Bugle 4134 - Mike Pence gets horny

The Bugle presents

the last post

with Alice Fraser.

Imagine a world just like this one but different.

An alternate dimension where everything is very familiar but not quite the same.

Where Trump is still tweeting and Brexit continues to rage on and climate change controversies cascade beneath ever more predictable extreme weather events.

Imagine this other world also has podcasts and there's a satirical show with this sound,

that fights truth to power.

But this one isn't hosted by this guy.

Hello bubblers.

It's hosted by me.

Alice Fraser, not a guy.

And it's Daley.

Imagine someone sent that podcast to the right email address but in the wrong dimension.

This dimension.

Every day from the 1st of January 2020, the last post.

Search the last post in your podcast app now.

Hello, Buglers!

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4134 of the Bugle.

For the second time in human history, this is the last full bugle of a decade.

This decade will come spluttering to its end in under two weeks time.

I'm Andy Zoltzmann and I'm not going anywhere until this recording is finished when I will head to the Soho Theatre for my show tonight.

There are still tickets available for the rest of the world, particularly on the added dates from the 6th to the 8th of January.

Joining me this week ahead of the official launch of our new Bugle spin-off show, The Last Post, and it must be said not

at 100%

health rating today.

It's Alice Fraser.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Buglers.

Yes, if we were playing a video game, my life bar would be in the red.

I'm running on 12% batteries.

But I'm here to be satirical.

And really, that only takes about 12% of your brain.

Don't give away the secrets of the trade.

Your health is in itself satirizing global democracy.

Yes, I embody the state of

politics right now.

Still alive, but not at its best.

And joining us from New York City, another country that's been enjoying some slapstick democracy, it's Hari Kondabolu.

Hey, Andy.

I think that's the most enthusiastic greeting that you've given me all year, actually.

It's not been a good year, actually.

How's the process of your institutional degradation going?

It's moving swiftly.

One hearing at a time.

We are recording on the 19th of December.

On this day in the year 1819, exactly 200 years ago, a man called Peter ate a potato, which makes you think, are we really so different today?

In other words, I didn't quite get around to doing the anniversaries this week.

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

This week, a special feature on the YouTubers to look out for in the year 2020.

As you know, the bugle always has its finger right on the pulse of contemporary culture.

And here are some of the tubers that you can expect to be entertaining you over the next 12 months.

Jack in the Box.

He does these brilliant re-boxing videos talking you through what it feels like to put a new tech product back in its box when you realize you absolutely don't need it in your life.

Dribbly Bibbly.

the latest geriatric tuber trying to crack the increasingly lucrative nursing home YouTube watching market.

Dribbly Bibli or Dribb to his constantly naturally changing legions of fans does very entertaining tips on everything from how to play cribbage while barely awake, intimidating snoring, how to run a sweepstake on who's going to be the next one down, and how to terrify your grandchildren with a truly harrowing look into the reality of life.

And also look out for Snacksy Woogle, who does brilliant food eating instructional videos, including a new series beginning in January advising people in the 13 and a quarter to 13 and a half age bracket, key social media commercial demographic, that how to eat a sandwich and Instagram every mouthful without absent-mindedly falling into a disused quarry or walking onto a busy motorway.

So keep an eye out for those

this year.

Also in the bin, name that decade,

by which I mean name this decade.

We are at the end of the decade and it still does not have a satisfactory name.

I mean, this is one of the things I'm most looking forward to about the year 2020 is having a decade with a real name again.

Yeah, what is it?

Is it the teens?

Is it the...

I don't know.

I mean, Harry, what do Americans call this decade?

I mean, I guess it would be, I mean, if you say the teens, it just makes you think of the last century.

So would it not be the 2010s?

Yeah, but that's awkward as well.

I mean, the noughties was awful.

Noughties was horrible.

It's 20 years since we had a decent name for it.

And you look back through history in the 20th century and they had the same problem.

They got four years into the decade and thought, well, we can't deal with this.

We're going to just have a world war, and everyone will just, you know, define that decade by a world war.

So I think it'll probably just be remembered by just a noise, a general harumph of disappointment.

Top story this week, it's official.

Trump peachment is going ahead.

Hari,

this is

a wonderful moment for everyone who enjoys pointless impeachment procedures that don't have even a snowball's hope in hell of originally guilty verdicts.

What a week it must have been.

Yeah, but you have to remember, you know, this is a symbolic victory, and that's the Democrats' favorite kind of victory.

So, yeah, we got another one.

I'm just disappointed in the fact that the impeachment process isn't more sort of old-fashioned and humiliating.

I was hoping for someone to be sort of dragged around on a cart while people throw rotten fruit at them, but apparently it's all just quite official and you're allowed to.

Yes.

I mean, I'm not sure that the peach bit of impeachment did come from the fruit, but I'm not an architect.

I'll have to ask my sister.

I mean, it it has highlighted the total f ⁇ edness of the American system, essentially.

That the chances of impeachment being voted for this are basically 100%, and the chances of a guilty verdict are basically 0%.

It splits completely on political grounds.

So, I mean, essentially, what this has shown is that truth in American politics can constitutionally go f itself.

Well, I mean, Mitch McConnell said that I'm not going to pretend to be an unbiased juror, which is genuinely the most bananas thing I've ever heard.

Someone say in an ordinary court case, that would mean you would throw out the jury and get a new one.

Can we do that?

Can we throw out the Senate and get a new one?

Well, Well, the thing is, if you start throwing out everyone in America who will be biased in this case,

you will end up with a guy who's been missing somewhere in the Appalachians for the last 85 years.

Or Jimmy Hoffer.

I guarantee you there's 12 people in America who just have never heard of Trump.

The trial starts in the middle of January in theory.

And Pelosi won't transmit the articles of impeachment until she gets certain.

This is the theory that she's not going to transmit the articles of impeachment until she gets certain assurances, which I don't think is going to happen since McConnell creates the rules.

And so I actually dug up some of the rules using my cyber hacking ability.

That's what you're on the show for, Harry.

Yeah.

I had to hack into the mainframe, and this is what I...

what I pulled out.

Apparently, here are the rules that McConnell wants.

No new witnesses, no new testimony, no mention of the word Ukraine,

no mention of guilty without the word not,

no mention of hands.

No one is allowed to use the bathroom until the trial is over.

No sex in the champagne room.

Oh, come on.

There's no sex in the champagne room.

Absolutely.

Dejection.

Actually.

Kennedy die in vain.

It's bad.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess the thing is that things like the overwhelming weight of evidence are of little matter in America at any level, least of all at the very top.

So we've got to kind of look for at least moments to lift the soul.

And I think we had that this year with Donald Trump's letter to Nancy Pelosi.

Because sometimes...

Great artists achieve something so perfect that it encapsulates everything about their craft, their skill, their unique genius.

You think of the Parthenon as the expression of classical Athenian architecture.

You think of the Sistine Chapel for Michelangelo, Michelangelo, maybe Hamlet for Shakespeare, Rodin's Burgers of Calais, one of the great high points of modern sculpture, Diego Maradona's goal against England in the 1986 World Cup.

For f's sake!

Tackle the f-mad ore ball!

You think of Roger Federer demolishing Lake Mewitt at the US Open final in 2004.

You think of Kajagugu's hit 1980s single Too Shy, or V.

V.

S.

Laxman's 281 against Australia in 2001, or even a very fine joke I myself wrote about the Syrian crisis.

But with Trump, one of the most original performance artists of all time, a boundary-blasting, shape-shifting, convention-crushing redefiner of his genre, this was his masterpiece, a six-page concerto of the cultic arts, a symphony for the shit-for-brained, a full-scale, all-encompassing expression of the Trumpel-Stiltskian Eeuvre, an epistrollary strop of such delusionary perfection as to make fans of the art form stop, take a deep breath, and think, this is what I live for.

I don't know how you, buglers, get your moments of spiritual peace and uplift.

Maybe you listen to a perfect song by Schubert or sink your eyes into

a painting by Rothko or maybe listen to a bugle by Eucharist.

But if you are a fan of Trump, a Fox Ficionado, a Make America a Gobshite Again, a hat wearer, this letter will be forever your inner sanctuary of perfect soulfulness.

It was truly one of the most extraordinary combinations of words and letters ever put to paper in the history of language.

It was truly amazing.

I went to an all-girls high school when, you know, bitchy letters to each other, which ran through a series of half-imaginary offenses, were the currency.

And yet, I have never read something that was quite this incoherently petty.

What I love about it is the fact that he has such a limited vocabulary.

And

most people, when you have a limited vocabulary, is you use a thesaurus.

But

he can't use a thesaurus, because if he uses a thesaurus, that means the thesaurus is better than he is.

And his refusal to ever admit that he's wrong means these are the best words.

There are no other words that could possibly be better than these words.

Let's look at some of those words now.

He wrote, you have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word impeachment.

Which I actually think is quite a nice word.

Impeachment.

It's a very nice word.

It's got a nice roll off the tongue to it.

It also feels like that sentence begins somewhere that it doesn't end.

It feels like there is a cheapened the importance of the very ugly word.

I mean, how important is this ugly?

Also, don't body shame a word.

Yeah.

But it's like treaty, isn't it?

Treaty.

I mean, it's disappointing.

It sounds like it's going to be full of treats in the general, it's just full of rather tedious clauses.

He said, this is even worse than offending the founding fathers.

Now, I imagine the founding fathers are pretty much immune to offence by now after the last four years.

In fact, the most common phrase in Ouija board sessions with the Founding Fathers is, for f's sake, that's obviously not what we meant.

And interestingly, and perhaps absolutely, the official abbreviation for Founding Fathers is FFS.

Do you know that?

I did not know that.

You also said you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying you pray for the president when you know this statement is not true.

It's not that it's not true that she doesn't pray for the president, it's just it doesn't f ⁇ ing work, obviously.

I mean, prayer at best is statistically ineffective, but praying for this president president for numerous reasons, I think is pretty much guaranteed a 0% success rate.

He went on to say, you have developed a fully-fledged case of what many in the media call Trump derangement syndrome, which is not so much the pot calling the kettle black as the pot calling the hamster a pot.

And he said, you view democracy as your enemy.

Bear in mind, this is, you know, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, she's devoted most of her life to democracy.

Whatever side of the political seesaw you're on, that is a fact.

Donald Trump, by contrast, dipped into it as a bit of a PR stunt a few years ago and has spent the entire time since then treating democracy with the same respectful duty of care as a devil-worshipping slash metal guitarist in a giant penis outfit at a nun's funeral.

In that case, I don't think democracy is the enemy.

It's more of a weird, deranged, and wildly temperamental uncle.

It's not an enemy at the moment.

This was, I think, perhaps my favourite bit.

Donald Trump wrote, More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem witch trials.

I mean, that's that is one hell.

Out of all the things he said, Hari, in the last four years, that's that's up there, isn't it?

Yeah,

yeah, it's up there.

Also, I think part of why it's so incredible is that you get his

like his insanity one tweet at a time.

To read a full letter filled with so many sentences that he vaguely tried to connect to each other is

remarkable.

Remarkable.

I mean, honestly, it barely reads as a full letter.

It's really just a series of tweets he wrote down all at once.

I'm starting to think that maybe the Democrats are wrong and the Republicans are right, because no one can be this terrible.

You know what I mean?

Like, I feel like maybe there is a conspiracy theory that is painting Trump in a bad light because surely no one is genuinely this

off the body.

So you're saying his own pen is in on the conspiracy?

yes I'm saying that he is part of a conspiracy to paint himself in the worst possible light this goes right to the very top goes right to the very top no one can be this much of an asshole and I think his whole tenure is performance art just seeing how far he can push it

another part of the conspiracy I think also is our shared understanding of words

which has been cultivated over thousands of years all part of a conspiracy for us to interpret the words he is using as fed up

I mean, I guess when it comes to the Salem Witch trials, you know, he hasn't yet been offered

the option of being dunked in a pond.

Yes.

To prove.

I mean, I don't think that happened at the Salem Witch Trials, but let's assume that it did.

Well, they had, I mean, they could do the old flour trial, which is where you have to eat a spoonful of flour, and if you can swallow it down, it means your mouth is moist and therefore you're not lying.

Right.

Whereas if your mouth is dry, then you are lying.

Okay.

That's science.

Right.

Yeah, but he doesn't really believe in science.

So

I don't know if he's going to go for that.

Trump also

at a rally suggested that the recently deceased John Dingell, record-breaking congressman who had 59 years in Congress, a World War veteran, was in hell

looking up.

from hell and even some of his own crowd seemed to gasp at that.

I mean, maybe, maybe, again, you know, we see this from our own position here in our lefty bubbles, that actually this is what the disenfranchised Rust Belt were voters wanted.

They wanted a president who was prepared to say that a lifelong public servant and war hero had gone to hell, because they'd not have that kind of president.

And at last, they have that kind of maybe it's you know, second only to the U.S.

Embassy moving to Jerusalem.

That was absolutely crucial to

the reinvigoration of the Rust Belt.

And of course, a clampdown on reproductive rights.

I think that's what it was all about as well.

I mean, if anything, reproductive rights have been siphoning money and opportunity away from the old industrial heartlands more than anything else.

But at least now they do have a president who said that a war hero has gone to hell, which is lovely.

His commitment to bullying is extraordinary.

Regardless of the circumstance, he will find a way to bully some.

It's like his religion.

This is because he ordered the flags to be half-staffed

after John Dingell died.

and his uh his wife who uh you know took john dingell's place on in the vote voted for impeachment and so he feels personally insulted because i did you a favor so you should do me a favor what's the term for that it's a quid pro quo i believe and

since she didn't uh

because she didn't reciprocate uh she uh he said i mean it's kind of clever for what it is according to him she said that, oh, John's probably looking down and has a smile on his face, something like that.

And he replied, or maybe he's looking up.

I mean, it's pretty brutal, but clever for a bully.

Yeah, I mean,

unless he's questioning, you know, the Christian vision of heaven and hell, and he's maybe more going for

an ancient Greek concept of an underworld.

I don't know.

I mean, maybe we're just

being needlessly negative again.

The river sticks in stones.

Maybe it's the balance.

It also should be noted that Vice President Mike Pence spent the day hiding his erection.

The two articles of impeachment, just to review,

it's an abuse of power.

He's accused of abusing power because he withheld $400 million of aid until Ukraine announced an investigation on Joe Biden and his son, and also for obstructing Congress because he wasn't cooperating with the House on this investigation.

Apparently, there was a third article

that he's being accused of being a complete piece of shit.

But apparently that did not get through Congress as apparently it is not unconstitutional

and in fact would have led to the impeachment of most U.S.

presidents.

Moving across the Atlantic, well we are a week on from last week and the election results still exists and that curious mathematics that we discussed last week has left and emboldened Boris Johnson.

So what will the Johnson years bring?

I mean so far it's not wildly optimistic.

We had the Queen's speech yesterday and the Queen seems to change her political opinion

an odd amount.

I guess, you know,

maybe she's just mirroring the fact that generally as people get older they get a little bit more right-wing.

So the government seems to be ditching pledges on child refugee protection because these child refugees were coming over here and stealing our jobs.

Apparently a government spokespeople are going to be advised not to use the term Brexit after the 31st of January.

Which does, I mean, you know,

this is a British issue, clearly.

And I think it's good to remember at this point that George Orwell was writing warnings, not blueprints.

I think maybe we've forgotten that as

a nation.

I mean,

what is the real Boris Johnson?

He's attempted to build some bridges over the plains that he himself flooded.

Here in London we know that when Boris Johnson offers to build a bridge as happened with the proposed London Garden Bridge across the Thames the totally f ⁇ ing pointless bridge covered in plants that no one thought was necessary and cost

what was it £100 million or something?

Chris, yeah, a lot of money.

Let's just go with that.

I've not seen this bridge.

Well, it hasn't happened.

This is the thing.

He said he was behind the bridge.

He was in favour of the bridge.

The bridge, lots of money got lost, no bridge happened.

So when he says he wants to build bridges, beware.

Also, we do know that if Boris Johnson designs and builds a bridge, there is going to be some luxury, first-class accommodation for some absolutely horrific trolls built underneath.

But, are we being too cynical?

There's a famous, I mean, perhaps not.

Yeah, there's a famous, there's a famous saying leopards never change their spots.

But it's also true that leopards do sometimes put on a cuddly koala outfit if they think it'll help them politically.

But we do actually now have the technology to give leopards a full fur graft, but I guess it'll probably still be the same carnivore underneath, although we don't know that the graft might actually be quite a traumatic experience and make the leopard emerge change.

I guess we've just got to try and let the leopard be who the leopard wants.

I'm confused.

My favourite bit about this whole process is how Johnson is presenting himself now as a man of the people, despite the fact that he is the poshest thing since incest.

He said, we have a pre-cooked Brexit meal ready to pop in the microwave and we will bring it before Parliament this week, as though he's ever met a microwave.

Also, pre-cooked meals that you've put in the microwave are generally finging disgusting.

They're truly disgusting.

They're too high in salt and they're a sign of like a sad life gone badly wrong.

He's essentially made a lot of what I call Zimbabwean dollar promises in that they sound big, but they're fundamentally worthless.

We'll probably end up being devalued to wait maybe for something way more moderate but still not worth having or just changed directly into US dollars.

We don't know how it'll all pan out.

We can just hope that it's one of those rare accidental coincidences between personal interest and national interest.

Meanwhile, the outgoing Supreme Court president, Lady Hale, warned against Britain adopting an American-style Supreme Court system.

I'm not quite sure why.

I don't know if it's just that she doesn't want to mortgage the entire ethical future of the country to short-term political gameplay.

I mean, Hari,

as an American,

presumably you're a massive fan of your politicized Supreme Court.

I do.

I do love our Supreme Court and how so much of it is based on hoping different members will die

at the right time.

See, it's not the right time for Ruth Bader-Ginsburg to die, so she needs to live perhaps another two, maybe six years

for their...

for our political goals to be met.

Also, Clarence Thomas won't die soon enough.

That's how this game is played.

It doesn't work that way in the UK.

You don't just wait for your Supreme Court justices to die for there to be justice in the country.

We don't yet, but I mean, maybe, maybe, maybe that'll come.

Maybe one day soon.

I mean, it's odd that Britain hasn't adopted that because it's very pro-generally a lifelong office.

Yeah, but we make sure that they can't actually do anything.

Yeah, it's as though the Queen were a political figure and you just were having your fingers crossed.

Does the Queen have no power whatsoever?

No, not really.

No.

I mean, that's.

Her whole power comes from not ever saying or doing anything particularly anything.

Yes.

I mean, she is a blueprint, I think, for all politicians around the world.

If only no politician actually did anything or said anything meaningful, I think the world would be a much happier place.

I mean, all the minor royals go, and their whole thing is basically arms deals, right?

Well, I mean, if only it were only that, based on recent evidence from certain princes.

This was a lovely detail about the election.

Yuri Geller, spoon bender extraordinaire, claimed that he helped Boris Johnson win the election through the power of his mind.

Which, I mean, might make a little bit more sense than first past the post, to be honest.

I mean, this was a delightful thing.

I was surprised that Yuri Geller was still alive.

That's actually the same thought I had as well, which is like, wow.

I do hope that in the very unlikely event that Yuri Geller ever ever does die, that as his coffin is sitting and wherever he's having

his funeral.

It just gradually sits up from one of his spoons.

One of the side effects of the Conservative victory, of course, is the

likely furtherance of the breakup of the United Kingdom in the form of momentum for the Scottish independence movement.

Nicola Sturgeon

set out what she described as an unarguable case for a second independence referendum.

And the government interpreted the word unarguable, meaning that they don't have to argue against it and have said that it will not happen under any circumstances because we are Britain, and by Britain, what they mean is England.

Wait, so if

Scotland becomes independent,

will they be able to survive on whiskey and shortbread exports alone?

I think so.

I mean, they do sell a lot of whiskey and shortbread.

They also have, I think, a monopoly on most of the water in the United Kingdom, so that's handy.

Oh, my God.

Also, does Andy Murray's first British man to win Wimbledon?

Don't even go there, Harry.

Do not go there.

I mean, does that get not

to the nation?

But if he's not British, if he ends up, if he's like Scott, does it get grandfathered in as a British victory?

Or do we go back to Fred Perry?

He was British when he won it.

That is a victory.

It was not Andy Murray that won that title.

It was the entire population of Britain.

And let's never forget that.

Other news now, and well, the decade is reaching its end with some appropriately batshit crazy stories going on.

The environmental snooze button has been pressed yet again at the Paris conference.

I don't know, seem to be trying the tried and tested tactic of giving the environment the silent treatment.

Oh, yeah, you want to destroy us, our way of life, our social stability, and our entire future.

Well, talk to the hand, because the governments, international bodies, and species in general ain't listening.

Go outside until you can behave yourself.

I am outside.

I'm literally.

I think

I'm getting increasingly concerned about this.

I think we are not that far away now, maybe 20 to 30 years from the tipping point where the living are pursuing the dead in zombie films.

Whilst the environmental snooze button was being pressed in Paris, Australia was celebrating breaking its all-time hottest day record.

Yeah, number one.

Number one.

It's a very long time.

But it's knocked down to number two by the very next day when it beat itself.

I mean, you can have a look at the heat charts for Australia.

And I didn't know there was a colour that was more hot than red.

They've gone into the purples and blacks in some areas.

I wonder if they'll just start again from the beginning once they peak out.

But it's a genuinely terrifying thing to see your own country be on fire.

Yeah, so 41 degrees average highest temperature across the entire country.

Across the entire country.

In some places, 47, 48, 49 degrees yeah I mean I start getting a bit cranky when it reaches about 24 to be honest yeah

I speak Fahrenheit so I have no idea this is hot this is hot right look we love our sunburned country but someone could probably put some aloe vera on us

so yeah 41 Celsius is 106 Fahrenheit and Christian the highest temperature reached was 48 which is 118

Fahrenheit Bear in mind that water boils at 100 that means everything was natural to boiling if it was confused water that didn't know its metric from its its uh from its uh imperial

it's uh

been described as a once-in-a-lifetime heat wave uh we should point out though that the uh the lifetime now used as a reference point for all once-in-a-lifetime weather events is now the lifetime of a hamster actually I'm just hearing that has now been updated to the lifetime of a fruit fly after what's happened in Australia

this week oh and in Australia in fact the 24 hour Ponson Bees micro ferret which of course lives for less than a day the American Prime Minister though is taking some unfair criticism because he has been on holiday and has finally been persuaded to return to Australia from

his holiday.

Now, I think this is unfair.

We often grouch against and quibble slam our leaders for not being entirely honest, for acting in a way intended to dupe the voting public.

Often these criticisms are what the lay person might describe as entirely justified.

But in this case, you have a politician who is laying his cards firmly and honestly on the table.

An Australian Prime Minister who not only doesn't give a shit about the environment, but is prepared to leave the country when it's on fire fire to demonstrate how much he doesn't give an a shit.

This is just honesty, isn't it?

Yep, he's laying his cards on the table and all of the cards say I'm a

no you did tarot.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison's deputy Michael McCormack was acting Prime Minister whilst Morrison was out of the country.

He told a group of climate activists to quote go and do something productive whilst these fires were going on as the mercury was hitting oh I've never been to this bit of a thermometer before woo woo

as this barbecue obsessed nation was essentially putting itself on its own barbecue and as wildfires opened their minds and visited parts of the world that they're usually too

they usually can't be bothered to go to go and do something productive that his full word speaking to protesters via reporters at the Rural Fire Service Control Centre in Sydney said go and do something productive go donate your time to meals on wheels or something like that now in some ways you know meals on wheels delivering food to the elderly that might help these climate protesters understand the social time bomb of an aging population, but that itself only further highlights the importance of sorting the environment out so they'll be back protesting against that within 24 hours.

But there's no good way out of this.

I mean, I've not really come across Michael McCormack too much before, Alice.

I'm presumably one of your great political heroes.

Yeah, basically, every politician in Australia, give or take, maybe three that actually have a personality.

Every politician in Australia is just sort of a bland cut-out of a man in a suit.

That's how we run it.

They're almost entirely interchangeable, except sometimes when they get into power, you find out that they're deeply religious.

There was a very amusing tweet put up

of some of the new Conservative MPs who'd breached the red wall in the north that we were talking about last week and their first day in Parliament.

And they were all white men.

The only difference was one of them was not wearing a tie.

That was, I think, possibly tweet of the week.

What a rebel.

What I think is kind of unbelievable is all these countries are pushing the inevitable, right?

They're like delaying it.

They're agreeing to deals.

Oh, we'll deal with it next year.

You know, we've gone this far and then we'll talk about the next decade, you know, in a future meeting.

And the thing is, the compromise is between countries and not a compromise with the earth.

And that's really who you need the extension from.

Like when you get an extension, it's from the teacher.

The other students can't be like, the class decided we're all getting an extension on this exam.

We don't want to take it till like next week.

And then the teacher will be like, well, that's cute.

You all fail.

That's how the teacher works.

So, yeah, I don't understand the logic of any of this.

It's getting catastrophic, Harry.

I don't think you quite understand.

In Australia at the moment, it is too hot for cricket.

Oh!

A sport where a significant number of the players just stand around

for most of the game.

Oh, look, this is.

I think this might be the tipping point for me.

Let's start actually doing stuff about it instead of just thinking about doing stuff about it.

We all have our tipping points, and I think that's mine.

In Sapphic greeting card news now, the Hallmark channel has apologised and put back four commercials that it had pulled from the wedding planning website that had featured two brides kissing.

So what happened was they had pulled it from the website after they faced a wave of criticism from religious groups, and then they put it back on after they faced a wave of criticism from pro-LGBT

activists.

And I assume that they will face a wave of criticism for putting them back up, and then they'll take them back down, and then they'll face another wave of criticism for taking them down and putting them back up in an infinitely recursive attempt to please both sides of an increasingly polarized world.

I mean, I think we need to put this in context, Alice, because this happened in the year 2019,

2019 and AD as well.

That's really the case.

I mean are there still people in the world who think that God will strike them down for seeing lesbians being affectionate with each other in an advert for a greetings card company?

Are there still people who believe that?

In which case my message to the religious right is stop defacing people's Bibles.

I feel like they may have misinterpreted what the ads were.

I mean the greeting cards themselves are not lesbians.

They're just greeting cards.

Right.

But they may be sent between lesbians.

But can you?

I don't know the science of this.

Can you catch lesbianism from a car?

I mean, you've not said no, Alice.

I don't know.

Anyway, I'm just not sure this is how God works.

Oh, Mr.

Jenkinson, terribly sorry about your recent death.

I was trying to get you an extension past the Tokyo Olympics.

I know how much you love sport, but my old buddy Reeks had some quotas to hit, apparently.

So, sorry about you having to die.

Now, first, let's look at your application form.

Congratulations on a life.

Very well lived.

Excellent ratings coming up on your application form for morality, generosity, humanity, all things I'm very much in favour of.

And I must say, on a personal level, you have a quite terrific baritone when singing hymns.

I do really enjoy that, maybe a little too much on reflection.

But look, this isn't about me,

frankly.

Frank.

This is about you, Mrs.

Jenkinshop.

And well, I mean, it was going very well until you saw two women being romantically affectionate in a TV advertisement.

I know you say you were asleep in your hospital bed at the time, on the verge of death, but you know how I work.

I'm afraid it is strict liability on these things, like all the foody stuff in my other franchises.

So, cheerio, pop your overcoat in the charity box on the way down.

You will not be needing that.

I mean, to be fair, Hallmark did apologize for what they did with their new corporate homophobia apology card.

So

they did,

maybe it was just

a way to

publicize this new greeting card.

This is what the greeting card said.

It said, I just wanted to say, hey,

heartfelt apologies that I thought it was strange to be gay.

We mean what we say.

Please don't take your gay money away.

Harry, I think you have just found the biggest untapped commercial market in the world corporate apology greeting card.

Productivity news now and well this is uh very much the news we've been waiting for.

Um scientists, I assume, have developed a deliberately uncomfortable toilet

uh to try to make uh people take less long, let's call them shit breaks when they're at at work.

I mean this is very much the news that the corporate world has has been waiting for.

You know with the decline in the teaching of Latin it's taken people longer and longer to do cryptic crosswords on the blog and the productivity boost from this toilet being installed in every single workspace around the world could give the world an extra five trillion working hours a day globally.

Well the toilet has a 13 degree slope that makes it painful to sit on for more than about five minutes and I just I don't I mean the world has responded to this with absolute horror because toilet breaks are the only highlight of the corporate life.

It's also it's really the only true moments of solitude you get in the world these days.

Yeah,

I think it's a good step forward in productivity.

The next step, obviously, is having the toilet in the middle of the office open to the world.

Get your shit done quickly then.

Yeah, that does bring a whole new meaning to that term.

It just seems very short-sighted.

Like, okay, what if you're really sick and you need more than five minutes?

Right?

Like, that's increasingly painful.

Or what if you're a comedian who gets their best 45 minutes of work done on the toilet every day?

What about that person or group of people?

I mean, there are always unforeseen side effects to this kind of thing.

I'm anticipating a huge rise in quad strength among your average office worker

and a corollary increase in cycling times.

But I mean, think of what we could achieve with all that added work time.

We could develop a cure for Twitter rage.

We could develop brain implants for children to save on the costly infrastructure of schools and allow the government to just implant information according to the political whims of the time.

These are hugely exciting times for humanity, thanks to the new patented uncomfortable crapper.

The person who invented this is going to hell.

We do agree on that, right?

Yes.

Yeah, absolutely.

Just a quick bit of sport news to round off the bugle decade.

And for the first time in the entire history of humanity a female dance player has beaten a male dance player at the PDC World Championship in London.

Fallon Sherrock defeated Ted Everts 3-2

and it's a symbolic moment.

I'm obviously a massive sports fan but also I'm

broadly of the belief that men and women are the same species and the marginalization of women in sport has been one of the sort of unsung triumphs of the patriarchy during the 20th century.

And the Football Association banned, basically banned women's football after the First World War.

They wouldn't let women's football teams use any FA registered grounds for

about 50 years, wasn't it?

It was up until about 1970.

And anyway, you see this in many, many sports,

just insane inequality.

So this is quite a pleasing, symbolic moment.

Now, darts, you would have thought, is one of the sports where there really should be very little difference between

the sexes, other than the fact that to get to a high level of darts you need to spend probably three to eight hours a day at minimum practicing throwing a small thing at another small thing not very far away and without stereotyping the genders I think that suits the male psyche more than the female psyche

is that fair Alice?

Yeah.

Also a natural inclination to darts tends to emerge when you're wasting your fing time in a pub with your mates.

Yeah I mean it's not it's not the physical side of darts, it is the entirely self-destructive lifestyle side of it that is really historically separated.

One of the few sports where people play with a pint in hand and a cigarette hanging out of their mouth.

Yeah, it was like Formula One in the 1950s.

Or rugby in the 1970s.

This is not just a big victory for women's sports.

This is a big victory for darts, which I did not know was a sport until the story.

Well, that concludes this week's bugle.

Happy Christmas, if that's your bag.

I've been reliably informed it's also Hanukkah very soon.

My sources tell me.

Happy Hanukkah,

thanks, Alice.

Happy Hanukkah to you.

Well, happy new decade.

We will be back with a full new bugle.

I think on the 3rd of January, there will be a bonus.

Maybe we'll do a review of the decade

as a sub-bugle next week.

Chris is shaking his head thinking, yeah, that's exactly what I want to do with my spare time.

Just some breaking news.

Blitzen has resigned.

Ahead of Santa Claus's annual round-the-world bonanza, the renowned reindeer has alleged inappropriate antlering by Prancer, who denies the claim, saying it was an accidental antler to posterior contact caused by loss of balance when traveling at the necessary 780,000 miles an hour in practice.

Also, I know Christmas is a, you know, it's largely a happy time of year, but if you don't know any professional facts checkers, do give them an extra big Christmas hug for 2019.

It's been a fing dismal year for them.

Alice, you are performing at the Soho Theatre, not only alongside me in my certifiable history shows, but in your own show, which you will now plug.

Yes, I am doing Savage, which I think is maybe the best show I've ever done from the 2nd to the 4th of January at the Soho Theatre.

It's 10.15 p.m., so it's like a prime time slot.

Everyone wants to go see comedy on the 2nd of January, right?

Well, yes, and well, if you are coming to see my show on the 2nd of January, get a bit of dinner after my show and then go and see Alice.

Please do.

In the same venue at 10.15.

Are there any shows that you'd like to alert our listeners to?

Yes, I'll be performing in New York City at Caroline's on Broadway from January 23rd through the 25th.

And for Bugle listeners, if you use the online code Mango, you get a $5 discount.

Oh, that's lovely.

Mangoes are my favorite fruit.

It's my favorite fruit.

There you go.

Yeah, you had a beautiful long routine about the Alfonso mango, didn't you?

That is correct.

That is correct.

I'm known for mangoes.

I'm trying to write some Kiwi material, to be honest with you.

Well, you don't want to get pigeonholed as the guy who just does mango jokes, do you?

Also, a Kiwi tried to kill my mother.

Also, a thing that people can do is subscribe to the last post feed, where I will be publishing all of these little podcasts that have just somehow appeared in my email from a different dimension.

There we go.

Thank you as always for listening.

We'll be back with a review of the decade next week.

And in the meantime here are some lies to play you up.

This week's lies take the form of two pieces of research presented by teams of Bugle Volunto subscribers at the recent international conference for exciting new theories about all kinds of stuff.

Neil Guernsey presented a paper which wondered whether Darwinism means that eventually all edible edible animals will evolve so that they are less tasty and nutritious.

Surely, if Darwinism is worth the e-paper it's now e-written on, it should involve the survival of the least yummy.

That, says Neil, is basic self-preservation.

Victoria Godfrey, however, retorted that counterintuitively, being tasty actually makes animals more likely to survive.

It might not be a sound life strategy for the individual animals themselves, notes Victoria, but it definitely boosts the numbers of the species as a whole.

Christopher Barnard jumps in with some numbers, citing the difference between the number of cows in the world and the number of rhinoceroses, which Christopher, without it must be stressed, any personal experience, assumes do not taste very nice and are quite chewy, especially if you eat them whole.

Christian Kayser disagrees vehemently, citing the evidence that no animal has evolved to naturally taste not only of meat, but also of ketchup and mustard or other garnishes.

Monica Gibbs thinks that looking at the number of wasps versus the number of pandas at large in the world, Darwinism is actually more about the survival of the most annoying at picnics.

But Ian Horsey is incandescent about Monica's suggestion and asks her in no uncertain terms whether she has ever tried to eat a picnic with a panda in the vicinity, especially if using a picnic basket made of bamboo.

Monica retorts, just move somewhere else, they're quite slow animals.

Moving on to the second piece of research, Lisa Pawlik did some research at the Institution of Global Milliner and discovered the origin of the bobble hat.

It dates back to the year 1053 when Frankish King Robert le Cour de Bras or Robert the Short-Armed fell off his horse in the woods while hunting on a cold winter's day and emerged from the undergrowth with a hedgehog clinging to the top of his woolly hat.

Derek Mead picks up the story and relates how unable to remove the terrified tenacious creature with his underlengthed arms, King Robert left it there and threatened to execute any courtier who did not have a hedgehog on his head within 20 minutes.

Sam Bergman found papers proving that the behedgehog-headed king then had his most fruitful hunting day ever, slaying 46 stags in a couple of hours, the most, of course, since King Jacques Le Coeur in the year 937, of course, a love of stat.

Mithu Rahman then explains how King Robert then made hedgehog wearing compulsory for all fighting aged males in winter, leading to the near extinction of hedgehogs.

This forced forced the development of the artificial hedgehog made of wool.

And Maeve O'Shea concludes by explaining the etymology of the shape we now know as a bobble.

It of course comes from the shortening of the king's name Robert or Bob Le Cordebras or Bob Le.

This research almost certainly won a prize.

Here endeth this week's lies.

Please give one to each of your family and friends for Christmas.

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.