Bugle 4126 - Silk and Linen

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4126 of the world's most trustworthy source of untrustworthiness, the Bugle.

I am Andy Zoltzmann and joining me in the audio pages of this week's audio newspaper are no time Nobel Prize winner Alice Fraser.

I mean that's that's got a sting hasn't it like that basically makes you a de facto warmonger

yes Andy I'm I'm inventing weapons of mass destruction as we speak right good also joining us from India it's the Mumbai monsoon mopper himself Anuvab Pal.

Hello Andy, hello Alice.

Hello Anubab.

How's the monsoon season been for you this?

You understand it's very much like the party conference season here in that it's now coming to an end and has left behind a bit of a mess.

And everyone involved is suspiciously moist.

Well, at least your Brexit situation has an end.

It appears the Indian monsoon does not.

And maybe we need to meet with Janclude Juncker and the European Union and shake hands to end this monsoon.

Because

our monsoon was supposed to end Andy Alice in the month of August.

We are now in October and it's still pouring rain.

So if you have any solutions for us, for me specifically

I'm all yours I mean if the sky is crying and this works on my on my niece tell it sternly to stop

behave yourself or we won't read a book that's what works for me so does it work on the sky have you ever tried it yes that's why there's such a strong drought situation in Australia We are recording on the 18th of October.

This week, we celebrate 12 years a podcast.

The bugle was born 12 years ago during the business end of the 2007 Rugby World Cup, of course, when a series of phone calls between me and John Oliver, in which we innocently discussed global events, were hacked by News International and published online.

My memory's a little hazy of those times.

Now, 12 years on, and almost, and this really puts in perspective how long this podcast has been going, almost every dog that was alive to curl up at its owner's feet and listen to that first episode is dead.

Thank you, Time.

You dog slaying shithead.

Someone is listening to this show now whose dog digested day.

Well, yeah, I'm aged 12.

Well, Andy, for the 12th-year anniversary of a wedding, the traditional wedding gifts are silk and fine linen.

Well,

isn't it lucky I put my special pants on this morning?

And, Andy, if we are doing that kind of analysis, in 12 years, India's had seven prime ministers.

I mean, in 12 years, Australia's had about 48, so I don't know.

Yeah, I'm not sure necessarily the world is better or worse than it was.

I certainly think it's.

We've contributed to the overall sum of human ignorance.

I think we can at least claim that.

Today is also 168 years since Moby Dick was published.

So you and Moby Dick share an anniversary.

That's, I mean, that is perfect.

Just a grumpy old man chasing something that doesn't exist.

In which one of the two main characters is much bigger than the other.

Well, anyway, since that, 168 years ago, humans have developed the car, the aeroplane, the space rocket, the internet, the fidget spinner, and the macarena.

What the f have Wales done?

We're winning.

We are winning the evolutionary race.

Take that, Herman Melville.

Interestingly, on Moby Dick,

the opening sentence, call me Ishmael, originally it was call me maybe.

I would have gone with initially that sentence had a comma in it, call me Ishmael.

It was just a very long, like angry break-up note, call me.

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

This week, the party conference season here, as mentioned, has tragically come to an end in the UK.

The Scottish National Party concluded their conference.

They opted not to go with a we're better off clinging to a sclerotic Tory England vibe this year for whatever reason.

So, in the bin, a commemorative 2019 UK party conference season pull-out section to keep on your coffee table for the rest of time.

Party conference season, of course, that most beautiful time of year, that time of year that makes you think that full automation of all jobs, particularly politicians, simply cannot come soon enough.

The time of year when professional fact-checkers wake up every morning after three hours' sleep screaming, I fing hate my life.

Party conference, the place where people go to trade their rare Thatcher trading cards.

Happy times.

One of the trademarks of party conference season, of course, is politicians giving a terrible speech and then their colleagues unconvincingly praising them for that speech, despite the fact they patently think they're deranged and/or evil, saying, Well, I thought it was a really good speech.

But giving a speech at a party conference season, that is a low bar.

Hannibal Lecter could give a speech at a COP party conference, and the delegates would be nodding to each other, saying, Well, he had some excellent ideas.

And I found the bit about his lifelong commitment to veganism particularly inspiring.

So we have the nominations for this year's Party Conference Season Awards as hotly contested as ever.

Categories including least coherent speech, very competitive.

Most brazenly hypocritical lack of self-awareness.

Very good luck to the awards panel for narrowing that down.

Who the f am I kidding?

It's pretty Patel's taking it home.

Beating her is like beating Nadal on clay at the French Open.

And also, perhaps the most interesting

category for the prizes this year, the speaker who most looked like they just had their own face surgically removed like in the film Face Off and then reattached back to their own head before trying to do a smile without making children scream too much.

And the showdown between Dominic Robb and Matt Hancock in that category has been a classic for the ages.

In India, when we have party conferences, we have two major parties, and when the leader, the main leader, shows up, there is a ceremonial garlanding of the main leader.

And the garlanding takes place by all party members to a point where the leader is essentially engulfed under piles of flour.

Bookes.

Is there some sort of deification of a Labour or Conservative leader like that?

Like when Boris Johnson comes out, is he garlanded continuously by about 5,000 people to a point where he's buried under the weight of flour?

Well, I think in his own imagination he is.

You can just tell that from the look on his face.

Traditionally, there's sufficient backstabbing within parties in the UK that what happens is half the party tries to drown the leader and the other half tries to burn them as a witch.

But they cancel each other out, so you just get a slightly

steamy leader.

Thank you.

This is the insight I live for.

Thank you.

It's a fact.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week, world on literal and or virtual fire news.

Which is going to burn us to a crisp first?

Reality or metaphor?

Political events or the environment?

It is getting increasingly easy, Alice and Anivab, to think these days that the first fish that climbed out of the sea, all those years ago with a crazy pipe dream of growing some legs, not being eaten by a shark, and gradually evoluting the shit out of itself, might have made a catastrophic error of judgment.

This week has seen more

disasters unfolding.

In particular, the situation in the Kurdish area of northern Syria or Kurdistan, depending on which side of the coin you're approaching it from.

Donald Trump has pulled off the quite extraordinary feat of becoming an irresponsible war monger without actually mongering the war himself.

When he's achieved with one, you know, a couple of crazy phone calls and letters, what it took George W.

Bush years and months of planning to achieve.

I mean, the letter.

Shall we start with the letter?

Let's start with the letter, yes.

Have you read this letter, Andy?

Well, yeah, I mean, it's always nice to see.

I mean, letter writing is an art that has fallen from

prominence.

It was dated the 9th of October.

It was sent after the US troops had been pulled out of Syria by Trump and he told Erdogan well a number of extraordinary things in the letter including don't be a tough guy, don't be a fool, which does sound like I mean a line from a kind of 60s Motown song.

Yeah, I mean that is something that I would sing at karaoke.

I mean the thing I find most charming about this whole situation is that Trump is writing letters.

He's genuinely so much on his own plane of reality that I'm constantly surprised when he does anything even vaguely normal.

You know, he's the kind of guy you'd expect to be surprised by paper or

have an inexplicable vendetta against ink.

The man is afraid of stairs, for God's sake.

Stares and facts.

Those are his two major fears.

And sharks.

Stares and facts and sharks.

I am not.

That's another classic song.

It was a carpenter's, wasn't it?

I'm not surprised by the language of the letter.

His big appeal to the voters was that he was going to bring

his strong background and 90s business ethic to the role of president.

I guess they just didn't think about what being a big real estate mogul/slash/con man in the 90s actually involved.

I'm surprised by people who are still surprised when he treats international diplomacy as anything different from business conducted in a dark cellar while your counterparty tries not to let their attention drift to the meat hooks over your left shoulder.

Democratic Congressman Mike Quigley said, I actually thought it was a prank or a joke that it couldn't possibly come from the Oval Office.

It sounds all the world like the President of the United States in some sort of momentary lapse just dictated angrily whatever was on the top of his head, which is obviously biased Democratic bullshit.

This is not a momentary lapse.

It is a long-term sphinctral prolapse where Trump's hindbrain has herniated through the quivering muscular membrane of his undertoned self-control and is now throbbing bulbously in the open air for all of of the diplomatic community to see.

Well, I think that is an image that none of us are ever going to fully get out of our brains.

As always, Andy, Alice, I have questions about world diplomacy.

And here's one on Turkey.

Well, it's a two-parter.

The letter, Alice,

it did say,

Trump's letter did say, don't be a fool.

I will call you later.

And I think that, you know, a certain degree of informality is quite lovely, especially when nuclear weapons are involved.

Like, Andy, if I was to hold forth on the genuine prowess of Indian fast bowling in cricket in the 1980s, I think you would respond with, don't be a fool, I will call you later.

Yes.

I would absolutely, with all due respect to Kappledev.

Yes.

I would definitely do that.

And my second question is, we we need to spend a second talking about Recip Tayib Erdogan.

I hope I'm pronouncing this correctly, the great leader of Turkey.

And he said when he started the small Kurdish invasion that he is a peace-loving healer.

And given what he's done currently in sort of Eurasian politics,

him being a peace-loving healer is like saying the eruption of Mount Vesuvius caused a slight inconvenience to the residents of Bahai.

Yeah, I mean, it's a healer in the same way as, you know, you go to an acupuncture clinic and the acupuncturist comes out with eight chainsaws saying you won't feel a thing.

So that's only because he's going to cut your head off first.

Trump said to Erdogan in the letter, let's work out a good deal.

Exclamation mark, you don't want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people.

And that, frankly, is a naive assumption to make of Recip Erdogan.

History, says Donald Trump, will look upon you you favourably if you get this done the right and humane way.

It doesn't feel exactly clear exactly what that would involve.

It will look upon you forever, continued Trump, as the devil, if good things don't happen.

History for Donald Trump is very much a binary thing, isn't it?

Yes, and I think he's right when he says you don't want to be responsible, but he's left out the held from that sentence.

You don't want to be held responsible.

That's such an important word in these things i mean also history doesn't even look upon the devil as the devil these days so quite what it'll think of erdogan i'm like anyway erdogan's probably thinking

history will consider me the devil that sounds like a f load of documentaries i mean if you read paradise lost the devil's quite hard in that

well

do not tell my school english teacher but that is a big fing if

um

it turns out you can uh the old york notes are pretty pretty handy when it came to those things um turkish presidential sources apparently told the BBC that Erdogan received the letter, rejected it and put it, where buglers?

I said they're going where?

That's right.

He did his own section in the bin.

He put a letter from Donald Trump in the bin

where it belongs.

It's a very confusing situation and a ceasefire has now been struck and if history teaches us nothing else, it is that ceasefires in the Middle East are never ever broken apart from every previous instance of ceasefires happening.

Yeah, I mean, within the ceasefire, there are many complicated things happening.

The whole situation needs sort of bar charts and graphs and flowcharts to explain it.

But one of the things that drew my attention was that Australia has ruled out retrieving about 46 Australian women and children who fled ISIS territory and are being held at the Al-Hal refugee camp in northern Syria near the area of Turkish operation.

These Australian citizens will remain in these refugee camps during the ceasefire because Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said the situation remains too dangerous to send Australian troops or officials.

He's blaming the parents of the children for taking them into danger.

And it's, I think, really good to know that whether it's our own citizens or people arriving on boats, the official Australian government stance remains f them.

No, seriously,

them right up the hoop.

I like that our government is happy to leave Australian children in a situation that is, quote, too dangerous to send soldiers into.

It makes it feel just so nice, doesn't it?

It's also quite lovely and I want to know what you guys think that in the age of you know where a missile can get from Istanbul to deep inside Kurdish territory in about 12 seconds, Donald Trump is still writing handwritten letters and probably delivering them by pigeon.

I think Trump should be encouraged to use increasingly primitive forms of communication.

You know, he's gone from Twitter, wean him off Twitter, move him to letters, wean him off letters, move him to chiseling things onto slabs of stone.

And move him off that into sticking him in a f ⁇ ing cage

with some mud.

Draw that elk and f off.

He apparently had something of a meltdown or Nancy Pelosi had something of a meltdown depending on whether you are Donald Trump or everyone else in the universe.

It was at a meeting

in the White House and it got pretty competitive.

Trump said to Nancy Pelosi, I hate ISIS more than you do.

And that's a strange thing to get competitive about, given that one assumes neither of them's much of a fan.

It's very hard to quantify, though, isn't it, Alice?

I mean, how much do you hate ISIS?

I mean, I don't know.

I've never tried to quantify that.

I think if you put it into cricket bats and sent it to the moon.

Oh, nice callback.

Quite a lot.

Right.

Well,

I'd be three cricket bats more than you, so I hate ISIS more than you, which makes you a terrorist sympathiser.

I mean,

it's so hard to quantify exactly how much each of them hates ISIS.

I mean, Trump clearly hates them so much that he wants to facilitate their regrowth by creating the instability on the ground that he's achieved, so that he has more of them to hate.

So, whereas Nancy Pelosi has done nothing to bring ISIS back from the dead.

Well, this is an interesting thing.

Trump's meltdown was in response to a bipartisan condemnation of his decision to order the withdrawal of American troops from northeast Syria.

People are suggesting that it's an abandonment of the Kurds, who are one of US's main allies in the fight.

I sort of, I don't know how I feel about it.

He said that it's time to get the US out of, quote, endless wars.

As a Buddhist kid and a big fan of non-war, I agree with Trump on principle with two questions.

One, if you want to get out of wars, why do you keep giving money to the military?

And B, the biggest exacerbator of increasing territorial conflict at the moment is crop failure due to climate change.

And if you don't want billions of people fighting over land and resources, you maybe want to stop pretending science isn't real.

I know that's not very funny, but why don't you just replay that bit while imagining at the same time there's a cute fat puppy excitedly dragging an oversized novelty dildo around a fancy dinner party while a slightly flustered middle-aged house husband chases him around going, Drop that, Roger, bad puppy, and apologizing to his guests.

That was my house last night.

I just have a quick question.

Nancy Pelosi, guys, she left that press conference, and she left that meeting with Trump and gave a press conference.

And she said, Every day I pray for the president and his family.

Now I'll start praying for his mental health.

Do you think that this is the sort of thing bipartisan politics should be talking about?

That the opposition leaves and says, I think the man we met is mad.

People have done proper scientific studies of his mental health, I think, haven't they?

I was reading about this.

Yes, I think there's the sort of a general prohibition on mental health professionals diagnosing someone at a distance.

But I think it's very different when someone is diagnosing someone at a distance if that person is semaphoring their mental illness

with two giant red flags

Brexit news now and it's all over.

Boris Johnson has struck a deal for Brexit.

It's all over apart from the bit where he has to try and get it through Parliament and then the ensuing decades of working out exactly what it involves.

A deal has been struck with the European Union that will be put to Parliament tomorrow as we record.

They finally agreed on the precise size and mechanism of the sledgehammer with which we will crack ourselves in the political and economic nuts.

It's a kind of like an inverse pre-nup, this.

It's like a pre-divorce agreement to live in separate houses and not cut the dog in half.

The nitty-gritty is still

again.

The dog is still Northern Ireland.

A lot of dogs in this podcast.

Boris Johnson tweeted: We've got a great new deal that takes back control.

Now, Parliament should get Brexit done on Saturday so we can move on to other priorities like the cost of living, the NHS, violent crime, and our environment.

Hashtag get Brexit done, hashtag take back control.

Let me translate that into plain English for you.

We've cliché, that's cliché.

Now, Parliament should cliché on cliché, though, so we can cliché to clichés like lie, lie, lie, and lie.

Hashtag cliché, hashtag simultaneous cliché and lie.

As a foreigner, I've been trying to follow this for two years, and it seemed to be quite complicated and impossible.

What did Boris Johnson do in the last 10 days that he was able to get the Europeans to sign this, get the Irish to agree?

What do you think in private rooms he was able to pull off that all these human beings could not for two and a half years?

Well, it's quite hard to answer that without having been there, and I emphatically was not involved in those negotiations.

I mean, I lay that card firmly.

I lay that card firmly on the table.

I mean, there's, you know, the mind does speculate.

It's possible that he just took all his clothes off and said, I'm not putting them back on until you agree to a deal.

It's the most likely way to have got this through.

It is essentially largely the deal that had already been agreed with a few tweaks to it.

And it's obviously impossible to know exactly what this deal actually involves, because depending on your chosen media outlet, it is either an abject catastrophe that will hammer the final cricket stump into the leaking coffin of the UK before slamming the population of Britain in it and catapulting it into the mid-Atlantic, Or it's a heroically jubilant triumph of Britain over our imperial overlords, like the mighty Luxembourg, phoenixed out of thin air by a strategic genius whose apparent f witted venal illegal incompetence has in fact been a clever facade for our one true messiah.

Or it's almost exactly the same as Theresa May's failed deal, but a bit shitter and a bit weirder, but crucially closer to the latest and deadliest deadline yet pending other deadlines.

So it's it's I don't know, possibly one of those three, possibly a mixture of all three of those three, we we don't know.

Anuver, to help you conceptualise the process of the Brexit negotiations, it's sort of like the Olympic torch relay, where in this instance

the Olympic torch is two cupped handfuls of liquid feces

being passed from one politician forward to a next politician as they briefly, you know, it leaks between their fingers, sometimes they have to top it up with a bit of their own.

And Boris Johnson is the last in this very long line of people, and he is the one who is proffering very gently this cupped handful of liquid feces to the bowl of the British people.

Thank you, Philip.

Alice, I will never watch an Olympic opening ceremony the same way ever again.

Yes, just imagine the fire as farts.

Yeah, and it does look like that certainly the younger generation of Britain may well end up, if we can continue on the Olympic opening ceremony vibe, very much like the doves at the opening ceremony of the Seoul Olympics in 1988.

And if you haven't seen that, check it on YouTube.

That flame was pretty toasty.

Some estimates have suggested that under this new deal, British people will be on average £2,000 a year worse off.

In more understandable terms, that means no new hubcaps for Jacob Reese Mogg's 1930s Bentley and/or a cheeky little pot below the poverty line for struggling families.

So it's going to work different ways for different people.

The Economist magazine said the proposed deal would be bad for the economy, bad for the union, and bear little relation to what voters narrowly backed in a referendum referendum more than three years ago.

Michael Gove, by contrast, on the radio, informed us that it is in fact what the majority of people in this country want based on his own govic divination of public sentiment.

Now, there is, with all due respect to Michael Gove, which of course is no respect whatsoever, there is a more accurate and reliable way of finding out what the majority of people want than his own hunch, you clatteringly cantankerous cock nugget.

It's a solution so achingly obvious that even Jeremy Corbyn, the Duke of Dither, the Imperator of Indecision, the Pontiff of Political Paralysis, is now almost properly in favour of it.

And that clearly is a second referendum.

There is an extraordinary amount of people telling us what the public thinks and then saying, We cannot let the public tell us what it thinks.

What is happening to this country?

Chris, don't just sit there and do something.

I'm gone.

Oh, he's gone.

I mean, you can call it what you want.

A second referendum, a confirmatory vote, and are you sure you want to go through this non-necessary invasive brain surgery and nose job in which your nose is replaced with a real set of buffalo udders moment?

It's just, how can it not be the correct thing to do?

I mean, these politicians just asserting facts.

I admire it so much.

I am currently putting together my visa application, and I'm so full of imposter syndrome that even asking people to write me letters of recommendation saying I'm okay at my job feels so intensely like I'm asking them for like a false passport so I can go assassinate an archduke.

I genuinely have been looking at Boris Johnson and Michael Gove and all of these fnuckles as an inspiration.

If I had even 1% of their immense self-confidence, I would be an intolerable arrogant f monkey.

Also, applying for a visa to the UK right now feels mildly masochistic, like asking the person who bought their sex skills bar charts to a first date to marry you.

Or getting a cheap discount ticket for the Titanic

on a resale website at the very much the wrong time.

That's it.

If anyone's famous or influential who listens to this podcast and wants to write me a recommendation, please get in touch.

Well, I mean, if you haven't said famous, I'd have been right up for it.

Was it famous or influential?

Yeah.

Sorry, I'm out.

0 for 2.

So depressing.

There are some reasons not to have a second referendum.

One, Nigel will get cross.

Two, there are now only three times as many people in the UK who didn't vote for Brexit as who did vote for Brexit.

Three.

Three times as many.

Now, three is not a very big number.

A billion is a big number.

So let's wait until it's that.

And three, the level of screeching twattery that would be unleashed would possibly make Britain detach from the surface of the earth and flip backwards into space, which is possibly what the hard Brexit has had in mind all along.

My friend recently filled out a long-term UK visa application, and they have a box that says, Do you have opinions on Brexit?

And then it says yes and no, but then it doesn't give you any other space to fill out what that opinion is.

And I think that's quite a nice indicator of how things are, don't you think?

Well, yes.

And I mean, that's

yes and no.

And that is also about the level of detail that we voted on in 2016, so it seems entirely appropriate.

What happens if he can't get it through Parliament on Saturday?

Well,

if he can't get it through Parliament on Saturday, then

there'll probably be another extension and

a general election probably.

Or I don't know if there'll be a referendum.

It's basically it'll just be the unleashing of further chaos.

But also, if it does go through, there will be the unleashing of further chaos.

Yes.

And nobody knows what.

We're going to get further chaos, whatever we want, in these after-chunderings of David Cameron's inanely custard-brained 2016 referendum.

A lot of people are now saying, oh, the MP should now just

back the deal to, quote, end the agony.

Now, this is a term generally used for a dog you're taking for its last trip to the vet or for a granddad for whom you've bought a one-way ticket to Switzerland.

It is not

a term used for something that you have long-term confidence about.

And the logic seems to be that the three years of incompetence we've had from our politicians have been so incompetent that we cannot risk more incompetence, even if the upshot of it is an unexpected outbreak of sense if that makes any sense which it doesn't

it's like making a campaign for your own concert so obnoxious that people buy tickets just to make it stop

well that is a sales pitch i've not entirely tried it

so would this be a bit like sudden death in football so they would keep extending it till they get the vote that they want but just sudden death they just have sudden death possibly literal sudden death but which side's politician is most prepared to get a bit ancient Roman on it and commit ritual suicide for the greater good?

Do I have to propose the Mad Max Thunderdome again?

Blob news now, and a zoo in Paris has put on display a blob.

It's

a a yellow goo entitled Fisarum polycephalum, which translates as many-headed slime, which coincidentally is the Latin name for the species Michael Gove.

It's an organism that has no brain, but apparently 720 different sexes.

Yes.

No binary male and female for the blob.

700 and is that not too much choice?

I mean, it can move without legs or wings.

It can heal itself in two minutes if cut in half.

It looks like a fungus, but acts like an animal.

I think I met a guy like that once.

It's going on display to the public on Saturday.

It has no mouth, no stomach, no eyes, yet it can detect food and digest.

I definitely met that guy once.

Bruno David, the director of the Paris Museum of Natural History, has said, it surprises us because it has no brain but is able to learn.

So it's one up on Donald Trump.

If you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other, which is going to be my new Tinder profile.

It is apparently a slime mold, technically.

It's a yellowish unicellular living being, which, as you say, looks like a fungus but acts like an animal, has no brain and 720 sexes.

The wokest slime in history.

And people are still against Brexit when France is about to flood Britain with yellow idiot blobblets that are horny to the power of 720.

Take back control of our yellow microorganisms.

British, sexually repressed microorganisms that just innocently go about their unicellular business, go to church, and then eventually get found having auto-erotically asphyxiated themselves in a cupboard.

I mean, this is, I mean, 720 sexes, there is already fan fiction being written about how hot that is.

And there's something very French about this, isn't it?

Hugely French.

It's a tiny unicellular organism in a beret.

It is, I mean, it doesn't look spectacular.

As an exhibit at a zoo, it's just, you know, it basically looks like someone sat on a bottle of mustard.

But apparently, the scientists say it is one of the most extraordinary things on Earth today.

It's, you know, it's been in existence for over a billion years, and apparently we still don't really know what it is.

Sometimes, as you said, behaves like an animal.

When times are good, it lives as an individual, believing there is no such thing as society, and it doesn't have a brain.

And light is one of its only foes.

So is it a Tory?

This is the question.

But the evidence against that is that it can heal itself if cut in two.

It comes together in times of crisis and can solve problems by working cohesively and can find its way out of a labyrinth.

So, no, it is definitely

not a Tory.

If I was a restaurateur catering only to blobs, would I need 720 different toilets?

Well, this is one of the questions that the world has been distracted from with all the all the fuss over Brexit and Trump and global warming.

There's toilet facilities for unicellular organisms.

Do unicellular organisms

shit or not?

I mean we'd have to ask it.

Right.

Just merge with it briefly.

Share its knowledge.

Oh, can I just recommend no one Googles blob shit?

Just as a life piece.

Chris, some warnings you don't need.

I mean some warnings I don't need.

You clearly do.

The research I do for this show.

Was Was it last week Spaceship Dildo that I made you do?

It was Spaceship Dildo, yes.

Which you then pointed at in front of a room of 300 people with pride.

And they didn't laugh.

Oh, dear.

I thought he was called Buzz Aldrin.

I have a feeling every single listener right now is googling Blobshit.

I'd like that.

Or Spaceship Dildo.

I'm pretty sure Blobshit was a Shekhars-whacking ice hockey player.

Men news now, and two men have been in the news this week.

Well, more than two, but these two men specifically, Kim Jong-un and the Mayor of Wellington, New Zealand.

Let's start with Kim Jong-un.

He has climbed North Korea's highest mountain on horseback, of course.

Well, what's happened here is a horse has climbed a mountain with a twad on its back.

Well, it just shows how the media can report the same story in different ways.

He has ridden a white horse, no less, up a sacred volcano.

Who does he think he is?

Frodo?

He's ridden his horse.

The volcano was responsible for one of the bangiest eruptions of the past five millennia.

And

it's been described as

an act of political symbolism.

The official state news agency, and this is not any old news agency, it's the official state one, so we think we can trust it, said, having witnessed the great moments of his thinking atop Mount Paiku, all the officials accompanying him were convinced with overflowing emotion and joy that there will be a great operation to strike the world with wonder again.

Which does raise the question, is Donald Trump moonlighting as a copywriter for the North Korean state news agency or are they writing his shit?

Either way

is

not ideal.

What is it with

fascist leaders and horses?

I mean,

why is a horse simultaneously the most macho thing thing that a fascist leader can ride and also

the favourite animal of seven-year-old girls?

Right.

That is a very interesting

psychological quandary you've chanced to have.

You've got Putin shirtless on a horse, you have Richard III going my kingdom for a horse, and you've also got Pony Club Fun Times.

I think actually that was the original version of that death scene in Richard I.

Pony Club Fun Times, anyone!

Sorry, skipper.

We're just going to kill you and bury you under a car park in Leicester.

Mount Paiketu is the sacred mountain of the revolution in North Korea.

I mean, you do have to ask, how much use is a mountain in a revolution?

I mean, have there been many revolutions where people have been gathered together?

Right, we've got the leaflets, the speeches are written, we've got weaponry, public support, and sandwiches.

Shit!

No mountain!

Revolution is off.

We're going to have to just take being suppressed until geology changes.

Kim Jong-un or KJU, very disappointing sequel to KJT, the world champion British heptathlete, Katerina Johnson-Thompson, of course, is the son of Kim Jong-il, now Kim Jong-dead, to be precise,

who was born either in a secret camp on this sacred mountain, Mount Paektu, or 900 kilometers away in Soviet Russia.

Now, obviously, if you've got a choice between whether or you were born in a freezing Soviet city or born on a sacred volcano,

That is not a tough call to make.

That is not a tough call.

Oh, I figured out the metaphorical symbolism.

I figured it out.

Although, oh, so the idea is like the mountain, you know, mountains are the breasts of the earth.

So the mountain is the boob.

And the horse is the penis, which makes Pony Club a lot more disturbing.

Volcanoes are the breasts of the earth.

Yes.

That just shows what a bad mother Mother Nature is.

Drink this.

Oh my god, that is hot.

Shouldn't start smoking at that age, you.

know.

I was going to say, Alistair, what you're suggesting is then every invasion of the Empire had erotic undertones.

Duh.

Seems familiar, Mount Bike.

I'm sure we've mentioned it before on this show.

But how do you think the Bugle would report this story if it were a tabloid only interested in headlines containing wordplays?

Uh-oh.

Well, I think what we'd have to say in that situation would be.

Let me just buckle up first.

Okay.

John, is this situation careering out of control?

If so, how Kim?

The issue is getting complicated.

It's like a jungle.

It's getting Piong the pale.

Oh, yang it all.

The situation is chonjin all the time.

Chonjin is a city in northeast North Korea.

Hey, Kim, if you're listening, Haiju, wish you'd grow up.

Haiju is also a North Korean city.

You loser.

The Yalu River is on the border between North Korea and China.

I tell you, I'm not happy about this.

Amnok is the Korean name for the Yalu River.

And you are to blame.

Andju is another city.

You've been very Silla.

Silla, an ancient Korean kingdom.

Now just you hangol a minute.

Give me one good reason we should let you get away with this.

Hangul is the Korean alphabet.

The yuan is the North Korean currency.

Call me here and say that.

Self-explanatory.

Actually, don't.

I wouldn't want to be Sinuidu in public.

Sinuidu, that's another North Korean city.

Oh, Kim On, you're being a total cult.

You better sling it and fast.

Horiyong now.

Horiyong, that's another city.

This friendship, this friendship daidong the vine.

Daidong, that's a river.

Okay, now bike do you in America, John.

Bike do, that's a big North Korean mountain.

What do you reckon?

See Jong, it wasn't that difficult.

See Jong, that was a 15th century Korean mountain.

So I'll leave it to you now.

Gojong.

Gojong, of course, the first emperor of the Korean Empire.

22 North Korea-based puns, John.

Yes, it's all coming back to be now.

I was listening back then.

Unlike now.

I listen to my episodes like all good listeners.

Many of you not listen to me during

the recording.

Obviously not listening.

Anuvab, you're closer to New Zealand than we are geographically currently, so tell us what's been going on in Wellington.

You know, Andy, as a screenwriter, I find this quite an exciting thing.

The mayor of Wellington has denied

being the puppet of film director and producer Peter Jackson.

So Wellington's new mayor Andy Foster has hit back at suggestions that he is a puppet of Sir Peter Jackson while still

refusing to reveal how much the Lord of the Rings director and his wife Fran Walsh have donated to his campaign.

So I guess what I'm saying is he is definitely a puppet.

of a novel film director and what it does is andy i think alice it opens the door for many film directors to buy many city mares.

And given this podcast reaches out to a lot of people,

I would like to currently offer myself up to be a puppet of Christopher Nolan.

Christopher Nolan, the film director, is shooting in Mumbai currently.

And I would just like to announce that in case he's looking for a puppet, I am available.

I mean, I think this is a ridiculous story.

Of course, the mayor isn't Sir Peter Jackson's puppet.

Peter Jackson doesn't work with puppets.

He uses Wetter Workshop prosthetics and 3D imaging to create the Mare, Andy Circus for incidental characters, and Maori and Pacific Islands for all the orcs and Urakai, which would be racist if they weren't guaranteed work for the next 50 years in every gritty fantasy reboot.

Orcs and Orakai?

So orcs are the orcs,

and Urakai are the big orcs.

They're more orcased than the other.

An American school drama series, the orcs of Urukai.

But what's interesting.

I've just judged the shit out of that.

What's the interesting thing about this is that the total.

Oh my god, I'm going to pitch that.

Oh, Andy, you've just started something terrible.

Sorry, that's really tickled.

I'm still thinking about Shagrat and Gorbag's spin-off buddy movie from the Orcs of Urukai.

Cut this out, Chris.

We are pitching this.

This is going to be the next podcast series.

Shagrat.

Shagrat is an Uruk High who falls out with Gorbag, the Orc.

I think it's also a lot of people.

They've been captured by Shilog the Spider.

All right.

Yeah, Shagrat was a term used about Boris Johnson in a headline on the Daily Mirror.

I think

you guys are just naming my old relatives.

That's what I'm concerned about.

I mean, is it racist if you say it, Anna?

I don't think so.

There's another show you've got to pitch.

If it's not, if I actually have an uncle of that name, I don't think it is.

I don't think that I'm just looking for him.

Right, well, we've overrun.

Chris is looking like he wants to get off and edit the shit out of this.

And pitch the Hawksaburakai.

Don't forget, you can buy tickets to my Soho Theatre show, the end of the year review show, The Certifiable History, which will also be featuring Alice, visa permitting,

from the 16th of December through to the 4th of January, from memory, with a few gaps in between.

Bring all your family and friends along to that.

It's now as much a part of 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.

So do come along to that.

Alice, anything you need to plug?

I'm in Sydney in November and I will be doing various gigs including the Opera House on the 2nd of November.

Go on my Twitter at alliterative to figure out when that sounds massive.

Are you playing the entire Opera House?

I am.

I am.

i'm playing it like a trumpet i'm standing on the top and just blowing down the tube there's no tube

i'm doing a very short spot on a gala thing but uh yeah follow me on twitter i will announce things on there and

well i'm back in the uk for 10 days andy and uh i've finally got a thing called a website uh apparently that's helpful nowadays in the world it's anuvapal.com and there's some shows at the stand in tusco and the dates would be on that website which is my name.

Before we go, Chris, you plugged your new podcast on this show last week and forgot to tell people its name.

Yeah, I had a moment of existential crisis midway through.

You've been hanging around with me too long.

I mean, you've learned my promotional skills by osmosis.

Yeah.

I mean, I've learned.

I mean, my promotional skills have degraded since coming on this podcast, too.

I've just gone down to follow me on Twitter and I'll probably tell you there.

What's it called?

You still haven't said what it's called.

No, I actually was quite tempted to just leave it and forget for another week.

Yeah, it's called Richie Firth Travel Hacker.

Richie Firth Travel Hacker.

That sounds menacing.

I'm downloading it right now.

That sounds like something a police would say into a police reader.

Richie Firth Travel Hacker.

Some alphabet thing.

Anyway.

That's it, Buglers.

Until next time, goodbye.

And now it is time for this week's lies about our Bugle Premium Voluntary Subscribers.

Russell Turbeek had naively assumed that people who collect litter using a grabber were called pickup artists and thought that that job title dignified their work with an element of creativity with which it is seldom credited.

Felix Blix Everberg would like to set up a committee, but is not fixed on what it should be called, what its remit should be, or who would be in it, so he has summoned a group of 15 friends and colleagues to discuss this matter further.

Nigel Waller thinks anyone conducting a marriage proposal via the big screen at a sporting event should be instantly jailed and banned for life from any future romantic relationships.

Any accepted big screen proposals would be rendered void by law.

Arthur Moll would add that if marriage proposals have become deemed acceptable at sporting events, then so should dumpings dumpings and divorces.

In fact, thinks Arthur these would actually be far more entertaining for the rest of the crowd, given their more unpredictable outcomes and the amount of arguing that could be involved.

After all, isn't that what sport is all about?

John Paddy does not begrudge Vera Lynn her success, but wonders if it was simply a case of right place, right time for the now 102-year-old croonstress and World War II chart topper.

Would she have been such a superstar, for example, if she'd been born in Finland in the year 974 as a wolf, lucky Vera.

Martin Neville is not much taken by the kind of fancy graffiti art you see these days and would rather that young people with the desire to create uncommissioned works of public art simply carve the proper sculptural frieze like the ancient Greek youths used to.

Philip Rothfeldt, despite the auspicious first three syllables of his name, has no desire to write a novel, but does attempt to write one title for a novel every day.

Today's possible hit for someone else to then write is called The Harmonious Rhythm of Chickens.

Yesterday's was Funnel Vision.

Since we're talking about novels, Roger Colwell thinks the whole genre is long overdue for a reboot.

They're not novel anymore really, are they?

Correctly quibbles Roger.

Support for Roger comes from fellow novel skeptic Joe Norris.

If one more person in a second-hand bookstore tries to sell me something as a novel, blasts Joe, I will rub a dictionary in their face and tell them to stop deluding themselves.

Paul Brown, overhearing Roger and Joe's quibbling, is suddenly struck by the idea that Quibbles would be a simply excellent snack food.

It sounds like a shortening of quick nibbles and would, thinks Paul, fly off the shelves.

Eli Sesewski Robinson, although making no claims to be an expert on the marketing of snack foods, reckons Quibbles could be advertised with a big budget campaign in which people pedantically bicker about stuff whilst sharing a harmonious packet of quibbles.

Adam Bruard jumps on board this advertising train and suggests that a famously divorced celebrity couple could be hired to star in that advert.

Maybe Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise if they're not busy, thinks Adam, or failing that, people who look a bit like them and enjoy snacks.

Dave Tapley would definitely buy and eat Quibbles as soon as they hit the market and would also be interested in other products including snack teria, tasty edibles made of deep-fried processed bacterial colonies, ideally balsamic vinegar and shark flavour.

Jamil Narja, as a snack aficionado and massive fan of everything to do with all forms of painting, would sign up to be a voluntary taste tester for Cézanne Pays, pre-meal munches designed in the style of the work of Impressionist art celebrity Paul Cézanne.

Likewise, Chris Kreitz is positively salivating at the prospect of chowing down in a comic book-themed Italian restaurant on a big plate of Batmanti pasti, Batman-themed Italian starters.

And anonymous donor Eric Knutson further suggests that all these products could be sold in a new 1970s dance music themed emporium called a funka delicatessen.

Here endeth the lies.

To join them and support the podcast go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Goodbye.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast Mildly Informed which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.