Bugle 4127 Let's Sit In Silence and Watch a bird go "Honk."

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers!

It's bugle time.

Are you sitting comfortably?

No, of course you're not.

It's 2019.

If you're sitting comfortably, you're doing it wrong.

Metaphorically, of course.

I am Andy Zoltzmann.

This is issue 4127 of the world's one and only New Cyclopedia of Current Affairs.

Joining me in London, which is a bit of a silly place these days, if you ask me.

Nish Kumar and Alice Fraser.

Hello.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Alice.

Hello, Buglis.

Hello, Nish.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Buglis.

We're still here.

Yeah.

It's never felt more appropriate that we record these in a sort of subterranean bunker.

It's never felt.

I don't think there's ever been a sort of time that we've been doing this and it's felt more appropriate to feel like we're in a nuclear shelter.

Yes.

Well, I mean,

it's always exciting to emerge from here and see how the world has changed in the hour that we've been recording.

Sometimes it's more than you would like.

We are recording on the 25th of October 2019, which means on Monday, it will be 100 years since the National Prohibition Act was passed in 1919 that tried to stop America from drinking.

alcohol.

That went about as well as an attempt to ban bats from echolocating.

What would you like to see?

I mean, after the raging success of Prohibition 100 years ago,

what do you think should be needlessly banned, thereby causing it to become more popular?

I'd love to see that happen to my comedy.

I'd like to see people bootlegging my gigs.

I mean, I would like to see them try and introduce prohibition of alcohol to Britain just to see what would happen and to see how long it would last before.

I mean, if people think Brexit is bad, imagine what would happen if the entire country was actively behind something.

i'd like to ban reasonable conversations where everyone listens to each other's point of view and then people would feel rebelliously obliged to have

test cricket for me

just make it the biggest thing in the world well you'd want it to you want test cricket to go underground underground this speakeasy is lasting five days of gently building narrative

Also, this month, October, as we approach the end of October, it's Emotional Intelligence awareness month

i already knew that well i already knew it that is going straight in the bin is that kind of shit we voted to escape from with brexit we need britain to be clammed up repressed and inhibited as god intended so uh that in fact that can go straight in the bin

top story this week animals are animals doing better or worse than humans at this key stage of the evolution of life on earth humans clearly resting on their evolutionary laurels right now after the trademark bodily breakthrough opposable thumbs found its uh definitive conclusion in the mobile phone and the games console humans now behaving like this kind of spoiled self-important tools you would expect them to grow up as if you kept telling them that god had made them specially lost to run the planet Animals, however, not quite taking advantage of this dip in the fortunes of humanity.

It must be said, tootling along, eating and shagging and dying in the old school tried and tested way.

Alice, you are the Bugle's resident animals and other creatures correspondent.

How is the natural world doing this week?

Pretty well, Andy.

In loudbirds being loud news now, the white bellbird, which is a mountain-dwelling bird, lives deep in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, and it has been discovered to have the loudest voice of any bird species recorded so far.

It's about as loud as a pile driver.

It's 116 decibels.

And what's notable about about this bird is not just that it's very loud but that it does the very loudness extremely close to female birds and that the loudness is like notably boring jeffrey podos of the university of massachusetts says it's one loud note like a horn with no variation

and i feel like i have to respect the level of confidence that this bird has

very close very loud very boring it's got to work sometimes

Like, you know how when you see groups of boys driving around in a car, shouting out of the car to women?

Yeah.

And you're like, that has to have worked at some point.

Right?

Otherwise, why would they keep doing it?

There has to be a functional evolutionary element to that.

Impressive, 116 decibels, which is, I mean, that's a lot of decibels.

Yeah.

Even I think that's loud.

And I have a voice that, and I believe I've discussed this on the show before, a former neighbour thought was a pack of wild dogs, an opinion that they then put in a letter and sent to my landlord.

I had something that wasn't quite the same as that, but

after staying in an Airbnb flat with my wife and children in Spain,

received an email from the letter.

wondering if we'd had a pet in

the flat because the neighbours had reported barking.

Anyway, the source of that barking was me just

occasionally barking as you do on holiday.

Why were you barking?

Family show, Andy.

Family show.

Why wouldn't you bark on holiday?

Well, dogs, of course, are creatures with whom we like to think we share a lot.

And what these loud male birds are, in some ways, so like 50% of the population of Earth, it's uncanny.

One loud, monotonous noise, honking away endlessly.

This is the species called the white bellbird, also known as the comedy panel showbird.

The election campaign pigeon, the oasis concert hawk, and the radio phoning gull.

So, I mean, it does seem like a very, that's quite a patriarchal kind of bird.

Isn't it?

I mean, did Emmeline Pankhurst pluck those patriarchal pheasants in vain?

You have to ask.

It's almost like the bird hasn't heard of feminism yet.

It is difficult to be part of

a gender that seems to be being satirized by nature.

Even the natural world is like, and I mean, also, it depends on if we can decipher what the chants actually are.

At the moment, the best guesses are the Joker was actually a masterpiece and Nanette didn't have enough jokes.

Well, also, it lives deep in the Amazon rainforest, so it's quite possible that it is just understandably squawking something along the lines of holy shit We're f ⁇ ing doomed

We are fing doomed darling.

How can you just sit there on your branch not squawking at 116 f ⁇ ing decimal when the world is sleepwalking to environmental catastrophe?

So it's possible.

It's also evidently possible.

The

scientists think that it may be something to do with sex, as everything is.

It says if females detect the loudest males from logger rage and find the loudest smells most attractive at close range, then the sexual selection would drive the evolution of extremely loud songs up against the limits of physical performance constraints.

And this is a species I can get on board with.

If it's producing volume over physical performance, then sign me the f up.

I'm joining this bird group.

I mean, I've just realized why they haven't heard of feminism yet.

It's because they're talking too loudly.

It's amazing how successful that tactic has been through history.

In other animals news, this is really what we've all been waiting for.

Scientists have trained rats to drive cars and collect food.

I mean, yes, this team from the University of Richmond in Virginia, they've trained rats to drive tiny cars because, look, they've got rats and they've got tiny cars.

I don't understand what the confusion is here.

They've made it out of a little clear plastic food container on wheels, the little steering wheel, and they've trained six female and 11 male rats to drive the car

because they're sexists in rat studies too.

And they've rewarded them with fruit loop cereal pieces when they drive the car properly.

That's the whole thing.

They travel around an arena four square meters in size, and it's like a little traffic jam at all times.

They get rewarded with bits of cereal for driving well.

So basically, these rats are treated better than some Uber drivers.

i think that's probably the long-range plan is to replace all uber drivers with rats yeah and i mean these rats aren't even getting reviewed if they were uber drivers they'd be finding things like he was prompt but on the other hand i did contract bubonic plague four stars

never go below four it's not worth the hassle this is i don't think this is good for the rats we're in the late stages of capitalism and in late stage capitalism people see opportunity anywhere.

And if these rats continue to be driving around, Jeff Bezos is going going to have them delivering Amazon parcels faster than you can say my need for convenience trumps any worries I have about basic rights

I mean I also worry we why are we rewarding rats like this what why are we rewarding a species that with essentially free food and a company car

when they've they have repeatedly through the course of history tried to wipe us out

It's like giving mosquitoes complimentary adapted coffee machines that instead of coffee dispense blood.

It just seems wrong.

Well, the thing that I like most about it is that I think for a significant portion of the population, the only thing they have to pride themselves on is that they can drive a car, and now rats can drive cars as well.

I didn't like the fact that you looked at me as you said that, Alice, which suggests to me that you know that I can't drive.

And so it's been a sobering week for me to learn that I am less useful than a rat.

Hey, but louder than a bird.

There it is.

Posting that Matthew Paris article, wasn't it?

It was in a review of my 2014 Melbourne Comedy Festival show.

Well, I mean, also, when I hear about this rats trying to drive a car around a four-metre square arena, I just think new sport.

Andy's already looking up stats.

Right, I mean.

Rat ball, rats.

Well, I mean, you chug a football into it, even better.

Just as it is, rat race, it basically markets itself.

I would watch this with more enthusiasm than I have watched any F1.

If they replaced Lewis Hamilton with a bunch of rats stuck together in a Lewis Hamilton suit,

I would much prefer that.

And put the sort of rat Lewis Hamilton behind the wheels of a sports car.

It would all fall apart at the end after he won the race and was handed his bottle of champagne and responded, why the fk am I f ⁇ ing fruitless?

Give me my cereal.

Be a more wholesome podium.

Everybody just chucking wheat a bits at each other.

I mean, the next piece of news is completely inexplicable to me, although I understand the rats and tiny cars combination.

A Frenchman at Telecom Paris in France, his name is Marc Tessier.

He's devised an artificial skin to put on your phone that looks like human skin.

And when asked, why, why, he said, I wanted to pinch my phone.

Oh my God.

This skin responds to gestures and different things that mimic human emotional communication.

So so you can express anger by squeezing your phone hard.

It's just basically if you've ever been worried that your phone wasn't creepily integrated into your own

human system enough.

Yeah, it seems really bleak.

It really does seem to be designed for people who are only touching their phones on a day-to-day basis.

Like, if we can't get human contact, let's whack some skin on an iPhone.

I mean, I'm all in favour of it.

I was just

the other day.

Hold on.

Well, I was just thinking the other day as I checked the cricket score on my mobile phone, I wish this phone felt more like a dismembered rectangle of flesh from a psychos dungeon.

Bees, Alice,

friends of the show of course,

it's turned out a study has found that bees get better at maths when they are punished for getting answers wrong.

And I mean the obvious conclusion from that is bring back corporal punishment in schools and build more prisons.

I mean another question similar to the rat one is why the f are we teaching bees to do maths?

Will we never learn?

What does maths lead to?

Rocket-propelled weaponry.

That is not what you want at your picnics.

Yes, I'm going to quote from one of the reviews of my rap album, Who Allowed This to Happen and Who Thought It Was a Good Idea.

NK47's coming straight out of Corrigan.

I mean, it's justifying all of the harsh tactics of tiger mothers everywhere.

The idea that they respond better to punishment than they do to reward.

Yeah, I was about to say, are these scientists, have they been speaking to my mother?

Because I can tell you it's not just bees that respond to that, it's also fat Indian kids.

Tiger mums rejoice.

You haven't been irreparably damaging your children's love for you by ruthlessly punishing them in the name of their future hypothetical professional success for no reason.

Now you can seriously impair your children's social skills and mental stability in pursuit of arbitrary external markers of prestige without guilt.

Birds do it, bees do it.

Even privately educated fleas do it.

Well, so, I mean, in summary, Al, I mean, we're looking at the natural world by comparison with humanity.

We've basically got aggressive males speaking

over women.

We've got rats basically going to drive-thrus, which is bad.

I just can't wait for Fast and the Furious 13.

We've got bees taking up accountancy under the threat of death.

I mean, it's, but they're basically, we're on a level with them at the moment.

So let's turn to the human world.

And, well, we've delayed this as long as possible in this show.

I mean, Brexit was due to get get done yeah trademark next Thursday the 31st of October Boris Johnson has had to postpone this he has not made use of the ditch as of yet

we await next Thursday with trepidation I mean I'm leaving the country

Brexit is essentially a long-running political snuff movie box set and it has flubbled regurgitated and dickheaded its way through another week of pretty much nothing in a week is a long time in politics as uh the labour prime minister harold wilson once said uh of course the science suggests that a week in politics is in fact exactly the same length as a week in any other realm including reality hip-hop microbiotic research tennis endoscoby professional endurance picnicking and timekeeping but it's just i think the effect of politics makes time seem like it goes a f a lot more slowly when you see the same thing almost on an endless repeat this has has been another classic week of the uniquely Brexitataceous cocktail of chaos and stasis that we have in Britain.

Now, under Theresa May, her stasis produced chaos, whereas Boris Johnson has somehow flipped reverses

and his chaos has produced stasis.

Happy, happy times, but he has still not used the ditch.

I'm going on strike, Andy.

I refuse to write another Brexit joke until Brexit happens or doesn't happen.

Wait, so you're going on strike?

Because also, there has been a threat this week that the government is going to go on strike if Labour doesn't give them a general election.

So, are we now in a position where the government is going on strike and the people who are making fun of the government are going, like, is this what's gonna

happen?

Are we just about to enter a period in which the government does nothing, no one makes jokes about it, and we all just sit there in silence?

Mish, I think you've just nailed Utopia in the face.

Just sit there in silence while a loud bird goes honk.

Honk.

I think that should be the new constitution for this country.

Yeah, I mean, let's clear up a couple of things.

The ditch that Andy keeps referring to is the ditch Boris Johnson said he would rather be found dead in than not deliver Brexit on October the 31st.

And there seems to be some surprise that Boris Johnson may now be about to go back on his promise.

But that is what he does.

The man is a ceaseless fountain of mendacity.

He is a perpetual motion machine of bullshit.

Like, at this point, if he said today was Friday, I would assume it was Sunday.

He's lied about everything from whether he was going to deliver Brexit to the fact that he was planning on sticking to his marriage vows.

I'm not sure why

we're still surprised about this.

And the particular stasis that we're now referring to is that Boris Johnson has essentially had to accept that he has to accept a Brexit extension, but he is now trying to push for a general election on December the 12th.

However, the Labour Party do not want to give him that election because of fears they have that he's going to use it to try and sneak through a a no-deal Brexit.

Meanwhile, the EU is saying that they can't give us an extension until they work out when the election is going to be.

And we won't work out when the election is going to be until the EU is going to.

And I

and yeah,

I'm having a nosebleed, and I think it's my brain trying to escape my face.

Well, there's the problem ever since Boris Johnson was released from the parable in which he's the guard who always lies.

He's been trying to get out of this situation where he can't deliver on any of the promises he makes, but also none of the promises he makes are promises he should be making in the first place.

He did manage to have his first win in Parliament,

in which Parliament approved his brilliant stroke awful deal.

But crucially, not to be passed in three days, because Parliament, the pedantic busybody that it is, actually wanted to examine what was in the deal before signing it off for all eternity to shape the lives of the unborn to whom it was bequeathed by the loving votes of their great-grandparents.

By this point, presumably, the EU are just basically checking the small print of all the various treaties we've signed over the years to see if they can just sell us to South America in exchange for an equivalent area of rainforest to be hauled across the Atlantic and tagged onto Portugal.

Has it been described as a zombie parliament now?

I mean, the difference being that zombies get shit done, don't they?

Within their limited scope of ambition.

Also, that they're attracted to brains rather than.

I mean, Jacob Reese Mogg has been a grey-faced mother for some years

it would not surprise me to learn that he died in 1936

that recently

yeah it's uh it's rumbling on it does look like we're not going to leave on october the 31st although we are waiting for official confirmation from the eu uh for when that happens uh the government it's worth noting as much as these things are passing

sort of at a rate of nuts it is worth noting that the government did spend a hundred million pounds on an advertising campaign about us getting ready for Brexit on October the 31st.

And this is, you know, this is in the year in which Boris Johnson's predecessor told a nurse that there was no more money available for the NHS because there was no magic money tree.

Just the sobering figure.

And if you really want to bring it home, we have spent money on an advertising campaign for something that isn't going to happen that constitutes half a Marvel movie.

And I cannot think of any way of making that point more soberingly.

I mean, it was very exciting for me.

I encountered this advertisement in my Twitter feed, this ad for you should get your business ready for Brexit things, and these are the forms you may have to fill in.

And it was a beautiful thing to witness, the comments section in which there was literally no division.

There were just hundreds and hundreds of people telling the government to go f itself.

And

if it takes that to bring this nation together,

good news for Boris Johnson, though, though, is he has managed to really establish an unassailable lead in the battle for the title of most infantile prime minister in British history.

I mean, admittedly,

it was pretty much over that battle the day that Johnson surfed into 10 Downing Street on a tidal wave of Tory internecine vomit.

But even more so this week.

And bear in mind, this is quite an impressive title, actually, to get the title of most infantile leader Britain has ever had.

Given that Henry VI became King of England aged eight months,

and Mary Queen of Scots became, well, Queen of Scots, aged six days.

Good enough, you're old enough.

What were you doing when you were six days old?

I was king baby already.

I was enjoying having a foreskin.

Those were the days.

How long did you hold on to that bad boy for?

It couldn't last.

I think gone by the end of the weekend.

Johnson was forced by law, by the Ben Act, to write a letter to the EU asking for an extension after failing to railroad his Brexit deal through Parliament

in the timescale he wanted.

So he did, he wrote this letter, but then didn't sign it

and sent another letter saying that he disagreed with his first letter.

which I think is possibly the most childish political act in Britain since Churchill sneaked a whoopee cushion under Neville Chamberlain's arse in Parliament in 1939.

And you could almost, you could hear the cabal of clods at at the heart of the Johnson junta just sniggering to themselves.

We're not going to send the letter, but we're not going to sign it.

And democracy just dying, not just inside this time, but outside as well.

He also pulled out of his scheduled meeting with the Commons Liaison Committee, one of the most important committees in the Commons, I'm reliably informed by the internet.

And he did so by an essentially illegible hand-scrawled letter.

And I think he's the only person I've ever come across who's got worse handwriting than I have, which is kind of reassuring.

He's been accused of avoiding scrutiny by many, including some in his own party.

I guess the answer to that is what good does scrutiny do when the results only upset people?

Tory MP Patrick McLaughlin said no, he's not avoiding scrutiny because he's held up to scrutiny at Prime Minister's questions every week.

Now, the difference is that this was

essentially a cross-examination involving leaders of the various Commons committees asking detailed questions.

Prime Minister's questions is half an hour of scripted bleating involving superficial anti-answers and counter-twattery in response to opposition questions and delusionist auto-obsequiositudes in response to fawningly lick spittle splattered pseudo questions from his own team.

So I'm not sure it is really the level of scrutiny we want.

Andy, I'll thank you to not quite directly from reviews of my television show.

And now he's basically threatened to go on strike, as you said.

So not

basically throwing toys out of the pram.

Those toys of course being the exact toys that he had previously claimed were on his Christmas list as he demanded that Parliament took back control.

What's funny about it is that I'd forgotten about the letters.

Like, I genuinely, because if you know, it's less than a week ago, but so much more has happened again this week with the sort of back and forth.

But there was supposed to be, everything was supposed to be resolved on Super Saturday.

Then Oliver Letwin brought an amendment forward, again, requiring the government just to show a little bit of their working.

And so, in response, they pulled the bill.

And then again, this week, there was supposed to be another key vote, but the government has again pulled the bill in face of them possibly losing it, despite the fact that MPs did vote for the first measure, which was just to have a look at what was going on.

So essentially we just had a week of relentless news.

It's the perfect Brexit week because there's been a week of just relentless news and yet no progress has actually been made.

And at this point Brexit is the equivalent.

in politics of a spin class in that it's loud annoying seems largely to consist of white people shouting and in the end regardless of effort no one actually moves forward

and importantly a lot of spin.

There was some good news for the government in that the BBC had to apologise to Home Secretary Pretty Patel after Andrew Maher accused her of laughing during an interview about the impact of Brexit.

Now, the BBC then had to acknowledge that she hadn't actually laughed.

That was just her face.

So the BBC basically had to acknowledge that she was not laughing at the struggles of the poor.

She just has a natural face that looks like it is suppressing a laugh about the struggles of the poor.

Um, or is she Jack Nicholson's joker?

So, so yes, she's so she wasn't laughing, she just looked like she was about to laugh, but she does that.

Oh, there's that kind of no, I can't believe I'm doing this job either, Smirk, or the holy shit, I don't know why more people don't have 14 clandosine-off-the-book meetings with Israeli politicians while they're on holiday.

It seems to give you a career a real boost kind of grin.

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, neglecting the fact that that's not how gravity works.

Trump peachment, latest news now.

And well, a very exciting week in

the progress towards or away from the impeachment of Donald Trump.

Republicans stormed into an impeachment hearing and refused to leave for hours.

I mean, it's starting to make Boris Johnson look mildly grown up in the way he's conducting

his politics.

Essentially, they've given up on trying to prove that Donald Trump is not at least 200% guilty of everything and so they're just trying to prevent stuff from happening Which is like a child delaying its bedtime yeah absolutely all of the complaints this week have been to do with the secretive nature of proceedings not the actual substance of the allegations themselves Lindsey Graham who's a very prominent Trump ally and gutless magazine's man of the millennium has actually said I'm not here to tell you that Donald Trump's done nothing wrong.

That's a full sentence from a man who's clearly never heard of the phrase double negative, which was also Andrew Zaltzmann's wrestling name.

He's not going to not lay the SmackDown.

I was a double actor, John, and I did years ago.

This all happened after one of America's most senior diplomats gave a testimony about Trump's alleged dealings with Ukraine.

They put the A into incriminating and the E into obviously guilty.

And yeah, because of that, the Trump impeachment inquiry, like my stomach after I ate some suspect Peruvian street food, rumbles on.

But the protest was incredible because they sort of stood outside shouting, let me in.

And if we took the attitude of the Republican Party to people who stand outside something saying, let me in, they would all have been rounded up and sent to a concentration camp.

And their children sold.

Yeah.

But then once they were in there, they sort of sat in.

There are about 30 of them.

They disrupted the hearing and then they ordered fast food.

And could they have conducted that protest in a manner more befitting of their country's worst attributes, unless they had been firing handguns into the air and watching episodes of the sitcom ALF?

I just want to say one more thing about Donald Trump.

I just want to say right now that Donald Trump's only crime is loving crimes.

And if that is a crime, then lock him up.

Tech news now, and exciting news from Australia, Alice.

It's rain and lies.

Hallelujah.

Entrepreneur David Miles has been criticized for promising technology to drought-stricken farmers, saying that he can make it rain.

He's been piloting his scheme with a small private group of farmers in Wimera, and they have signed an agreement that they will pay him $50,000 if they get the rain.

On his website, he claims this technology can create a bridge in the space-time continuum to model the weather 10 days into the future and then apply small amounts of energy to bring about the desired outcome through, quote, the butterfly effect, end quote.

He's fully under criticism because what he's saying is obviously absolute dangerous nonsense, and he's giving false hope to people in desperate straits.

But the thing that I enjoy most about it is that he says, the thing is, we've found a way to link a model of the near-future weather with an actual flight corridor of approaching weather, as though he thinks weather is an aeroplane that you can just flag

to the crops.

Various people in the government and various people in the farming lobby have said that one of the problems with his technology is that nowhere has he explained the actual physical device or method by which he promises to do this.

And in one section of his website, he has claimed it uses electromagnetic scalar waves, which University of Melbourne Associate Professor of Physics Martin Sevier says don't exist.

Still, I mean, he's still a few steps ahead of the Brexit campaign, I think.

Well, that does sound like some of Boris Johnson's tech solutions to the Irish border, which I think at this point are someone's going to come up with a workable stargate within the next 10 years.

I mean, this man, Mr.

Miles, has just a way with words that is truly astonishing.

When asked what the device does, he says it is a device.

And when asked where it is, he says, I can say openly, we're currently hidden in plain sight because we haven't raised the capital to fund a proper facility.

This is a man who needs to immediately be elected to the office of Prime Minister.

It's quite impressive that after all these years, we've managed to come up with a worse system than sacrificing an ox to the gods.

That was another one of Boris Johnson's tech solutions.

I mean, the only redemptive feature is that it's a no-pay, no-play situation, in that if rain does not arrive, the farmers are not forced to pay him, in part because then they wouldn't have any money to pay him with.

Unfortunately, I would suggest that possibly if it does rain, it would have rained anyway, and he doesn't deserve $50,000.

Well, I think it's good that this guy's working the space-time continuum to help farmers, because our farmers for too long have just been relying on EU handouts rather than the space-time continuum.

Tech solutions.

This is what they've talked about.

They've held us back.

The EU has been blocking the British time travel industry.

It's been a bad week all around for tech entrepreneurs because Mark Zuckerberg was also hauled in front of a congressional committee for questioning.

You know, it's just really disappointing that the guy who founded a website to compare women's appearances to farm animals was not the upstanding moral citizen we thought he was.

Watching a lot of that footage, especially of Alexandra Ecasio-Cortez cross-examining Mark Zuckerberg, I've realized that there is real mileage mileage in Pornhub opening a new category that is just people facing consequences.

I would absolutely ceaselessly beat myself off to footage of Mark Zuckerberg having to sit uncomfortably whilst faced with the consequences of his own dog shit policies.

I mean, Mark Zuckerberg should take a page out of the book of this entrepreneur who's been promising rain because when he was asked on how his device worked, he pointed out a 48-page white paper, which which also doesn't explain how it works.

Google, meanwhile, has claimed that its quantum computer, which uses quantum stuff instead of

other stuff,

did a magic sum in just three minutes that would take the world's cleverest normal computer 10,000 years to do.

IBM in response called bullshit on Google, but who cares?

10,000 years versus three minutes is way cooler, so let's assume it's true.

Quantum computers work by anyone?

I don't think so.

Absolutely no idea.

I glazed over and halfway through the first paragraph.

My parts of this week's bugle have been written by Google's new quantum computer, and it took just eight hours to write.

Whereas usually it requires a sweatshop full of 200 children a whole week to churn this stuff out for me.

So I guess that's progress.

Computer games news and Lady Gaga.

Wow, that is a whole list of words you have no fing clue about.

Lady Gaga has said that she doesn't know what Fortnite is.

Lady Gaga, of course, is the daughter, as you would assume from her name, of the former First Lady of the USA, Lady Bird Johnson

and the Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, who of course were secretly interbred in a laboratory in the 1960s as part of a Cold War bridge building treaty that was supposed to involve Judy Garland being blasted into space with hardline communist pin-up and foreign minister Andrei Gromyko.

I love history.

And now that you've explained who Lady Gaga is, why don't you explain what Fortnite is, I think.

Fortnite.

Obviously,

there's various different theories on what Fortnite is,

including

that it's a very useful term to help you remember how to start setting up the pieces on a chessboard.

The ideal length for Brexit.

It's an entry in the 12th century Sultan and anti-crusader activist Saladin's diary, Monday, Fortnite.

It's also, some people think it's a breed of magic pig that shits marshmallows but is sometimes racist.

Or it's a computer game in which players fight to be the last player alive.

Or is that the world in general?

It's very hard to tell

these days.

I've got to be honest with you, I'd like to apologise to you because when you did the chess joke there, I was like, he's got nowhere to go from here and i really underestimated you

uh so have you played fortnite i i have seen it be i've seen my young cousins play fortnite and it's like i can't really track what's happening if i'm honest like i can't really fully grasp what's happening do your kids play fortnite no my son plays minecraft and fortnite has been described as uh a cross between the hit world-making game Minecraft, the Battle of Ypres, the Old Testament, and a barn full of foxes dressed as chickens.

I thought you were writing video games with the insult on.

It has been described as that by me just now.

I've never played it.

I don't really understand why you would play it when you can just watch reruns of old test matches on YouTube, each of their own, and I am very much on my own.

It involves, apparently, a world in which a massive storm has wiped out 98%

of the world's population and zombie-like creatures have risen to attack the remainder.

Now, are we sure this isn't one of those games where what happens in the game becomes reality, as happens in films?

I mean, is this some kind of Jumanji type situation that is just unfolding?

When I was younger, we sort of played, video games felt like quite an escapist entertainment.

I mean, either you were sort of pretending to be a footballer winning a World Cup, or you're sort of pretending to be an Italian plumber who jumped on dinosaurs' heads for gold coins.

But I'm worried that video games now seem too close to the real world, and children are going to play Fortnite and then move on to a game that's basically centered around America's crisis of private debt.

To play the game,

I mean, I've no idea, but I think

you have to press X and Y in quick succession and then spacebar to jump.

Or is it cursor keys to move and then spacebar to kick it towards the goal?

I don't know, but

it's something like that.

And I think the only person in this room who's played a video game against Andy Zaltzman, I would say that that is a

more technical explanation.

Can I just quickly ask, what was the circumstance that involved you two playing video games against Isaiah?

That was her audition for the the beauty

i built him i beat him in donkey kong junior which is a maths game yeah oh yeah i know that game

yeah the maths i didn't have a problem with the maths let's put it this way i am very bad at video games and i beat andy zaltzman easily

well that's video games and maths zaltzman you really weren't playing to your strengths was there no test cricket manager available

i did used to play that as a kid

There are new versions of Fortnite Imminent, including we're following from Fortnite Creative, which is a new one, I think.

Fortnite Tax Haven, in which players compete to create the most deregulated offshore financial centre, thus destabilizing the entire global economy.

Fortnite Telegraph, in which players have to create an edition of the Daily Telegraph, so vitriolic that all other players spontaneously gouge their own eyes out to prevent them ever reading anything again.

The American version, Fortnite Fox News, of course.

Fortnite Rugby, in which players have to develop a new version of rugby that's so brutal that only one player is left standing at the end.

Which, not that far off.

And Fortnite Zaltzmann at Soho, in which players can go onto the Soho Theatre's website and buy tickets for my end-of-year review show.

The certifiable history, also featuring Alice, very much now established as as much of a Christmas and New Year tradition as Christmas New Year, and the creeping sensation of time passing irretrievably by, and the prospect of decline and oblivion hoving gradually closer into view.

Well, we will be back next week

recording on Friday, the day after Brexit was supposed to have happened.

I'm just about the fifth time we've recorded the day after Brexit was supposed to have happened

with the latest news from this ridiculous planet.

Until then, goodbye.

What are the dates of your Soho run?

A good point.

16th of December to the 4th of January.

Great.

On and off.

I'm obviously not doing Christmas.

Bye, everyone.

I just thought I'd quickly help Andy with

having mentioned them and they're just not giving any more information.

Do you have anything to plug?

No, that's why I'm trying to help you guys.

That's why.

Is that the ending you're going for?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, just tag it on the end.

Just tag it on the end.

I think the ending should be you saying, is that the ending you're going for?

To conclude today's show, here are some lies about our premium level voluntary subscribers.

Music, please.

Michael Swift came to the conclusion that the significant difference between Donkey Kong and Don Quixote emphasizes the need to enunciate clearly right through to the very end of each sentence and or word.

This realization came after a very disappointing, if educational, children's party.

Given the overuse of the word awesome in today's world, Bayorn Leonard wonders what will happen if people ever have to confront something that does genuinely fill them with awe.

We've left ourselves nowhere to go linguistically, complains Bayorn, leaving us vulnerable to impressive aliens.

Returning to the theme of Olympic sports that need a shake-up, Alex Adam thinks that if swimming is allowed to give out medals for less efficient forms of movement such as breaststroke and butterfly, then road cycling's grand tour should follow suit, the Vuelta de España should be a three-week unicycle race, and the Giro d'Italia should be raced on children's tricycles.

Always on the lookout for sport improvements, Ben Harvey is not sold on archery as an Olympic event in its current form, and would be much more interested if it involved galloping on horseback, trying to pick off guards on the roof of a castle.

Dan Milburn sometimes feels pity for the person who invented the scissor, but never realized that it needed to be paired with another scissor to reach its full gadgetary potential.

Ori Enav thought that the Art Deco movement had been named after a man called Arthur de Courcheval, who, assumed Hurri, was a Frenchman obsessed with geometric streamlined forms.

Similarly, Horry's fellow art non-aficionado Ed Hockey lived long under the misapprehension that Quentin Bismarck had invented cubism and that the most influential art agent in 15th century Europe was Frenchman Renaissance.

Emily Yeats is not ashamed to join this cavalcade of people who misunderstood the names of genres of art and admits that she thought that dadaism was so-called because the artists would unveil their latest pieces from under a big cloth with a proud dada!

This This is becoming an absolute parade of artistic confusion because Ross McIntyre thought Rococo was a genre sponsored by the 18th century Yorkshire-based building corporation, the Rotherham Construction Company.

And not to be outdone or indone even, Steve Seale thought faux vists had been so named by influential New Zealand art critic Molloch Sneads because they were painters who wore knock-off fake t-shirts or faux vists.

Nick Hornby shares the bafflement of the last few lied-about subscribers, having assumed that futurism was so named because it did not appeal to people from any other country apart from that of the artists in question, hence few tourists.

Yes, and finally, Neha Sami thought pop art was the equivalent of dad dancing and that Dot van Georges Surat had copied his distinctive painting style from his girlfriend, a woman who invented the Madonna-style conical bra called Pointy Lids.

Here endeth this week's Lies.

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.