Bugle 4143 - Official Coronavirus Survival Guide

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The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4143 of this most august and widest respected of all of the one audio newspapers currently operational in this strikingly visual of worlds.

I am Andy Zoltman and if there's one thing in the world I know then A, I should probably read up a bit more about the world and B, it's almost certainly something about sport.

I am in London, a city in lockdown.

It literally has not moved from its place by the Thames for upwards of 250 years, maybe more.

And joining me from across the pond, from the city that never sleeps well, that's the word in that sentence people always miss out.

The city that never sleeps well, or indeed long enough.

New York, not one, but two guest co-hosts from the USA itself, Josh Gondelman and from India, currently delayed in the USA due to a topic topic we will be turning to shortly, Anuvab Pal.

Hello, Andy.

Hello.

Hi.

How's America?

This room is terrific.

But the rest of it,

shambles.

Oh, right, okay.

Well, you stay safely ensconced in that comforting studio in New York.

So talk us through why you're still in America.

So apparently, Andy, nobody told me, but there's this virus going around.

Oh, right, okay.

Yeah, apparently it's a thing.

I guess I should talk to people more.

But

I was in Silicon Valley doing a show, and I don't know if you know, but Silicon Valley is now mostly a part of the Republic of India.

It's a place, it's called the Bay Area.

We do all the technology.

It mostly belongs to us now.

And I had gone there, and I was just supposed to have a layover of one night in New York City.

But the airlines apparently don't want to take people across oceans anymore.

And so now I am in this studio.

I'm living in this studio with Josh for the whole weekend.

I'm just here for the company.

That's great.

So it's a lovely story of, you know,

when you said that you came, you went to Silicon Valley and were delayed by a virus.

At first I thought computer virus.

All the planes stopped flying.

It was like a Y2K type thing that hit 20 years late.

That's exactly what it is, Josh.

It's the flu that met a Microsoft bug.

That's That's what happened.

Oh, that's a story of romance.

Exactly.

As always, the section of the bugle is going straight in the bin this week.

A homeschooling section.

What to teach children whose schools have been coronavirused off.

If you, as a parent, are too busy with your own stuff to really pay attention.

Hashtag 21st century parenting.

Hashtag those phones don't check themselves.

So we have a official bugle guide to how to keep your children educated and occupied when they're stuck at home.

A philosophy class, just get them to write a 10,000-word essay entitled, What is an Orange?

Maths, make them calculate the surface area of absolutely everything in your house.

Then divide it by the number of units of electricity used if you switch everything on at the same time.

Language, for a language class, just get them to call random overseas numbers and pretend to be from an internet provider threatening to cut off their service and see if they can work out

the entertaining international swear words that will inevitably come back at them.

And if you want a really convenient, all-in-one lesson for your temporarily homeschooled children, encompassing chemistry, physics, biology, sociology, economics, geography, history, and politics, just get them to cook an egg.

That's basically

everything if you read enough into it.

Anyway, that section is in the bin.

We are recording on the 6th of March in the year 2020.

On this day in 1869, the periodic table was launched by Russian science boffin Dmitry Mendeleev.

Up until then, when Mendeleev laid out that there were loads of different elements, no one really knew that metal wasn't just metal, but was in fact lots of different types of metal, or that gases couldn't be categorized as either air or stinky air.

Mendeleev made things a hell of a lot more complicated, and things have been unraveling ever since.

So we pay tribute to the man who 150 years ago stopped stuff from just being stuff.

Thanks a fk of a lot, you dead bastard.

Also, on the tomorrow, the 7th of March, is the 100th anniversary of the 7th of September 1907, a day which for some reason historians still don't understand happened 13 and a half years late.

Top story once again the coronavirus is dominating this planet which is pretty impressive given how small it is and it's yet to make an official statement of its own so we're really having to interpret what its motives are as a virus.

They're very elusive these little creatures.

Look, This planet is in full quarantine.

No aliens have been allowed to land at Roswell this week.

That's the first week with no alien landings at Roswell since 1956 if my sources are to be believed.

Here in Britain we are at panic stations.

Obviously it's Britain, so at panic stations the panic trains are running late.

Everyone is just standing looking grumpy on the platform muttering when is this bloody panic actually going to arrive?

Probably won't even be able to get on it when it does.

What's the point?

I'm just going to give up and stay calm for the day.

This country can't even bloody panic on time anymore.

The British government's released a 28-page battle plan to take on the coronavirus.

Compared, as we mentioned last week, it had a 30-page plan for the Brexit negotiations.

So, the coronavirus is mathematically 93.3% as toxic as Brexit.

That puts it in perspective.

This is bad.

It's really, you can't fight maths.

Well, if you do fight maths, maths will choke slam you to the canvas and start differentiating some calculuses all over your face.

So, that's the state the world is in, Josh and

Anuvab.

What's the American reaction to it been, Josh?

I mean,

are people fully on board in the battle against the virus?

It's kind of going two ways over here.

Some people have been washing their hands every six minutes, but then this morning on the way here, I was in a combination coffee shop/slash ice cream parlor, and I saw a woman order a cookies and cream milkshake for breakfast.

So on the other hand, some people are just going straight f it.

The SFI, as I believe it's known.

The SFI, yeah, that's the protocol.

And Aduvabin, what about in India?

Because there haven't been that many cases in India yet, but there's been quite some criticism of Narendra Modi.

It tends to be, you know,

basically just for him breathing, which is generally a fair criticism.

It's correct.

And a couple of things here.

Well, first of all,

we're specialists in fudging numbers.

So

the official reported cases are 30, but it could be anywhere between 30 and 50 million.

Right.

Because, you know, when you've got 1.3 billion people, you just abbreviate and say 30.

It's all a rounding error.

It's a number thing.

And Prime Minister Modi, the moment he heard, he's very with it.

He's with fat, with whatever's fashionable, you know?

Just like Bolesonaro in Brazil, just like, you know, some people here I won't name because I'm in your country, Josh.

That's a gang.

So when he heard that the coronavirus was a thing, he said, I want to be part of this game.

So, you know, he's privately got himself a VIP coronavirus

because he's allowed to.

But I'd just like to mention one thing, you know.

We're an ancient culture.

We've had herbal remedies

from nature for thousands of years.

So I don't know this nonsense about washing your hands as a remedy, Andy.

Josh, I'd like to read out a few Indian remedies for coronavirus

that were discovered in the ancient Hindu text of the Atharva Veda 5,000 years ago, which is a Veda I just made up.

Okay, right.

That's the best kind of Veda.

That's one of my favorite Vedas.

So, these are the things that the last time the coronavirus hit India in

BC,

this is what we did.

That's before cricket in India, I should emphasize that.

BC, Exactly.

Exactly.

A week before cricket.

So this is what we did.

And it was all good.

In one month, it was gone.

So these are the best remedies currently.

So don't wash your hands, but help other people wash their hands.

That's beautiful.

That's one we did.

Shower out in the open.

Read Plato.

That always worked.

Listen to the bugle.

Right.

Oh, that's good.

That goes back a while.

Yeah, yeah.

We've been at this.

And, you know, ancient Hindus know of you.

Ban avocado and yoga.

And that will get a lot of support from a lot of the right-wing media.

Yes, yes.

And it's a cure.

And the last one is ban T20 cricket.

So I don't know about the Western world, Andy, Josh.

No, that's pretty good.

I mean,

I grew up outside Boston, Massachusetts, and your methods sound better than our methods, which is the patented Mark Wahlberg method of being racist to Asian people.

That's how he avoids coronavirus.

Well, just try and keep that under wraps for at least for the duration of this episode, Josh, if you could.

This is not my methodology.

I'm just about it.

You're just going by best practices.

Yeah.

Oh, I've been, people know him from Boston.

I go around.

If I see someone with a tag on their luggage that says they were recently in China, I kiss them on the mouth.

I just want to show.

I'm like, hey, look, we're all cool.

And you've done that unrelated to the virus.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

I don't travel that much, and so I just kiss strangers on the mouth who have, and I try to absorb the travel through osmosis.

We're all learning some valuable biology today.

We've had history.

History from Adavab, now biology from Josh.

This is the most educational podcast you can possibly listen to.

What I've found is people who have recently been to other countries like to punch me in the face.

Well, if you kiss them and they're not aware of it, that tends to be the reaction.

I guess that could be the X Factor.

Anavab, Rahul Gandhi, who's one of the prominent opposition politicians in India,

advised Modi to, quote, quit wasting India's time playing the clown, which does raise a question, what kind of circuses has has Rahul Gandhi been going to?

Because

that is one sinister clown.

As the circus, darling, it was great, mum.

The acrobats were incredible.

There was this guy dangling around on a rope, waggling axes everywhere.

There was a woman doing one-arm handstands on a big rusty metal spike.

The Cossack horseman had to be seen to be believed, and the clown killed some Muslims and fostered a regressive nationalism.

That sounds like a lovely day out, darling.

He also

said that what the government should be doing, doing, Rahul Gandhi said, that to focus the attention of every Indian on taking the coronavirus challenge.

That is how to get the world on board with this fight against the virus, make an internet sensation like the ice bucket challenge.

Just have celebrities hilariously challenging each other to wash their hands really thoroughly.

I thought you were saying you dump a bucket of coronavirus on your head.

That's a Friday night out in Mumbai.

And Andy, that was a fairly good summary of the history of India for the last 50 years.

Elsewhere around the world, Italy has closed all schools and universities, further evidence of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

And in the Sistine Chapel, the creation of Adam bit of Michelangelo's Mickey Paintbrush's famous paintings in the Sistine Chapel, that's been repainted to show God and Adam both wearing latex gloves to reduce the chance of infection, should their fingers touch.

So it's good to see Italy taking it seriously.

Yeah, God and Adam should they should just bump elbows.

That's what the World Health Organization says.

Yeah, exactly.

23 members of parliament in Iran have tested positive, which I think might be a tribute to Michael Jordan or David Beckham.

I'm not entirely sure what.

And the South Korean president, Moon Jai-in, has declared war on the coronavirus.

And now, this iPhone has this, the military terminology to get people on declaring war uh you know throw the military at it i was looking at some of the uh the writings in Sun Tzu's Art of War.

Now what would the great two and a half thousand year old military strategist Sun Tzu have had to say about this?

Now obviously Sun Tzu, or as his friends called him, Sonny T, was from near Wuhan where the coronavirus was invented by an enterprising Pangolin who wanted to raise awareness of animal rights issues in Chinese retail.

So just to be on the safe side, I have translated Sun Tzu's words into English so you can't catch the linguistic version of coronavirus from, I don't know if he's still infectious, but he is dead, so let's not take any chances.

I don't want to catch that.

You absolutely don't.

He said this, there's a number of things we can learn from Sun Tzu about the fight against the coronavirus.

He said, if the mind is willing, the flesh could go on and on without many things, which is essentially Sun Tzu telling us that severe respiratory illness is 99% psychological.

He said, to know your enemy, you must become your enemy, which I think means fancy dress.

So just dress up like a virus with a crown and you'll be immune.

Be extremely subtle, he wrote, even to the point of formlessness.

Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness.

Oh sorry, now that was from Sun Tzu's lesser-known follow-up, Sun Tzu's Art of Seduction,

also known as the Art of Fuar.

He said, move swift as the wind and closely formed as the wood, attack like the fire and be still as the mountain, essentially volcano.

He said, ponder and deliberate before you make a move.

Sorry, that was also from the art of seduction, I think.

And the worst strategy of all is to besiege walled cities,

which could be from the art of seduction with a small misprint, I guess.

So many things we can learn from the wisdom of the ancients.

There's something I was listening to Josh at Andy in this country where the governor of New York said yesterday,

you know, all we're telling you to do if you've got the virus is stay at home and watch Netflix.

How bad can that be?

Yeah.

You know, and I thought to myself, because I guess the

death rate is pretty low.

It's 2%, 3%.

So for 98% of the people, they're saying, don't talk to anybody, stay at home and watch streaming platforms.

And I'll have to say, this is, if that's the thing, it's my favorite disease so far.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

They really skipped the step of the hospital.

Also, for 98% of the people, that'll work fine, right?

But 2% of the people are going to die watching Stranger Things.

Is that significantly lower than people that die watching it normally?

I don't know.

You're right.

There probably people have done that already.

Trump has been criticized.

Some of his opponents have claimed he reacted slowly, then gratuitously blamed his political opponents, played down the threat threat by belittling scientific evidence, and, well, didn't just shoot the messengers, but strafed anything that even looked like it might be a messenger, then panicked belatedly and threw money at the problem.

So, I mean, not really, I mean, this is basically how he deals with every single issue from, you know, climate change to the Syrian crisis to what to have for dinner, essentially.

I mean, this is just absolutely classic Trump.

He might be getting on a bit, but he's still got the chops people elected.

This is definitely, this is classic Trump.

Like, he's telling people, don't worry about it.

He absolutely seems like the kind of guy who would put off telling people they should get tested.

Just wait till they figure it out on their own.

Just, nah, nah, that wasn't me.

Come from somewhere else.

Josh, Andy, I have a question.

Please.

So President Trump, the moment the crisis was announced, passed it off to his second in command,

the vice president, saying, this is now going to be Mike Pence's problem.

He's going to deal with it.

I understand that.

It's a very Indian way to solve problems.

When a massive crisis hits, find your closer psychophant and say, he's your guy.

Yeah.

And then immediately retreat and run away to some vacation home.

Would you say that Trump is adopting Eastern techniques of leadership

that we in the third world are so used to?

I think that's it.

I think this is his kind of more holistic.

He's like really taking other points of view into perspective, trying things that are outside his comfort zone.

No, I think he's just an idiot

and a coward.

And it's not even virus specific, right?

He's kind of

pushing off the responsibility,

keeping the CDC from releasing information.

This isn't disease-specific.

He just doesn't like people knowing things.

Knowledge is very, very dangerous.

He's against it for himself and he's against it in others.

People talk about low-information voters.

He's a low-information president.

Works very well in government in the world today.

Very little comes in, very little comes out.

Andy, now in Britain, where the latest Caesar in power, Mr.

Boris Johnson, has declared in the document you mentioned earlier that people might be still getting paid while at home?

Yes.

Yeah, I mean

he also this week he called on the media to be responsible and not to sort of issue scare stories and false information, which, I mean, you've just got to admire the barefaced balls of that level of flagrant hypocrisy.

But I guess this crisis has, you know, brought out different aspects of things.

In many ways, actually, I think Boris Johnson probably really respects the coronavirus because in some ways they're kindred spirits.

They play on our basist fears.

They do most of their work unseen.

There's a lot of very unaccountable stuff going on behind the scenes, and they're not really fussed about the poor.

So it's,

you know, they're very much peas in a disease-ridden pod.

Brexit is just a pre-quarantine, right?

Exactly.

He was ahead of this wave.

Now, Andy, you know, I have heard your monologue and diatribe,

your piece of philosophical writing on the invisible hand, if you remember,

some of the marketplace.

And I think one of the places the invisible hand seems to be coming in is the airline industry.

The head of the Airline Trade Association said it's very hard to make money from the airline business if the planes don't fly.

And that seems fairly accurate.

If people are not going to work, work is hard to generate any revenue.

I think you would agree in your, as an economist, Andy, and Josh,

you look like a PhD in economics.

Yeah, I do look like I don't have a lot of fun and people don't like me.

How do you think, what do you think is going to happen to the world economy if people are physically not doing anything economics-y?

Well, I think we've got to grind it down to a full halt, right?

If some people stop doing doing things and other people are still doing things, that's going to create an imbalance.

But if we all stop, we're going to create an economic stasis wherein everybody just keeps what they have.

And I think we can live there for a little while.

Also, I mean, I think we need to take inspiration from the likes of Elvis Presley, who

died in

1977, was it?

And in many ways, he's generated more business since then.

So this is what the the airlines need to do: they need to really get people starting to get nostalgic about those old airlines that they used to use before they had to shut down.

And buying loads of merch and

going to themed restaurants where an aeroplane impersonator will pretend to be a flight from a no longer existing airline.

And they need to just adapt to the changed circumstances.

Similarly, they could do it the way Tupac did after his death, right?

They could release a ton of kind of lesser quality airplanes and then start rumors that there are actually airplanes flying to Cuba, even though no one's ever really seen them.

And then eventually there would just be a hologram of an airplane that people would pay to see.

There we go.

We're already providing the solutions.

Human ingenuity.

I'd just like to add this current release from the Chinese, from the very liberal, objective Chinese media mouthpiece, Xinhua.

And they have put out a thing today that said, don't touch your face during during this thing as a remedy don't touch your face for that matter don't touch anyone else's face either well that one I think is more important right like if it's on my hands if there's a virus that wants to get me and it's on my hands it's gonna get to my face my arms connect right to it

Well, that leads us into a steps to keep yourself safe from the coronavirus pull-out supplement.

Well, a lot of people have said masks are only of limited use.

I would say we're all wearing a mask anyway.

We're not all hiding behind some kind of mask, so we're probably fine.

We have a bugle guide to how to stop yourself touching your own face.

Now, there are a number of things you can do to stop yourself touching your face.

One is keep your hands busy.

So you've got to make sure your hands have something more important to do than scratch your face or stroke your own eyelids or whatever you like to do with your hands on your face.

So perhaps try keeping a live snake on your person at all times.

that generally requires a fair amount of dedicated handwork alternatively smear your hands in molten tar you don't want that getting on your face you vain hypocrites another thing you can do is to go to sleep with one of the following recordings playing on a loop

your face is so beautiful it dissolves fingers

or your face is magic if you touch it it will turn into steve bannon's face that should subliminally enable you to wake up with a lifelong fear of touching your own face.

Another way aside from not touching your face of avoiding the coronavirus is prayer.

Obviously one of the most statistically effective forms of disease avoidance historically but what type of prayer is most effective?

Should you ask your chosen deity to save all of humanity which is a bit of a stretch for any deity these days no matter how omnipotent or complicated world to save just you and your family which is a a bit selfish um you know in your your own personal bubble you think you're so f ⁇ ing special are you a kind of top-level elite sports star, thanking the Almighty for getting them a gold medal?

And honestly, turn it up.

Or should you simply appeal to your deity to save the stock markets?

I think that's probably the best thing we can do at this stage.

Just pray to God to save the markets because they will not save themselves.

And also, should your prayer be accompanied by a sacrifice?

It's always better to err on the safe side and slay at least some animals to carry favour with the Almighty.

But remember, if you do, please wash your hands thoroughly after slaughtering your hundred head of oxen.

In fact, current guidelines from the International Association of Animal Sacrificial Offerings is to wash your hands thoroughly after each five oxen slain.

Also superstitions.

Now, traditionally in the past, before we had this kind of modern medicine that keeps us alive today, superstitions were hugely effective.

They're not called super for nothing.

They genuinely work very occasionally.

What you could try putting your left shoe on first

before all your other clothing.

You can try throwing salt over your shoulder every five seconds and you will find that people steer well clear of you, thus leaving you well away from potential infectors.

Then there's the famous old superstitious saying, find a penny, pick it up, and all day long you'll be worried that you might get virused by the penny.

Who's touched that penny?

God knows and he ain't telling.

Patient confidentiality and all that.

Put the penny back on the floor and wash your hands.

One thing that people have been saying is that you're supposed to wash your hands for

20 seconds, right?

That's the amount of time that it's supposed to take to actively kill the germs.

If you only do it for 18 or 19 seconds, the germs have no respect.

They know you can't commit to anything, and they just treat you like dirt.

They walk all over you.

What I've been doing is instead of washing my hands for 20 seconds several times a day, I get up, I wash my hands for 260 seconds, knock the whole day of hand washing out right at the beginning.

That's 13 hand washings.

And it's just six and a half minutes.

Right.

It's like you're you're loading up your Metro card.

Correct.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Right.

Why would I want to pay every time?

Do you not have a problem, though, that then your fingers get quite wrinkly?

And actually, that gives the viruses a place to hide.

Yes,

that is a problem, but they're so clean.

And then by the time they're smoothed out, I can spot the viruses because they've clustered.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Well, that's good.

I'd just like to go back for one second to the remedy Andy mentioned of animal sacrifice.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

That always works.

In Nepal, for the longest time, they used to sacrifice goats before any important family event.

School exams,

elections, any sort of event, marriage, they'd sacrifice either oxen or a goat.

They found this really interesting odd situation where they ran out of animals.

Oh, no.

And then they passed a law that said, you have to only sacrifice an animal for an important reason.

So I think if we adopted the Nepalese technique where in the Western world, everyone was given one animal and you sacrifice it only when the virus got really bad.

Yeah.

You know, it's all about rationing, isn't it?

And about prioritizing.

Yes.

That's like that old, that finally puts that old Nepalese piece of wisdom into context:

sacrifice after wedding, never been sicker.

Sacrifice before wedding in the clear.

I mean, it's been a tough, tough time for religion.

The shrine, the Christian shrine at Lourdes in France had to close some of its pools in which pilgrims swim to be healed from diseases as a precaution because of the disease.

That's not the greatest PR for the miracle healing industry if the pools that you bathe in to get better are now too dangerous.

Well, hold on.

I think this is an even, this is, it speaks even more to their power because now they're so powerful, you don't even have to get in them to have the healing effect.

Well,

I've said that pilgrims are still welcome, but I mean, lords without the healing bath, that's like vegan-friendly cock fighting.

It's just never going to be quite the same.

Those underground satan fights I've been attending just don't have the same zip to them.

The texture is weird.

Well, in the South Indian town of Tirupati, which is considered one of the most holy sites for Hindus, they decided that

they were not going to allow mass congregations.

So the temple is now being evacuated, it's completely empty, which in India it means down to the last four million people.

Virus showbiz news now, and well no aspect of human activity has escaped the microscopic invisible clause of the coronavirus.

We've talked about the tragic side effect of sport being postponed or cancelled or generally desportified just at the time the world world needs as many pointless reality-numbing distractions as possible.

And now the film industry has

been forcibly jumped onto that bandwagon.

The new James Bond film, No Time to Die, has been delayed by seven months due to coronavirus concerns.

That's always risky with a James Bond film because in that seven-month period, one of Bond's many sexual conquests in the film could have become heavily pregnant.

And Bond is never really at his best when forced to face up to the consequences of his actions and take some responsibility for what he's done.

After all these years of James Bond having unprotected sex, it's unbelievable that the coronavirus is the one that sets him back.

It's amazing.

Daniel Craig keeps saying that that's going to be his last Bond movie, right?

Every time he's like, ah, this is the last time I do one of these.

And finally, because of a global pandemic, he might be right.

Also, why delay it?

Just cut the first word out of the title, call it time to die, and it feels like extra contemporary.

There has been a

significant cultural response, even in the world of comedy.

A number of new comedy acts have sprung up amidst the coronavirus global concern, including a new character act, pandemic of a hypochondriac super spreader, sold out a stadium tour in Britain and then cancelled the entire run on safety grounds, thus becoming the first self-satirizing comedian in the universe.

COVID is is a parody of the ancient Roman poet Ovid.

A very entertaining act based on doing poems in Latin about food-like diseases and the social panic they cause.

And Germaine the Germany, German, fairly self-explanatory.

And

competitive hand washing has taken off as a spectator sport as well.

You've got traditional freestyle and of course Greco-Roman hand washing that's really packing out the stadiums.

In the world of comedy, I found the shows I've been doing have had, have been fairly empty, and it's either people cautiously staying at home because of coronavirus or business as usual hard to tell that's right my crowd were well 20 years ahead of the coronavirus

Race to get ritually humiliated by Donald Trump over the next few months news now and well the Democratic race Josh has rather dramatically clarified itself over the last week or so Joe Biden has surged on Super Tuesday and

it's basically now him and Bernie Sanders left Pete Sputigej quat Amy Klobuchar quat Bloomberg quat Elizabeth Warren quat Rick Moranis ruled himself out returning to acting instead Roosevelt still dead bum garner sticking with baseball Markle well join the dots people join the dots that surely that's what this whole thing Megan Markle for president it has to happen

Mouse If America isn't ready for a female president, it's not ready for an animated mouse either.

He's out of the race.

Putin, let's not rule him out.

Trump, well, he could be the only person who could beat Donald Trump.

Oliver, ineligible, no Smurfs rule.

Condor Bolu still mulling it over.

And Gondrelman, are you going to stand?

I, you know,

my service to the American people is I'm not running.

Right.

I mean, if only more people had that noble, public-spirited attitude,

then the world might be very, very different today.

So remaining, we have Biden Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard is still officially in the race, I believe, although it is rumored that she'd entirely forgotten she was still running and actually had to cancel a violin lesson she'd scheduled for Super Tuesday.

Tulsi Gabbard is like kind of the oldest kid left playing Little League.

We're like, you can still do it, but it's embarrassing at this point.

Just leave and find something else to do with your time.

Now, Josh, Andy, I have a quick question about the concept of Super Tuesday.

Yes.

I spent a bit of time watching it.

It seems like, it's very complicated.

It seems like the candidates that remain have to impress a bunch of delegates.

And those delegates then come over in clusters or as individuals saying, you're my guy or lady.

Now, I'm just going to pass on some sort of Eastern election techniques that we've tried in India for a number of years.

Would love to hear them.

So

we do a lot of horse trading for members of parliament, right?

And one of the techniques that work,

when you want delegates to switch parties, is to lock them in a hotel room and bribe them with cash and food.

Okay.

Instead of Super Tuesday, have you guys thought of trying that?

Just outright bribery.

I kind of feel like that is

something our president has looked into in various other capacities.

Why not bring it into the electoral system?

Thank you.

So Super Tuesday, just to clarify, Andy, it's a lot like what you said about superstition, right?

It's like the same kind of super.

Like sometimes it goes right, but it is a total coincidence.

It's super makes it super, I know, as a prefix meaning large, but I don't think that it makes it almost has too positive a connotation, right?

Because sometimes, oftentimes, it goes very badly and people are very depressed afterwards.

So, I think we should change it to like big ass Tuesday, just to convey the same magnitude, but without the sense that it's good.

So,

what's behind Joe Biden's sudden Lazarus-like recovery in this

contest?

You know, I think it is

he's just, he seems kind of like a grandpa, and

his charming on-television persona made a lot of people forget that their grandpa would make a bad president.

I love both of my grandfathers, may they rest in peace, but never once was I like, let's elect this old fella to office.

Well, that's one of the fascinating aspects of this is that, you know, what, what, now in 2008, we had, you know, Obama and Hillary Clinton going for the Democratic nomination.

It felt like the landscape of politics was changing, and what we've got left now is,

you know, Trump and the two Democratic candidates,

70-plus-year-old white men.

What's happened?

Well, it's the same as in entertainment in that we're doing a reboot of something that kind of worked 10 years ago.

Bloomberg had a, well, a spectacular, essentially a one-day campaign, wasn't it, that at a cost of half a billion dollars.

Incredible.

And because he's a billionaire, when he quit the race, he gave himself another $800 million severance package.

So he spent over half a billion dollars, which bought him American Samoa and a family-sized portion of ridicule.

Now, the Democratic mascot is a donkey.

And I guess what Bloomberg has learned is that a presidential nomination is like a donkey in that if you try to steal it, you might end up with shit on your shoes.

You can't just throw money at it and hope it turns into a motorbike, and people will never forget if you fed it.

Josh, I don't know what you think about where modern politics is going, but I was just looking at political speeches.

And, you know, like in India, we started with the Mahatma Gandhi, who was slightly well known for saying impressive things.

And now we have Prime Minister Modi, who speaks of himself in third person, like he's Julius Caesar.

In this country, it seemed like you went from Barack Obama, who used to quote Rilke and Goethe and Socrates,

to a gentleman who won the primary who got confused between his wife and his sister.

That's true.

It is hard to call it a Super Tuesday when you end up sleeping on the couch, too.

This is something, Pierce Bush, the grandson of George H.W.

Bush, lost his congressional race in Texas, which just shows the shift in politics in the United States, right?

Like, that's how much Texas hates the environment now.

They won't even vote for a guy named Bush anymore.

When I read it, I thought it must have been a literal Bush.

That's how popular the family was.

I thought they were like, everything's bigger in Texas.

Come back when y'all are a tree.

He's the first member of the Bush family to lose an election in Texas in over four decades.

It was a big loss for a member of, a big, unexpected loss for a member of the Bush family, and people are talking about it as a historic loss, to which Al Gore replied, Mother, fer what?

India news now.

And well, Anuvab, since you were last on, India has been

treating itself to one of its periodic bouts of mass rioting.

Can you just bring us up to date with what's been going on and if possible, in the complex

landscape of Indian politics, why it's been going on?

Well, you know, I'm glad Andy, Andy, you brought up the hilarious topic of riots.

Always a laugh.

Well, very simply, when Donald Trump was visiting India and he was doing this mass rally at a stadium for 100,000 people, nearby in Delhi,

one of the suburbs of Northeast Delhi broke into Hindu and Muslim riots.

Now, rioting happens in India, and there is now in a right-wing government a very anti-Islamic vibe going on in the country, just like everywhere else where there is right-wing, homogeneous leaders that are sort of poisoning the environment.

Wouldn't know what that's like.

You wouldn't have heard of this stuff.

So we have a right-wing leader in India, Josh.

It's just a thing.

Maybe it'll catch up in the United States.

But he comes from the BJP, which is the ruling party, and they have a sort of thought leadership wing called the RSS.

So the RSS are pretty right-wing people.

By pretty right-wing people, I mean they had the

one of the members of the party was the gentleman that shot Gandhi.

Wow.

So, you know, that's how much slightly right-wing they are.

So the RSS has been sort of going to really poor Muslim neighborhoods and saying, you know, we're going to clean up Delhi.

We had a, you know, we had a citizenship law that there was some trouble over.

So a lot of Muslim people were

protesting against it.

And they said, basically, Trump is coming.

And if you don't clear the streets, we're going to kill you.

Now, when you tend to say that to people, they tend to sometimes get upset

and react.

Yes.

And it gets worse when large Hindu mobs show up with sticks saying, clear the streets of the protest, we are going to shoot you and kill you.

And then they proceed to do exactly what they say.

And so that leads to a Muslim retaliation and there are riots.

In such a situation, one of the best elements in democratic society are the police.

You know, everywhere else in the world, apparently the police are supposed to break up such fights.

What happened in Delhi is that the police joined the Hindu mobs,

which tends to reduce the fairness a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, that goes against the famous NWA song, Trust the Police.

Maybe they were listening to the song.

So it led to arson, riot, looting on both sides, but there were just a significantly larger number of Muslim casualties.

Now,

If you want to be bigoted, let's say you want to be right-wing and bigoted, that's your business.

Go on.

That's your, if one wants to be, that's your business.

When you do it in India, which has 300 million Muslim people, so larger than the entire population of the United States, it tends to be slightly dangerous.

So no one knows what kind of backlash this would create.

But while Trump was going on mispronouncing names of great Indian spiritual leaders, Delhi was on fire.

So

I'm really looking forward to the outcome of this

when, you know, things have settled down and the Muslim community in India realizes

this wasn't very nice and what the backlash of that is going to be.

So it's going to be a really peaceful next 20 years in India.

Wow.

In the United States, I think there's kind of a dim awareness of what's going on.

And I think people are, especially in New York City, are kind of lost right at the beginning of the story when you said they wanted to clean up Delhi.

And you think here, no one ever cleans a deli that is

so I think that that is the first sticking point it's not just our complete lack of awareness of the global landscape and the atrocities committed in other in other nations but it is it's a bodega thing yeah as a as a Muslim comedian colleague just said to me recently I've tried every angle of this and there is nothing even grimly earnest I can say about it, let alone funny.

And this is on a podcaster who we did 40 minutes on viruses.

So, but

the great thing was, Andy, Josh, it happened at the exact same time when President Trump was visiting.

And President Trump kept saying India is a great country, it is a very peaceful country.

And, you know, as you know, Andy, he named a bunch of Indian leaders.

He named the great Indian cricketer Sachin Tundulkar, and he pronounced it as Su Chin Tundulkur,

which is also a very prominent Chinese restaurant in Mumbai.

So, wow.

There's a much better chance that that's what he actually meant.

That's he wanted to eat there.

He mentioned the great spiritual and Vedic scholar, Swami Vivekananda.

Tough name to pronounce, but he went with a special pronunciation.

He called him Swami Vivekumundundunda,

which again is an important taekwondo class in Bangalore

that I've attended.

And there should be a spiritual leader called Swami Vivekamundundu Da.

So, while all this was going on, about 40 minutes away, Delhi was on fire, right?

So,

it just seems like we live in a political narrative now where the thing that is said and the thing you are watching are completely different.

On that happy note,

well, anyway, I'm going to go get a milkshake for breakfast.

That brings us the end of end of the bugle.

Josh, do you have any forthcoming stand-up shows or anything else you'd like to alert our listeners to?

I do.

I'll be in Boston on

March 13th and 14th, and I still have a book out called Nice Try, Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results.

And that's available in many places.

Annie Rabb, you're doing some London shows, imminently.

That is correct, Andy.

I will be at the Soho Theatre doing

my last year's Edinburgh show, Democracy and Disco Dancing,

from April 27 to May 2nd.

And if the virus exists, I will be doing it by hologram.

Don't forget there is a live bugle show in Norwich

on our one-night-only tour of East Anglia on the 4th of April.

So do come along to that.

Any buglers in that part of the universe.

Thank you very much for listening.

Until next week, stay virus-free, and we will play you out with some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers.

Daniel Grace once jokingly tried to convince a friend that the origin of the term duvet is from the French words duvet, meaning of the vet.

This is because, in the 14th century, claimed Daniel, vets would make extra money on the side by pretending people's pet ducks were terminally ill, having them put down, and then stealing their feathers to use in bedding.

Hence, duvet, later further francophonified to duvet.

His friend didn't believe him, but it later turned out that Daniel was accidentally correct.

One of the technological developments that David Kluft would like to see is a device which can faultlessly tell the difference between a cucumber and a javelin.

This follows a severe embarrassment at his local athletics club's annual all-you-can-eat vegan buffet.

Paul Hindel is unconvinced by salad cream as a source.

I can't even see where you would get salad milk from, complains Paul.

I've never seen a lettuce with others.

I think the whole thing is probably a fraud by the big condiment industry.

Amanda Lamar believes the time has come for all news outlets to include a plausibility percentage on any article published online or in print.

At least let the readers factor in the precise likelihood of what they're reading being bullshit, requests Amanda, and then make an informed decision on whether to believe it or not based on that.

Jeff Martin, having been surprisingly given a pantomime horse outfit as a leaving present from a job job that had nothing to do with horses or pantomimes, used to thoroughly enjoy wearing the costume amongst other horses, at horse race meetings, for example, or in police horse units and at military parades.

He gave up his hobby, however, after a near-miss at a French abattoir.

Kev Conroy wonders why the ancient Greeks were so obsessed with vases.

From some museums, notes Kev, you'd think that all these old dead bastards did was make vases, put things in vases, and then look at vases.

No wonder their civilization collapsed.

Alex Selig does not see the point in weightlifting as a sport.

It's had its time, blasts Alex.

At the very least it should be a biathlon in which the lifters should have to prove they can work a forklift truck or crane and do some mechanised lifting as well as manual lifting.

Otherwise it's an almost futile skill in the modern world.

Derek Snyder scoffs at Alex's suggestion, saying, yeah, I'd like to see what happens if you ever get pinned to the ground in a natural history museum when a fossilized boa constrictor that died when in an absolutely straight line with both ends of his body stuck in giant watermelons falls off a shelf and lands on top of you and there's an olympic weightlifter nearby i imagine you'll be saying don't bother taking this off my rapidly collapsing ribcage i'll wait for the forklift truck to do it Ed Benyon Pedley, whilst paying tribute to Derek Snyder's commitment to nominative determinism, wishes the world was a calmer place and that people did not descend into needless arguments about trivial matters and hypothetical scenarios such as weightlifting and impossibilities, even when those disputes are entirely fictitious.

Here endeth this week's lies.

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