the oil that lubricates the wheels of history.

That is what I'm going to tell my children's school when I turn up on Monday with my kids, saying I am essential to the functioning of the economy.

Apologies, buglers, if the quality of the writing this week is a little below normal levels.

As you know, my script is written by an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of papyrus scrolls and a special infinitely big aircraft and primate hangar but due to current coronavirus distancing advice those monkeys are having to sit two meters apart rather than 40 centimeters apart so i have a smaller talent pool of just 20 of an infinite number of monkeys

we are recording on the 20th of march uh on this day in the year who am i kidding none of history counts in the year

might as well delve into anyway in the year 235 on this day maximinus thrax became Roman emperor, the first emperor to be named after a sexually transmitted disease.

Thrax was swiftly followed in the year 251 by Trebonianus Gallus, very painful condition, and in 275 by Ulpia Severina and Florianus.

And, of course, later in the year 332 by Papiloba virus, of course, terrific emperor.

On this day in 43 BC, the birth of the Roman poet Ovid, although his full name was Aronavirus.

And that is the second and final of my Ovid jokes

that I will be doing.

I'm worried that this isolation is going to drive your references to new heights of obscurity.

Well,

it's quite popular.

Obviously, I did do a degree that encompassed Latin literature, but that is the last Ovid gag, I promise.

One was Plenty, two is Virgil on the Ridiculous.

Please, the people are suffering enough.

Let the puns die with the elderly, please.

I have to say, Tom, I'm actually reassured by this.

It's a sign that the British state is still functioning, that our Disoltzman is still making puns based on his largely useless degree.

Yeah, I mean, the whole thing is turning into a Horace story.

But, you know, the ancients

had big diseases too, so we can learn from them.

They could tell us a lot about how to deal with it.

And it sounds like we're pretty close to martial law being imposed.

I digress.

Monday will be the 23rd of March, on which day in the year 1775, Patrick Henry delivered his famous speech, Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death, in the St.

John's Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia.

That is now being updated under coronavirus restrictions to give me liberty and I might give other people death.

Or my version, give me liberty or give me televised sport.

I can live without one or the other, but I can't live both.

As long as the one of the one or the other is televised live sport.

Andy, Andy,

I released the virus.

It was me to stop cricket.

It was me.

It was me the whole time, and I don't regret it at all.

It was all me.

Right.

Ballard, all joking aside, if it turns out this was you and it was to stop cricket, Andy will f ⁇ you.

Yeah, I can't argue with you.

If you can get to me, you can't.

There's a travel van.

We've just closed all borders in Australia.

Good luck, motherfuckers.

I'll get away with it on grounds of diminished responsibility, on the grounds that I've conducted my entire adult life with diminished responsibility.

As always.

How are you coping without sport, Andy?

That was actually one of the first two things I thought when I heard about the isolation were, oh my god, I hope my elderly grandmother is okay.

And then I thought, oh my god, I hope my other elderly grandmother, aka Andy Salton, is okay without cricket.

Well, look,

I'm thinking of signing up a volunteer service where I deliver old DVDs of previous cricket World Cups to vulnerable pensioners and Andy.

Nish, I already have those DVDs.

Yeah, think of the pensioners first.

There's only so many imaginary test matches between the 1932-33 England side and the 1980s West Indians that you can play before it starts to really hit home what you're missing.

Anyway, Anyway, as always, a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week, a culture section.

Now, the coronavirus has had a truly devastating impact on culture, as we all know as freelance comedians.

The lives and livelihoods of many of our friends and colleagues in the creative and performance world are currently in a state of total collapse.

The venues that host us and their staff.

But it's not all bad because, on the plus side, alongside the cancellation of so many small, medium, large, and massive gigs and festivals, including regrettably the bugle live show in Norwich which is no longer happening

but on the plus side

alongside the really great things that aren't happening some really shit things are also now not going to be performed so we have special things we will not be missing section that have now been cancelled including Pence sings Cobain

the scheduled 50 date Vegas residency for the vice president with his Christianity infused reinterpretations of the hits of Nirvana Gove the musical that's off.

The new stand-up show from the hit outright character act provocateur No Offence entitled Melter My Ball Snowflakes.

That's off for

Mr.

Fence has pledged to do an online version of the show where he Skype calls sensitive millennials and tells them everything they think is wrong.

Exhibitions are off.

The Art of the Bullcock, that's off.

An exhibition charting the evolution of the design of toilet ballcocks.

I assume that's what it is anyway.

Although, looking again, the exhibition catalogue has an extreme close-up of michelangelo scope i think i might have got that one wrong uh and the love guru the love guru 2 uh off

and uh which i i'm obviously furious about because i'd actually been tapped up to starring the love guru too

they were going in a more uh ethnically authentic direction for the sequel yeah

also in the bin a special supplement symptoms of cvrh which is coronavirus related hypochondria um

uh, including, because I think a lot of us are suffering from this, uh, including feeling a slight twinge in the knee or hamstring and thinking, was that on the list of symptoms?

Uh, not sleeping very well, uh, also on the list of uh coronavirus-related hypochondria symptoms, uh, standing in a food shop thinking, have I got enough pasta to last the week?

And then buying 56 cans of chickpeas, a 20-litre canister of elderflower cordial, 200 copies of the Financial Times so you can wipe your backside and satirize the global economy simultaneously, a rubber dinghy just in case, 10 more cans of chickpeas, and a pump action water pistol.

And also, another symptom of the hypochondria is hearing someone slightly cough on public transport, then leaping to your feet, pointing at them and screaming, die, infidel, die.

O sections in the bin.

Top story this week.

The impending cancellation of the county championship cricket season.

God.

Clearly, the virus is,

well, as we've said, wreaking all manner of different levels of devastation

around the world.

It has so far officially infected less than a half of a hundredth of a percent of the world's population.

But it has affected the entire hive mind of humanity, which has been shuddered to its foundations.

The global economy has panic-bought toilet roll and then shat its pants before it could even get to the can.

Fair play to this virus.

It's a maverick, but it is getting some serious results.

Nish, Tom,

how are you coping with these unprecedented times?

Oh, God, remember Brexit, everybody?

Remember that?

Remember how we thought Brexit was going to be what this is now?

That was good times.

I'm not too worried.

I'm gay, so I have heaps of diseases.

And my people invented gonorrhea.

My asshole is ground zero.

So some people, like Andy Saltzman, often decrypt us as disgusting.

Ballard, I'll thank you to not plug down the pets in this podcast.

Your t-shirts that say my asshole is ground zero, we all know, are available on your website.

But let's drop it back on with the safety.

Not plugging anything with this social distancing.

I'll tell you that much.

Whoa!

But I'm furious.

Come on, holy shit.

I'm furious, Andy.

I've been saying for years, if we were allowed to eat bats as children, none of this would have happened.

But the PC nanny state are always telling us, no, no, wash your hands, don't eat the head off bats.

And now look at the situation

yep well it's you know it's that that's the typical PC brigade isn't it not eating bats you said it uh nish uh how has uh how has your existence uh changed well uh andy i'm uh i'm i'm housebound and uh i'm i i to be completely honest with you if i wasn't watching the news there is a good chance i wouldn't have noticed that this was happening uh because

uh certainly like uh like you two i'm a self-employed stand-up stand-up comedian and it's not been the lifestyle adjustment it has for many people.

Most of us spend most of our days making a sandwich to interrupt our daily schedule of rigorous masturbation.

So I mean, if anything, the switch has been for people like Chris who actually have jobs to go to.

I have been experimenting due to the fact that there are a lot of restaurants around me are closing.

I've been experimenting with it's this thing, I think it's a Swedish art form called a kuking.

I think that's an umlaut over the U.

It's sort of like you set a restaurant up essentially in your own kitchen and prepare the food yourself and then serve it yourself.

You can do a character of a white stuff, as I have been doing.

Hello, Nick Cooper, nice to see you.

Look,

there's nothing else really going on in the world at the moment.

I mean, I did read this morning that apparently today, as we record the 20th of March, is the International Day of Happiness.

And let me speak for the entire population of the world when I tell that title to go ram itself.

The primary concern is none of us in the UK are officially under any sort of

we're not under any sort of lockdown officially in the United Kingdom and that's for one reason and that reason is our government is a f ⁇ ing waste of space but we are being strongly encouraged to not leave our homes and it's been look this is a global pandemic, and it's there's no precedent for this.

Really, we have to reach back to the Spanish flu a century ago for any sort of precedent.

And what you want at this time is sound leadership.

What you need is a steady hand on the tiller.

Unfortunately, in this country, we have Boris Johnson, and every one of his now daily press briefings, he has looked like a baby that's been thrown in the deep end of a swimming pool, or indeed me during any sex.

And that is wildly wildly out of his depth

well nish i mean i think that's a little bit harsh i think boris johnson has done a pretty good job albeit only on the scale of how would the worst possible prime minister you could possibly have at a time like this do his job

i feel like we're trapped in a philosophy experiment

Like, I feel like we're all in some sort of weird hypothetical scenario being posed by some crazy f ⁇ ing lecturer about what would happen if you left the least qualified man in charge of the worst possible scenario.

And especially, I mean, with his counterpart in America, it really is like, I mean, it's like your house has sprung a catastrophic league and you call for the Mario brothers and end up with Dumb and Dumber.

I think he's been doing okay.

In his daily press conference, Johnson said, we've always said we're going to do the right measures at the right time, which is better than doing the right measures at the the wrong time, the wrong measures at the right time, or doing anything that Italy did at any time.

So, you're ahead of that.

And at a cabinet meeting earlier, he said, We are engaged in a war against the disease

with which we have to win.

Now, just a quick tally on the UK's track record of wars in the 21st century, Andy.

Let's count them up.

War in Afghanistan recently ended in a truce with the Taliban, so I'd say that's a loss.

War in Iraq, I'd say ba-ba.

The war on terror generally not so great.

The war on Christmas has been going quite well.

Christmas may be cancelled this year.

I feel like that a lot of that credit needs to go to coronavirus.

So I suppose the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

I'm going to call that a draw.

Still not looking that great.

Well, when what war is an interesting angle on this?

It's been described in very military terms.

But what does war mean, essentially?

What war means is subsequent films.

And there are going to be some, they're going to have to be some classic Hollywood rewritings of history to make this more visually appealing as US Marines hunt down giant flesh-eating virus monsters through the mountains of Iran.

It's not and saving Private Ryan culminates in them finding Matt Damon in the middle of a coughing fit somewhere in Normandy.

The government's response here, as you said, Nish, is slightly curious.

Basically, told everyone in London,

don't go to pubs, restaurants, bars and clubs, but also saying to the bars, restaurants, bars and clubs, don't worry guys, you can stay open.

You can stay open.

It'll make no difference to you apart from the total lack of customers.

But just use imaginary customers.

It'll just be the same.

All you need to do is pretend your customers are there, serve them their food.

You can even pep up your menu with some stuff that real people wouldn't order, but imaginary people might.

And then just pretend that they've left all their food as wasteful millennials and then run out of the restaurant without paying.

I mean, it's not really that different, is it?

Yeah, well, that's absolutely right.

The government has encouraged people to not go to bars and restaurants, but not told the bars and restaurants they have to close.

The government has encouraged everyone that is able to work from home or can stay at home to not go into work.

But it hasn't provided any sort of financial subsidy, something like a service to provide money to people so that they can pay their rent or something akin to a universal basic income.

And the reason it hasn't done that, Andy, is both both of those things would be communism.

And I did not personally dick slap Adolf Hitler to death for this country to fall victim to com I would rather die of coronavirus than have anything approaching a vaguely sensible or compassionate economic system in place.

Guys, guys, I'm just sorry, sorry, Andy, I've just got a bit of breaking news here.

Word has just come through that all four of Charlie from Charlie and the Choka Factory's grandparents have been confirmed deceased from coronavirus.

They were disgustingly irresponsible.

They refused to leave that bed and not practice social distancing.

The entire chocolate factory has had to be put into quarantine, and many oompa lumpas are facing deportation.

So that's just an update I've received.

Sounds like it's pretty grim news over there, guys.

Some further breaking news.

Wednesdays and Thursdays are to merge for the next three months at least.

The world truly is

changing by the minute.

I mean, it is.

And I should say, you know, apologies if you're one of the million or so people who've died in the past week from non-coronavirus causes.

But, I mean, we are focusing on corona because it is proving to be, frankly, a right old

medical term.

And

we've seen industries eviscerated, livelihoods, careers, hopes, certainties, even beloved exams abruptly snatched away from people.

And the virus itself is still really refusing to negotiate.

It remains unclear what its demands are, whether we can reach some kind of treaty arrangement like we have with other diseases, whereby they're still allowed to afflict humanity, but with certain restrictions to facilitate the smooth running of our world-renowned planet.

So, and you know, the social side effects, it's led to, as always happens, vigilante attacks on innocent, unrelated bacteria who are really copying it from association with the

virus.

In Britain, the schools are shutting down.

Today is the last day of school.

As we record, my children are enjoying their last day of school for X months, where X is an as-yet undefined number between one and a million.

We're seeing retired medical professionals coaxed back to

the hospitals and the care homes of the government, whispering in their ears, go on, old timer, one more shot at the big time.

So, homeschooling.

I'm gonna have to start homeschooling on Monday.

Now, you guys have both met me, and you've, I think, both met my children.

I'm not up to this, I'm absolutely not up to this in any way.

I've started to get a lot of people.

I mean,

I think we might have told this story before, but the only single piece of information I've ever seen you technically impart onto your children was that time in Edinburgh when we did a live bugle and your son was in the audience.

And afterwards, he came up to both of us and said, ah, now I know what the scene word is.

And then he left a pause for dramatic intent and then said,

So So, your children are about to get a very interesting education in what I imagine will be a variety of creative obscenities and obscure cricket stats.

I'm not worried about your children, I'm worried about you, Andy.

I think you're going to be bullied relentlessly.

I've plotted out an eight-week module on the history of Test cricket, 1877 to 1899.

But

then what?

I'm sure many bugles will be in the same position.

I've plotted out some essay titles that you could set for your children,

including Why Were Schools Invented?

Please explore the dangers to family relationships of being cooped up inside your own house, telling your children how the world works.

Also, this essay, in the light of the coronavirus outbreak, outlined the reasons that, as a species, humanity left its entire social structure, health systems, and economic stability epically vulnerable to a sudden outbreak of a medium-level disease.

And well, I've curriculum for teenagers.

Yeah, my daughter's entering, well, she's just entered her teenage years, including advanced slouching, uncommunication skills and CAS, which is short for cynicism and snark.

So

interesting, interesting time.

In America, as you said, Donald Trump has responded to this crisis exactly how you would have expected him to respond to the crisis with a mixture of delusion, arrogance and more arrogant delusion.

He tested negative for the virus despite having been in close proximity with some people who have contracted it, which is evidence that even the virus has some limits on what it's prepared to do to achieve its past.

No way, not if he was the last man on earth.

He's made some extraordinary claims.

Bloodstream is basically hamburgers.

There's no actual active thing for the virus to infect.

The guy's internal organs is essentially a massive happy meal.

Which incidentally is what is how he refers to his penis.

He's made some extraordinary claims in these bizarre kind of freewheeling press conferences that he likes to give.

He claimed that he can cure viruses just by growling at them.

He's suggested that victims try offering the virus money to leave their bodies.

He's also suggested that viruses like to eat things like cookies, haggis, or milkshakes, and that you should feed up the virus so it gets big and fat, thus becoming easier to see and swat with a ping-pong bat.

He's claimed credit for saving millions of American lives by not deploying the entirety of the US nuclear arsenal on American cities, which I guess you can't claim, can't argue with that Trumpian logic.

And he's now claimed that the virus can be expunged from your body if you stand on your head with your mouth open and get a friend, colleague, loved one, or police officer to whack the soles of your feet repeatedly with a baseball bat, thus knocking the virus down your body and out of your face.

So

on March the 5th, he said, I never said that people that are feeling sick should go to work.

A statement sadly contradicted by something he said on March the 4th, which was, if we have thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even by going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better.

That man is not able to keep his story straight for 24 hours.

And Trump has been on a real journey with coronavirus.

And like all Trump journeys, it started with incompetence and ended in racism.

He's continually referring to the virus as the Chinese virus, even according to some screen grabs and photos that some journalists obtained of one of his speeches going as far as changing it in pen on the speech to from coronavirus to the Chinese virus and listen right the virus is being blamed by racists including the US president on the Chinese and as I sit here a brown man talking to a gay man and a Jewish man I think we can all agree we have really done the bullet here.

We are from

three groups that are very much used to being blamed for, in our respective cases, again, brown, gay, Jewish, me, all terrorism, Tom, major weather events, Andy, everything.

We are all

used to being blamed and I personally, on behalf of all of our various demographic groups, would like to thank the Chinese for jumping on this hand grenade.

Hey, my people got blamed for a disease.

They made a film about it called Philadelphia, starring Tom f ⁇ ing Hanks, and now he's got the

f ⁇ ing Chinese Chinese disease, quote unquote, quoting the president there, so that's legitimate.

Yeah, listen, Tom Hanks, his method acting has gone too far.

And the preparation for this Philadelphia sequel is, I think even Daniel Day-Lewis would deem excessive.

Elsewhere in America, Senator Kelly Loffler, who's a senator from Georgia, tweeted that the consumer is strong, the economy is strong, and jobs are growing, which puts us in the best economic position to tackle COVID-19 and keep America safe.

Really, really strong sentiment there,

slightly undercut by the fact that various newspapers are now reporting that Senator Kelly Loeffler dumped millions in stock after a coronavirus briefing.

And I think the one thing that's reassuring me at the moment in this world is that as much as things are changing and our lives feel unrecognizable from what they felt like even a week ago,

still be

still beating.

You worried about

oh, they're

the

will never

stop.

Very poetic, Nishan.

In fact, BBC Radio 4 this morning had a poetry reading by actor Christopher Eccleston.

The bugle is also jumming aboard the poetry train in these difficult times.

So the special poem commissioned from our new in-house bard, Ganicus Straffage, who will be entertaining and enlightening us over the coming weeks and months with his versic concoctions.

Ganicus, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Andy, for having me.

My poem today is entitled Contagia.

There once was a virus called Corona, which gave Donald Trump a big coroner.

He said, Bring me a bucket full of virus, oh f

because

I am an irretrievable

Ganakus.

Thank you very much.

Moving, elegant, pertinent, and with

an interesting twist on the traditional theme.

You can buy Gannicus Straffage's latest collection of poetry, globules of brain gravy in a puddle of despair, from all known retailers everywhere.

Cooking in isolation is,

well, Nish, as you touched on earlier on, a lot of people aren't really used to doing this.

We've seen a lot of people.

I don't not so sure it's panic buying as much as crippling sense of uncertainty and low-level existential dread buying but you know it's your potato potato I guess but a lot of people you know if you if you've missed the panic buying and have empty cupboards or aren't used to to cooking yourselves you need some assistance and well luckily friend of the show Scluton Malvain has provided us with some lockdown recipes for people who failed to get to the shops before everything had been preemptively panic hoarded some delicious cordon bleu brassery style Michelin starry recipetes made with just the ordinary bits and bobs you have lying around your house or flat or underground lair wherever you currently live I'm not judging you these

a couple of recipes to get you started with from Skluton slow braised spare cushions snuggled in a spider's web enveloupe with multiply boiled batons of savant de chambé d'hotel that's soap nicked from hotel rooms but as you say in French it's a salesman

served with a seasoned Tolstoy mille foy which is an old unread copy of war and peace if that doesn't take your fancy you can can try freshly snipped trimmings of Haunch of Curtain.

That's anything from your curtain, which is below the window line.

Marinated in a casserole sample of oxidated de duo of moleculated hydrogens, that's a bowl of water.

Served on a bed of classical Tagliatelli magnetique, which is tape from old cassettes of Mozart, and for dessert, apple memories.

It is a shame that

particularly in Britain and America,

our governments have not provided us with any sort of leadership in these kind of difficult times.

And

there are sort of go fund me pages springing up constantly.

And basically, it does seem like the government is adopting the Bob Geldof economic model, hoping basically that charity jumps into the sector where the state should actually be residing.

The WHO guidelines, again, are basically just wash your hands frequently, which I do have to pick people up.

How infrequently were you people not washing your finging hands

some of us in the obsessive and let's face it Asian communities have been obsessively washing our I swear to god there are older Asian people that have not had to change their behaviors whatsoever several of my elderly relatives have been obsessively bleaching their belongings and indeed themselves and maintaining a healthy social distance from anyone for the last 25 to 30 years

you got to wash your hands frequently, maintain social distancing, avoid touching your nose, eyes, and mouth.

And if you have a fever, either stay home or if it gets really bad, go to the doctors.

Basically, there has to be a happy middle ground between the two approaches: either bleaching your butthole every time you do a shit, just in case your dookie got the rona, or just walking around saying, Look, if I'm in the street, I'll be looking at things.

Australia is having a pretty tough time with this whole affair.

In classic Australian style, we're still very much lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of staying up to date with the crisis.

We still don't have the new series of Brooklyn 9-9.

We're still wearing Patagonia t-shirts everywhere.

And we have a lax attitude towards pandemic prevention.

So we are still throwing shrimps on the Barbie without washing our hands.

We are still having Barbies.

We're still getting very close to each other's faces and bragging about the size of our various knives.

It's chaos over here, Andy.

It's no good.

But it is quite hard to practice social distancing when your country is a result of a certain other country setting up an island finging prison, okay?

Let me out, Andy.

I'm stuck in here with Olivia Newton-John and I saw her coffee the other day.

Let me out!

The Australian government has banned all public gatherings of 100 people or more and today they announced that any mass gathering with less than 100 people must comply with an indoor limit of one person for every four square meters okay so if you've got a room that's a hundred square meters and the prime minister was talking about this today you can have 25 people in that room the news has outraged everybody except the claustrophobic sex dungeon industry who welcomed the news and invited all Australians to support their local businesses and opportunities for you to masturbate while looking at other people masturbating in large school gymnasiums.

Okay, those businesses are really hurting and they need us right now.

And I want to get that message out, Andy.

It's okay to have a wank in a gym as long as the adequate facing specifications are met.

The national airline Qantas has stopped all international flights, and despite receiving a stimulus package of $750 million from the government to help them bail out, Qantas will still be standing down 30,000 employees and asking them to take unpaid leave.

The current CEO of Qantas, Alan Joyce, is currently paid $23.9 million

per year.

In other news, the Communist Manifesto was written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in late 1847 and is an inspiring call to arms to workers from across the world to recognize their power, rise up, and fight for a more just and decent world in which evil, greedy, dim and lizard executives can no longer ruthlessly exploit the working class for a profit and all basic human material needs are met.

But that's just another news story, by the by.

The casinos are still open, though.

The casinos are still staying open.

You'll be pleased to hear they're shutting down everything, but in

Melbourne,

Victoria, Crown Casino, and in Perth, the Crown is permitted to run its gaming room with every second poker machine turned off.

In New South Wales and Queensland, Star Entertainment is restricting the opening hours of its gaming rooms to stem the spread of the virus, with its three casinos shuttered for four hours every morning to enable a comprehensive cleaning process.

And the Victorian Premier has described Crown Casino as occupying a unique place in Victorian society.

And unique it is, Andy.

A place where destitute elderly people gather to listen to Michael Booblet and frid away their very last savings, gambling both their money and their lives on every pull of a lever or touch of a sweaty, oily button.

Crown Casino, if you're going to hell, come stop by here and get a taste of it first.

So the Australian response top has been to sort of do fall.

Pretty much.

There's been a bit of talk about school closures in Australia, but that's still a live debate.

I think it'd be a shame to shut them down.

We only just got schools in Australia.

Prior to 2017, Australian children were educated exclusively by being shown episodes of Skippy or being taught the alphabet through a range of drinking songs.

Now we've got the big old bloody fancy Lala schools, and the bloody eggheads want to shut them down because Mr.

Ji Jingping a bat or some bullshit bloody rots.

Truth,

that's the most Australian sentence ever uttered.

Well, it's very easy to get overwhelmed by the

suffusive gloom, but there's always positives to take.

We might not have sport anymore, but the eternal lesson of sport is that no matter how bad things are, you can at least pretend to take some positives from a disastrous situation.

So,

what are you,

Nish Nishan Tom?

What positives are you taking from the current mayhem?

I think there are positives for you, Andy.

John Oliver isn't allowed to have an audience anymore, so now he's just in a room by himself spouting bullshit about the news with no one laughing.

He's just like the old days on the bugle.

All horse racing has been suspended from Wednesday until the end of April.

No horse racing.

Good luck getting them back on board the whole getting flogged while carrying little men down a racetrack and if you fall down we'll shoot you in the head thing.

I think that's done for good.

I think the Queen has been very inspiring.

I've liked her.

She said this is a time for all of Britain to come together for the common good, and you know, she says her family stand ready to play a part.

I must say, this is a very positive turn of events for Prince Andrew.

I think he really must be pretty stoked right now.

He's been the focus of a lot of social distancing of late, but I think he's really had this whole thing take the heat of him.

So, congratulations, Andrew.

The positives for me, Andy, are that I'm learning a lot about.

I feel like I'm learning a lot of valuable life lessons from our government.

The fact that they've just done nothing and sort of gently encouraged people.

And Guta Hari, who's a former director of communications to Boris Johnson on Newsnight, BBC News show yesterday, said, we're grown-ups.

And like any parent, you don't tell your child to do a certain thing because daddy said so.

You try and persuade them.

And that has fundamentally reshaped my understanding of the entire state, Andy.

We don't have laws about preventing murder.

We just lightly discourage people from murdering.

That's how we do it.

Completely changed my understanding of how the state works.

Yeah.

Well that

is that is certainly how the state works when it comes to corporate taxation.

You've just got to encourage them to do it.

Eventually.

Daddy just has to say to corporations, please can you pay the absolute bare minimum.

So for example in times of major crisis, like say a global pandemic, the state might not be immediately at breaking points.

It's easy to say that with hindsight or foresight or any cranial activity.

It's easy to say that with sight, okay?

Sight is 2020, unless it's not, and then it has to be assisted by glasses.

But at the end of the day, daddy tells us what to do, and so we do it.

I see this positive, that you know clearly mayhem around the world.

A billion children having their education disrupted.

Pretty much every country affected.

Economic chaos, widespread human devastation, streets deserted, and in essence an entire planet put on hold, genuinely reassessing how it conducts itself.

So this is my minor positive.

F ⁇ you terrorists.

You have been owned.

You have been owned by a tiny little virus.

Everything you dreamed of for decades, this tiddly little spiky ass virus has ticked off in little over two months.

You useless pieces of shit.

Well, on that,

ISIS actually imposed a travel ban on its followers.

Did you see that?

ISIS advised its followers to not travel to Europe for fear of contracting coronavirus.

Andy, I never thought I would find myself saying this, and I would appreciate if if nobody could clip this and take it out of context.

ISIS

is better than the British government.

On tackling the coronavirus, and only on that,

ISIS

has taken a more proactive stand than the British government.

Do you think suicide bombers are just going to start shaking people's hands a lot more now rather than going the whole lot?

Everyone's just turned in for for a high five.

Aloha, high five.

I mean, the thing that surprised me more than anything else is that

ISIS called on its militants to stay away from the land of the epidemic.

And it did that in its group newsletter.

Now,

that was a surprise to me.

That ISIS has a mail chimp.

It's just not the sort of thing.

It's just not the sort of thing.

Hey guys, just in case this went into your spam, resending.

We'll get to the ISIS newsletter in a minute, but Squarespace is a great way to build your website.

Hey, and don't forget to turn out to our Patreon for more hot ISIS content.

I think it's great news for, you know, for the British people as well.

The British government has called for Britons to end all non-essential contact, or as British people call it, contact.

And ending all touching, that's obviously terrible news for most people in the world.

It's great news for the Me Too movement, I think.

You know, finally, we've got to a place that we're hoping for.

And if a global, horrifying death plague is what it takes to stop men being all creepy and shit and smelling your hair and licking your ear, so be it.

I think this is political correctness gone mad.

This is exactly what the feminazis have wanted from the beginning.

Are you happy now, feminazis?

We can't even touch ourselves for fear of spreading the rona to our own D's.

I got me too by my own face.

This is brutal.

In other non-virus news, well, the virus has taken over news so much that non-virus news has barely been happening.

And it's probably a great time for governments to sneak through some stuff that they really don't want people noticing.

Nish, we don't have much time for non-virus news here on the bugle because we are a news organisation and therefore it's just virus.

But what has been happening that isn't virus?

Well, look, Andy,

if you see the virus as a crisis, you have to, following the ancient Chinese proverb, also see it as a huge opportunity to dump some compromising stories about yourself.

The UK government has

leaked out the start of a phase that's going to result in the release of a report into the Windrush scandal,

which has recommended wholesale reform of a reckless home Office.

Now, that is not the R word I would use to describe the UK's Home Office behind the hostile environment immigration policy.

And that R word is, of course, really mean.

They're really mean guys.

And

it's not ideal that they deported people who were born and who lived in this country and who'd made it their homes and were booted out as a culmination of the hostile environment policy.

And, you know, it really is.

They've argued that

Windrush was able to happen because officials had a poor understanding of Britain's colonial history.

Again, not the words I would use to describe our understanding of our own colonial history.

Poor understanding is at best a generous remark.

I would use the phrase fing call understanding of our colonial history, which enables us to say things like this.

Hey, Tom, you Australians really f over the Aborigines, didn't you?

You Australians.

You Australians that had nothing to do with us really fed over and destroyed the lives of the Indigenous population.

That was you guys.

You guys did it.

Anyway, back to our glorious empire.

The sun never set on us.

God save the Queen.

Britain forever.

The Victorian state government during the midst of the corona crisis just suddenly lifted the moratorium on fracking.

Just thought they'd whack that out there, too.

Why not?

Now, finging, if you don't know, is like giving the earth coronavirus.

So,

obviously, like, this is just a generally PSA.

Keep your fing eye out at the kind of insane shit that your bat shit governments are doing all across the world, friends, because they will sneak through nuking babies with

hooping cough or some shit.

They'll try and get something out there over the course of the next couple of weeks.

We must remain vigilant and we must write jokes about them for the bugle with Andy's ultimate.

That's all.

We are a valuable public service.

Never forget that.

Please take my children to school.

this this whole podcast has just been a desperate attempt for you to try and get some peace with your own kids

do keep listening to uh to the bugle and of course the bugle's uh spin-off sister show the last post uh starring today none other than Chris himself.

That is correct, is it not?

Yeah, I shame myself by making the joke about wanking into the Thames.

I can only apologise.

Well, given what we've just heard in today's show, if anything, you're raising the tone of this franchise.

Nish, Tom, thank you very much for

joining us.

Well, see you soon, probably on a little screen, I would imagine.

Nice knowing you, Andy.

Good luck, Beaglers.

Godspeed to you all.

Goodbye.

We get

again.

Imagine imagined all the people

just

living

for today.

Thank you for listening, buglers.

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

To join them and keep the bugle fully functioning and fully free, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate.

Rebecca Mitchell and Zach Windler, who have not otherwise met than in this lie, once had a long conversation with the rock band Guns N' Roses when they found themselves all stuck in a broken cable car gondola for half an hour whilst a mechanic tried to find the right spanner.

Rebecca claimed that Thomas Edison invented the basketball, but didn't have anything to throw it in, so just chucked it in a bin he kept on a high shelf in his study and forgot about it.

Zach added that Edison's assistant, whom he claimed was called Hoopy Backboard, found it the following morning and promptly invented the now popular sport.

The rock band, suitably distracted, did not at any point in the half-hour delay sing their hit song Sweet Child of Mine, which to both Rebecca and Zach constituted mission accomplished.

Elizabeth Beverly is still intermittently harrowed to the core of her soul by the memory of a heated conversation in another cable car journey which she overheard between a high-ranking executive from a prominent fast food chain and a Belgian movie mogul on the ethics of eating smurf meat during a food shortage.

I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer, recalls Elizabeth, but it was unquestionably a most unsettling chat.

Jason B.

Standing remains hopeful that Microsoft, the celebrity technology company, will at some point release a stained glass version of its Windows operating system.

I think it would look lovely and be easier on the eyeballs for people who work long hours at computer screens, says Jason.

Joan Russik chirps in with a rumor she's heard that Microsoft's original operating system was in fact developed by Bill Gates and a software boffin by the name of Trevard Glass.

Unable to decide what to call their new product, they averaged out Gates and Glass, which of course equals Windows.

That's what Joan has heard anyway.

Here endeth this week's lies.

Goodbye.

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.