Ram the Ramparts - Bugle 4114

The Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4114 of the Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World. I am Andy Zoltzman and I'm live in London.

It is Friday the 5th of July and I have been to 27 days of cricket in the last 33.

That's a lot of cricket. I mean, any cricket is a lot of cricket.
Yeah. But that's a lot of cricket.
That's the whole point of cricket. It's supposed to be a lot.
It's supposed to take ages.

And I've never been so divorced from reality as I am now. And that is a hotly contested title, given that I've devoted my entire working life to avoiding reality.

Joining me this week, a glass of water. And also, the woman who's just poured that glass of water.

15-time water glass pouring champion of Australia, Alice Fraser. Hello, Andy.
Hello, Anubab. Hello, Buglers.
You can't say hello to her. I haven't introduced him yet.
No one knows he's there yet.

Hello, Andy. I've blown the whole thing out of the water.
Hello, Andy. Hello, buglers.
Hello, mystery guests.

Joining us.

Joining us. Any guesses, buglers? It is all the way from Mumbai, India.
Anuvab Powell. Hello, Andy.
Hello.

I have to say this, Andy. You've been quite popular in the subcontinent with a tiny, tiny population of a billion people.
And

you've been presenting statistics, actual facts. Yes.
And in a post-truth world, that qualifies you to at least run for Prime Minister of India.

I'm happy to give it a go, to be honest. Yeah,

I've been churning out actual facts, albeit facts about something that is pretend for the last five weeks. It's been a very strange experience for me, given that I usually

philosophically object to the concept of facts. It's like a double negative, isn't it? Because my facts are about cricket, which is essentially made up.

Those facts about something that is pretend, which is... So you can have that, or you can have lies about real stuff in politics, but you can't have...

If you multiply them together, it's absolute chaos. We are recording on Friday the 5th of July.
A few questions about this Friday, the 5th of July.

Question one, is Friday the 5th actually more unlucky than Friday the 13th? Was Jesus really born on the 5th of July? And if not, why not?

If the Battle of Hastings had taken place on the 5th of July instead of the 14th of October, would France now be part of Sussex? And why was the 5th of July so special to the dinosaurs?

And the answers to those questions are no, no, and none of your business. No, but it would have been a draw and it wasn't.

As always, a section of the the bugle is going straight in the bin. This week, a philosophy section in the bin.
We look at interesting new branches of philosophy, including Marky Marxism.

Is that where you wake up at 2.30 in the morning and play a 30-minute round of golf?

What?

Mark Wahlberg put out his self-calendar. Oh, yes, no, you're right.
Yeah, Andy actually did that on stage once.

I forgot that.

Yes, but it is very much his philosophy of life. And Newtalitarianism, which is the philosophy that everything is better for everyone if you get a new TV set.

Also, we ask some of the big philosophical questions in the world today, including, are chairs real?

If three people are in an aeroplane, but there are only two parachutes, should you shove someone out in mid-air just in case, even if there's nothing wrong with the plane, to avoid a potential awkward situation later?

The philosopher's axe, which is that famous old quandary, if you have an axe but don't really care for manual labor and don't need to chop any wood and don't really know how to wield an axe safely, is it still an axe?

And the elephant on the water slide, the old philosophical conundrum. How do you deal with it? Do you remove it with a crane? Do you shove it down the water slide?

Or do you blow up the entire swimming pool complex? There is no right answer to that.

Truly the Kobayashi Maru of elephant water slide scenarios.

Anyway, that philosophy section in the bin.

Top story this week, American news now. Happy 5th of July, Andy.

This week we celebrate the countriness of one of our modern world's most countriest countries. Oh, say, can you see by the dawn's early light? Yes, that's what light is for.
That is how it works.

Also,

not in the news, this week the 1st of July was Canada Day, but you don't hear them making a big fuss about it. You don't hear, oh, Canada, Canada, Can I don't know their anthem.

I only knew it was Canada Day because I have a Canadian friend sleeping on my couch and he didn't get home until quite late.

There's no tank parades, there's no fireworks, there's just maple syrup and a doughnut. One doughnut, not too many doughnuts.

But there's a lot of news about the 4th of July because Trump is receiving flack for his extravagant and heavily choreographed 4th of July celebrations, which included on the playlist the Star Wars theme song, military flyovers, which is where lots of planes go around looking like they're hunting for a parking spot in a crowded mall, and a lot of bloopers.

It's enough to make you feel sorry for Trump. You feel like he can't do anything right, but then you realise he can't do anything right.

His 4th of July speech betrayed a sort of loose, jazz, interpretative, historical understanding of the American War of Independence, or as the British called it at the time, stop at your grounded la la la, I'm not listening.

My favourite bit was that when he was referring to the fighting force created by the Continental Congress in 1775, Trump said, Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, ramparts, it took over airports.

I mean, that is a lot of sentence to unpack.

First, manned the air.

What is that? I mean, the last time someone manned the air in my presence, I had to open a window.

And as for the second half of that sentence, my issue is not so much with the idea that Trump thinks there was a 1775 Air Force and presumably commercial airports with a duty-free wad mull and cask ale section.

I mean, that's just someone who's been reading too much badly written historical fiction and if that's a bad thing call me guilty and put me in a book jail.

My issue with that sentence is with Ram the Ramparts.

I don't know what he thinks a rampart is and I desperately want to give him a packet of felt tip pens and make him draw one for me.

I mean Ram the Rampart sounds like it might be some kind of mascot for some display of military hardware.

And very useful in modern warfare where ramparts are

very much in vogue.

But you know, it was, you know, it was to Trump

a glorious demonstration of everything that makes America great. And to people who disagree with Trump, it was a glorious demonstration of everything that is making America absolutely terrible.

I guess it shows how a country can go in different ways.

Well, the perfect example of where ambition met realism was that he insisted on having tanks, but they were too heavy for the part of the grounds that he wanted them on, so they just had to sit in the side streets.

So I don't know about you you guys, but look,

military pomp is, I think it's a necessary thing in 2019. I mean, wherever I go, tanks go before me.

And I just had to look this up.

So I looked up emperors who make crazy entrances

because I would assume that Trump wants to embrace that kind of emperor-like pomp.

And I found this guy in Mongolia, Hulagu Khan, relative of the well-known marauder and Twitter addict Cengis Khan.

And he used to enter rooms every time to celebrate a military victory.

When he entered the room as an emperor, he was before him were always dwarves throwing rose petals, followed by a retinue of trumpeteers on mules.

Right. And presumably

he was all about the airports as well back in the day, wasn't he?

You control the Mongolian airports, you control the whole of Asia.

My thing with all sort of displays of military power is most militaries in the world seem to have an issue with knees.

They all move their knees in weird ways.

It makes you very self-conscious about your knees. If you watch a military march, you're like, is that how they're meant to go?

That's absolutely correct, Alice.

It doesn't give rise to fear. You just think of calisthenics.

You're not scared, which is the idea. India has a thing on 26th January every year called the Republic Day.
And we usually invite some country we're fighting with and show them all our weapons.

And, you know, we hoist the flag and we sing the anthem and we show them all our Air Force and military and stuff. And that can go either way, right?

I mean, either it's, my God, I'm so scared as your neighbor, or is this all you've got?

I mean, I do think with Trump that there is an element of the sort of Nero Caligular.

I mean, it does seem seem just a matter of time before there is a horse in the Senate, I think.

But do you have to ask, would that necessarily be a backward step for America as it is now? I mean, the horse is actually a creature much more given to compromise than the human being.

So actually, more horses in top-level politics. Yeah, and probably against factory farming.
Yeah, not necessarily in France. That might go very badly wrong indeed.

A quick update on the British junta that is currently going on. As last week, as in the last bugle, still waiting for that UN force to restore the rule of law to Westminster.

And it's, well, two Tory leaders left, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, the two candidates left for the Prime Minister. It's like Arley versus Frazier, but different in every single possible way.

Other than that, quite a lot of people would like to see them both and it punched in the face.

Two men desperately trying to appeal to the 0.2% of the population who are allowed to have a say in who our prime ministers should be, who should be entrusted with the hammer and nails to ram through the metaphorical hands and feet of the younger disenfranchised generation of Britain as we Brex crucify ourselves onto the cross of confected democracy.

Jeremy Hunt this week appealed to the younger generation by suggesting another vote on fox hunting.

Because,

I mean, it just, you know, I have two young children,

aged 12 and 10 now, and I've just lost count of the number of times that I've picked up my kids from school and seen children weeping in their parents' arms when told, no, darling, we still can't pursue a fox with a pack of dogs and tear it limb from limb so much for freedom.

You see the scales fall from their eyes as all the myths they've been told about democracy in their childhood fall away.

If the wild success of Brexit has taught us nothing else, it's that if we're going to have a vote on fox hunting, the foxes should get a say.

Absolutely.

Do a referendum, a referendum. Well, this is it.
I mean, we in Britain, we pride ourselves on our national sense of fair play.

I said, British values, politicians spout on about it, British values, but we've never armed the foxes. It undercuts it at the very start.
Now, Andy Alice,

I've just started following hashtag Back Boris on Instagram.

I don't know why. I guess I figured it's, you know, I need one follower at least.

And it's got a lot of photos of him cuddling strange animals in rural England.

I think they might be members of the Conservative Party.

Just check those photos again.

And my question is, is that the sort of metal they're looking for in their future leader that's going to take them through the 21st century? Someone who can hold small opussums?

Well, I mean, to be honest, it's quite unclear what we are looking for. We appear to be looking for a proven liar and with no grasp of reality.

The Daily Telegraph, if you're unaware of its work, Buglers, it's carefully positioned itself as a kind of British prafter for the Tory membership.

Very much the ventriloquist hand rammed up the arse of our probable future Prime Minister.

They've really been outdoing themselves of late.

Let me quote from an article in the Telegraph. This leadership election is special to the Telegraph readers for two reasons.
First, most, if not all, of those voting are also our readers.

Long live democracy. And while that's true of many Conservative contests, this is a rare occasion when they are picking not just a party leader, but also a prime minister.

And there is not even...

There's not even, you know, reading this on the website, you'd expect some kind of pop-up saying irony alert.

No, you know, you get pop-ups for everything these days, but not even a warning saying you may find this, the following piece arrogantly hypocritical and deeply disturbing.

Not even warning, unfathomable lack of self-awareness.

And then the article also in the Daily Telephone says, Mr.

Johnson grasps that Britain put its red lines in the wrong place, that the essential issue is sovereignty, and that unless the EU thinks that Britain is willing to walk away, it won't renegotiate a withdrawal agreement.

That is, quotes, totally unacceptable to a Democrat. Read the first paragraph of your own fing article.

If you want unacceptable to a Democrat, you've just been glorying in the fact that your fing readership is choosing my Prime Minister.

Described Miss Boris Johnson as, quote, a brilliant communicator, which is political talk for unusually confident liar.

And

he says he deserves a chance to realise an ambition he has spent his entire career fighting for, liberating Britain from the European Union and restoring its faith in itself.

A career-long ambition he managed to suppress for so long, even writing articles in favour of remaining shortly before the referendum until it became clear that it might help his career to support it.

Sorry, correction, to to pretend to support it, but at least he's at one with himself now.

There's been other Brexit news. Now, let me just return to the Cricket World Cup.
I've had very few moments of downtime from the Cricket World Cup.

What my average day involves is getting up early, doing some research about cricket statistics, then being on air for about eight hours on the BBC coverage.

punctuated only by lunch, which in cricket press boxes ranges from pretty tidy attempts to pick up a Michelin star for the Hungry hungry hacks, to something in Durham that was alleged to have been salmon, but I think was some kind of edible meditation on medieval witchcraft.

Then, so I do my eight day, and then I'll record a couple of things for a podcast.

And then what I do in the few moments of downtime is I think about all the things I've been unable to think about because I've been snouted down in cricket statistics, and exactly how delightful it has been not to have to think about them.

Now, doing my cricket job, for want of a better word, is it is a genuine childhood dream. It is a constant delight.
It is a privilege. I love everything about it.

But what I love most about it is that for six weeks this summer, I have barely thought about Brexit. And

it is just such a glowingly glorious thing to have had

that level of distraction. And amongst the things that I've barely thought about, global warming.
My missing sock was a good one too, with a picture of a fish on it.

The regression of democracy on a global scale, not thought about that. Whether that jar of Gherkins I opened in May is still in the fridge or if someone else has eaten it.

The implications of a trade war with China.

And whether or not I've still got the receipt receipt for a suitcase I bought that keeps falling over and has a knacker zip less than two months after I bought it.

All of those I can happily ostrich off to the back burner and sizzling away like a heretic sausage on the 16th century Archbishop's barbecue is Brexit.

As the thing I've been able, I've been aware that I've not been thinking about it and I've loved it. However, returning to it for this week's bugle,

reality is still there, Alice. In particular, Anne Whitticombe, now former Tory cabinet minister, now Brexit MEP.

She's one of six MEPs representing the southwest of England, and she's been criticised after saying the process of choosing the leadership of the EU has first chosen her: the best thing for Britain is to leave here as soon as possible, which is fair enough.

Bureaucracy is annoying. But then she went on to say there is a pattern consistent throughout history of oppressed people turning on the oppressors, slaves against their

owners, the peasantry against the feudal barons, colonies against their empires, and that is why Britain is leaving.

She made these remarks during her maiden speech in the European Parliament on Thursday, and Labour MP David Lammy described her words as ahistorical, which I think is possibly the kindest term you could use.

The National Board for Bad Comparisons awarded her their weekly award for most not noticing times of changed in public discourse in the last 200 years.

The award is a gold florin and a plump tavern wench.

People on the internet are obviously focusing on the slave part of that sentence comparison, because if you take that out of context, it's a wildly inappropriate comparison that seems to indicate either deep historical and linguistic confusion about the ways in which being a slave is the same as being a member of a governing body.

But I'm more confused about her definition of the European Union as a feudal baron under which Britain is a serf.

Did Angela Merkel demand the right of prima nocta upon her Major Lathon speech?

Miss Whitticomb told the BBC's Newsnight that people had interpreted her speech in a melodramatic fashion, quote, melodramatic fashion, before demanding a fainting counter and a lollipop.

I mean, there are key differences between...

Well, if I start,

when you look at it, slaves against their owners, the peasantry against the feudal barons, and the colonies against their empires. Britain was on the wrong side of all of those three things.

Which suggests we're on the wrong side of this one as well.

And the big difference, I mean, as you said, slaves, I don't recall slaves voting by a 67 to 33 percent majority to be owned by their owners, as Britain voted to stay in the

European Community back in the 1970s. Slave owners, also not renowned for focusing too much of their attention on workplace rights and health and safety regulation.

Nor did the peasantry enjoy full voting rights alongside the feudal barons or a special veto even.

If the barons wanted to do something they didn't like, then they have a special veto like we have with Europe. So it slightly falls apart.
Things that didn't really suit them as peasants.

And thus far, touch with the EU has yet to impose religion, smallpox, and starvation on us as we did in our glorious imperial past. Other than that, of course, the comparison is

valid. She also said, it doesn't matter which language you use, we are going and we are glad to be going.

No, it doesn't matter which language. There's one language we understand, which is English, not your weird codes.

Across the channel. She defended her speech, Whittakham,

saying to Newsnight, BBC's Newsnight programme, if people want to interpret what I've said in a particular way, that is not my responsibility.

Now, I take that point, but when you say interpret it in a particular way, they're interpreting it according to the words you said and the order in which you said them.

And I guess it's always dangerous as a politician that people may interpret your words in that way, which is a bit unfair rather than just doing anagrams of them or interpreting them as some kind of satirical haiku.

My favourite part of this is that it is her maiden speech. This is a bold, out-of-the-gate move to just describe reality.

Presumably, as she sees it, she genuinely perceives the British Empire as being this terrible, oppressed,

grovelling peasant in the like, what is she

doing with her brain that makes that reality real? Yes.

Now, Andy, Alice, having a little bit of experience on the other end of the empire.

Hey, I'm Australian.

What type of Australian? I Not a good one. I have to.

And, you know, Australia is pretty rough. You know, we were things were pretty rough.
And all I want to say is I've taken the Eurostar

and I have got from Brussels to London. And it is a rough crossing.
It's pretty rough.

But I'm not entirely sure if it compares to the decimation of the Indian textile industry.

Like for like. I don't know.
You guys may feel differently. I don't know.
It was ages ago.

Anyway, I'm sure we all wait.

Maybe she's right. And in 150 years' time, there'll be a hit film, 12 years a mutually beneficial trade block.

Aaron Banks, the founder of the Leave.eu organisation,

which democratically uses his enormous wealth to skew our democratic discourse, says the British led the way on abolishing slavery. We have nothing to be ashamed of.

um which I mean we didn't entirely rush into abolishing slavery but this is like you know saying well done to Uncle Gerald at Christmas dinner today he was the only one to take his penis back out of the roast turkey

and a Brexit Parsey spokesman added those who've raised this hue and cry seem to desire nothing more than a cleansing of our language of historical perspective no it's the exact opposite people are calling for more historical perspective not less

but I guess there's a very great danger if you're on the populist side of the political seesaw that if you allow historical perspective to creep into your propaganda, people might look at the next poster of desperate people, for example, seeking a better life in another country and think, oh yes, that does all make perfect sense.

In more Brexiteers Behaving Badly News,

there was a bunch of them led by Nigel Farage who turned their back on the playing of the European anthem and school choir end of year concert classic Ode to Joy, which is the best way of showing that not only don't you understand how post-World War national diplomacy works, you also don't understand how music works.

It can get you from behind, too.

The notes bend round your head and come in your ears from the other side, Andy.

It's a terrible thing. This group of MEPs led by Nigel Farage just turned their back on the playing of the national anthem, which is such a bad look.
Yes. Such a sicky,

pointless, mean thing to do.

That's unlike them.

However, Andy, Alice, I have a question. As my piano teacher, Mrs.
Chatterjee, had told me when I was in kindergarten, maybe they weren't protesting at all.

I was told that the best way to listen to classical music is to close your eyes and turn around.

And maybe they were just huge Beethoven fans. And the ninth is a famous one, and maybe they were really getting into it.
What do you guys think? I mean, it's Anavab, you always bring a

positive interpretation of events. And these cynical times, that is a great tonic.

Yeah, you so consistently bring a positive turn to events to these terrible events that I start to wonder about your attachment to reality. But I appreciate the positivity.

I don't like Beethoven being brought into this dispute either.

Beethoven had more talent and more to give to humanity, the dead skin on his scrotum than the entire Brexit party. Nah, say what you want about Beethoven.
He can't hear it

because he's dead. And deaf.

Social media news now. And, well, this is going to be very difficult for me, Alice,

this story. It puts me under an awful lot of pressure.

It turns out that despite two decades of effort to avoid this, I'm actually a celebrity. Yes.

Can you just explain why? Yes, in a landmark case in the UK

that just happened recently, the Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that anyone with over 30,000 followers on a social media platform is a celebrity for the purposes of advertising standards regulation.

Right. Can you not look at me directly

when you're in the studio with me please? You just count yourself lucky to be in the same room as me.

Well there was a case, a mummy blogger and unfortunately sarcastic soundingly named Sarah Wilcox not

she put a sponsored post.

Get it? Sarah Wilcox not it's not very nice.

Never mind.

She put up a sponsored post for an over-the-counter sleep medication on her Instagram and the advertising standards authority came down on her like a ton of bricks because apparently she is a celebrity.

30,000 is enough, it's the baseline unit for celebrity measurement. I feel like that's a good way to move forward with measurements in general.
How many people are at the football?

About three celebrities worth

a quarter of a celebrity were forced out of their homes due to rising flood waters.

We're having five and a third celebrities are picking the new fing Prime Minister.

yeah, so I mean my my my

Bugle Twitter account

and and my my cricket stats account makes makes makes me you know public property both I mean it's horrific.

I can barely leave my house now without being hounded on the bright side it puts me at about very accurately half a celebrity

you know I'm happy on the outside and that's what counts

Anavab plus Alice equals one celebrity. Oh there we go.

Is that from Twitter? Yes.

So there we go.

So if everyone who follows Anavab follows me, and if everyone who follows me follows Anavab, we probably won't even go up by one single follower because all of our followers are bugle listeners.

And of course, listen, Andy, Alice, again, looking at the positive of this,

the world does not need any more Beethoven compositions. What the world needs are more photos of people posting just waking up, hashtag this is me.

Absolutely. And also, I think, you know, you combine, if you two get married, we'd have the news.

You'd be the new, you know, Warren Beatty and whoever, who's a Warren Beatty for, I can't remember that sentence got out of control. I've met Anabab's wife, and she's heaps better than me.

I mean, to be fair, she's heaps better than him, too.

I found this piece of news I thought you guys would find interesting.

There's an ice cream truck in Los Angeles owned by a guy called Joe Michi.

And his ice cream truck is called CBT, which stands for Chocolate, Vanilla, and Twirl.

And he's been constantly bombarded by social media influencers who've been telling him, we'll post on your behalf if you give us free ice cream.

And he's gone.

The struggles of modern business.

Yeah, no one pays for anything. Exactly.

And he's just gone viral because he posted something that says, if you're a social media influencer and you come to my cream, you have to pay double.

That is so fair. Yeah.

Well, as a celebrity, shortly I will be telling you how I keep my skin so pure using only a Vanitax Dermo Blaster, a facial striper that blasts all non-celebrity suitable substances off my face using a special acid formulated from the vital organs of African subsistence farmers' freshly slain goats, because I'm worth it.

Now you have to say hashtag ad.

I do worry with, I mean, this is just another step in the inflation of the number of celebrities around the world.

It's increasing a

breakneck speed. And the latest statistical prediction shows that by the year 2073, the number of celebrities will outnumber the number of non-celebrities on the planet.

And at that point, the whole market will implode. into one and all celebrities just become one giant mega celebrity

or god god and then the process restarts.

I was thinking more in the vein of it turning the market upside down and all of a sudden people wanting to know the opinions of people who don't have any interesting things to say.

Well that's democracy, isn't it?

Animals on the internet news now and

Anuvab, you are our government ministers live streaming press conferences with cat filters on the correspondent. Some exciting news in that field of human exertion.
That is correct, Andy.

That is correct.

In Pakistan recently, the Pakistani minister Shakat Yousafzai was doing an update, an update about a regional Pakistani issue, and he forgot to switch his cat filter off.

And

he did the entire press conference with cat whiskers and cat ears.

I mean, that needs more.

That does need more explanation. I mean...

Oh, no, I mean, that needs to happen more.

That needs to happen a lot more. I mean, it does raise the question, why did he have his cat filter on in the first place?

To be fair to him, though, afterwards, when social media exploded, he did say, let's not take everything so seriously. I wasn't the only one.

Two railway officials sitting next to me were also hit by the cat filter.

Hit by the cat filter makes it sound like the cat filter is some sort of long-term serial offender, sort of like the poo jogger. Right.
Yes. Do you remember the poo jogger?

No. In Australia,

he was quite a renowned man who would jog around and do poos in the street. Yeah.
And then he was captured. Right.

I mean, neither of those two activities is really social acceptable for him.

If he'd done it with the cat filter on, people would have ignored it entirely. Yeah.
Don't jog, run, or walk.

That's quite this mediocre middle ground of jogging. Anubab, has anyone raised?

Aim higher or lower.

Anibab, has anyone raised the question of whether this was not in fact a cat filter, but how the man looks in real life?

Well,

there is a response from the official Pakistani Foreign Ministry, and they've said all necessary actions have been taken to deal with such incidents in the future,

which could mean that the minister has been sent to a vet.

In More Animal News Now, an Alabama man has been accused of feeding methamphetamine to what authorities are calling an attack squirrel,

which is apparently a state wildlife offence, which raises questions about who wrote that law anticipating a methamphetamine-stricken attack squirrel.

Are there any attack squirrels in Donald Trump's military parade or not? No, but I imagine there will be next year now that he knows it's a thing that you can do.

So there's a 35-year-old man who adopted this squirrel at an early age. He's been charged with illegal possession of wildlife, but he claims that he didn't give the squirrel drugs.

It's just naturally that aggressive.

I mean, that's.

I think I like the idea of more harnessing. Yeah, it seems unfair that only humans should benefit from methamphetamine.

Just quickly, sport Wimbledon is up and running. An Australian player's been hitting the headlines, Alice.

Nick Kyrios hit a ball.

What have he said now? Well, he deliberately hit a ball at Rafael Nadal and they didn't apologise for it after his forced at the feet to the Spanish Clay Court genius. He is just the biggest baby.

And I say that as someone who has a very big baby niece.

And Bernard Tomich has been fined £45,000 for not giving a shit.

He was beaten in the quickest match in

Wimbledon Men's Tournament for 15 years, less than an hour straight sets victory. And he was fined for not trying.

Tomich is the most dangerous person in world sport for me because if people catch on to his claim that sport doesn't really matter, the whole thing's going to come crashing down.

And I'm not looking forward to that.

And players defaulting from matches

various reasons, a lot of injuries. Also, world number 317, Stramat Gruffly, he walked off court in the fourth set of his match with Karjal Skrotich because he had a clarinet lesson.

Izvanica Jatilova had to withdraw a three-all in the second set versus Tarpaula Klappers-Rasputin. She forgot she had to do a TED talk about why hitting things with rackets is fun.

Ostrich Backnut, he had an existential crisis in the first set of his first round match.

And his press comrades afterwards, after walking off the court, looking confused, he said, did I myself default from my match or was it predetermined from the beginning of time?

Also, my backhand was shit. This allowed Flibbert Scowl into the second-round matchup with South African star Typhus van Skyjwej.

And Alexandre Dumas of France was out of the first-round class due to being a dead 19th-century novelist. Another disappointing overlook for 19th-century novelists after Liz Gaskell went out

six love to Simona Hallep in round one.

Am I going to get fined for never having tried to play tennis?

You know, Andy Ellis, I think this sets a terrible precedent, this fine, because Bernard Tonic was fined for playing badly. But there's now then no way to know if you're just a terrible player.

And that's what his rival Joe Wilfred Songer said to the press. He said, I'll say this fine is also for me because it's like what I did was not win.

Oh, yes, fine. Again, it's very complex, philosophical.
What is victory?

What is tennis?

Why are we here? What is trying?

Alice, you are the Bugle's edible sports correspondent.

What's been going on? Well, Joey Chestnut has won Nathan's famous annual July 4th hot dog eating contest again on Thursday, proving himself to be the Serena Williams of eating too much food.

Was he pregnant when he won?

No, I mean, he.

No, he just looked pregnant. Anyone who puts that many.
Never mind.

He didn't quite pass the 74 hot dog mark that he reached last year, but he blamed it on the heat, apparently. It's like a real sport, yeah.
Right.

It just dries out your mouth or something, so you can't

gluttonise with such ferocity. But at that level of competition, does that affect your tactics in how you go about eating as many hot dogs as possible in 10 minutes?

Do you try to pace yourself through the first three and a half minutes and then really hammer it in the final?

Why don't they leverage the heat and use their own sweat as lube i don't understand this sport at all they seem to treat it like it's a real thing in that they have like cool nicknames the uh women's all-time champion is called sonia the black widow thompson uh sorry sonia the black widow thomas and uh they they take home ten thousand dollars which is not enough

It's not enough money. If someone said, would you try and kill yourself with hot dogs

for $10,000? I wouldn't do it.

The black widow. Yeah, it's not a sport, it's a dare.
It's a bad dare at a pub.

But

the black widow spider famously eats her mate after

spider hornies. She got her name by getting in a fight with her husband and consuming him in a rage.

Turning him into hot dogs and then eating him.

I mean, it's, of course, one of the great sporting events. Well, they complain that it's not treated a proper sport, so I should apologise because I don't treat it like a proper sport.

Chestnut said it's not something that there's books written about in a documentary about hot dog eating.

I mean, certainly compared with sports like cricket and baseball and boxing, the literature of hot dog eating is, shall we say, thin?

Yeah.

Norman Mailer didn't write a masterpiece about the Nathan's hot dog eating competition that he did about the Rumble in the Jungle.

Maybe it's got to do with the fans as well, because spectator George Cartellano said his favourite part of the contest was watching them try not to regurgitate.

Each to their own. I love it.
To be fair, rhythmic gymnastics, that's my favourite part of it too.

I feel like natural human sort of processes shouldn't be made competitive. It's like...

Is there a banging competition?

I don't know, Alice. I know there's like a pro-sports kind of performative banging competition.

But is there there an actual

do you just give each other point? Look, I shouldn't go down this.

I shouldn't go down this avenue as last year's banging competitor champion.

I once accidentally swallowed a Burger King chicken burger too quickly and passed out in my chips.

Shocking confession.

No one gave me a prize.

71 in 10 minutes. That's because I think you're allowed water, aren't you? I think when I was 12, I ate half a wheel of brie, and I've never eaten it since.
Right.

What happened to the other half? I couldn't manage it. Can't back out of eating a whole wheel of brie.
It was a big wheel of brie. It was too much brie.

Is there a brie eating contest somewhere in the world? France, presumably. No, you're...
It's the breeder's cup. Boom!

You're only competing with yourself, Alex.

You're only competing with your long-term heart health. But you do wonder with people like Joey Chestnut, and much as he is a genius of the art of speed hot dog eating.

He's the federer of the hot dog.

Does it dull the joy of eating a hot dog? Normally, when it becomes the focus of your life, do you lose that childlike enthusiasm of just having a hot dog?

I worry about that psychological aspect of being at the highest echelons of hot dog eating I think it must be like again to to draw the analogy I think it must be like competitive

in that you have to keep something special right so maybe there's a kind of food that he only eats in a non-competitive way like it's in an intimate setting yes I mean there aren't that many

actually I'm saying there aren't that many sports that that that that depend on the slaughter of animals that take place but you know cricket uses leather on the cricket ball so you know that those cows did not die in vain well I mean there's that there's that one uh that sport where they throw a lamb around.

Right. Buzzkashi.
Yeah, or is it a goat? It's a goat's head. Ah.
Right. And didn't golf start with heads? Golf? No, I don't think so.
There's a myth that golf started with heads.

With hitting heads around. Yeah, I think it was.
Well, I think there was some kind of Aztec football that involved heads, wasn't there? Cromwell's head got used in a football game. Did it? Yeah.

It's still...

Where is it? It's still in some college in Cambridge, isn't it? Cromwell's game. I don't think it was an official football game.
I think it was more of a sort of a mob riot situation.

Inflate it to the required FIFA level of pressure. It was more like a football hooliganism kind of situation.
That's real sport. That's real sport.

That brings us to the end of

this week's bugle. I do hope you've enjoyed it.
Thank you very much for listening. I've got to return to my little numbers on sheets for the next few days.

And we'll be back next week, just ahead of the World Cup final. In fact, I'm good.
Oh, anything to plug?

Yeah, Anna, what have you got to

Well, I guess I'll see you guys soon next month. I'm back at Edinburgh with the show about democracy and disco dancing.

I mean, I say a show, it's very much a work in progress. By work in progress, I mean very much some things in Microsoft Word.

I have two previews coming up, one on the 10th of July of Mythos at the Museum of Comedy, but there's only about six tickets left for that.

One on the 15th of July at Goodship Comedy, and then all of the Edinburgh. Yes, I'm doing half of the Edinburgh.
There will also be a Political Animal and a couple of live bugles.

Come to all of those shows, all of you, all of the time.

And to play you out, as always, here are some more lies about our premium-level subscribers.

To join them or to voluntarily subscribe to the Bugle with whatever you want on a recurring or one-off basis, go to the Bugle podcast and click the donate button. Chris!

Schuppet Lagefeld believes that whilst it is not right for rock stars to throw television sets out of hotel windows as they are so wont to do, it is actually fine for law-abiding citizens who are not rock stars to throw television sets in through the windows of hotels to balance things out.

Ian Frank thinks that flounder is a bit of an unfair name for the renowned species of fish, the flounder, given that it was given to them by a human and he knows who his money would be on in a let's see who lasts longest when dropped in the middle of the Atlantic competition.

Rail to not reckon snakes and ladders doesn't make any logical sense as a game, given that you can go both up and down a ladder and neither up nor down a snake.

Consequently, Railton finds it hard to enjoy the game at all.

Andy Walker would like to see the middle two people in a four-person bobsled have to do something more useful and challenging in the event, maybe throw a watermelon into a bucket halfway down the course, or have to change their trousers

Will have to change their trousers between the start line and the finish line.

This is lovely. I wrote these so long ago I can't remember what some of them would be genuinely surprised by my own bullshit.

It's nice though.

Do you want that again? Hold on. I know, I don't like it that way.

Megan Seelar, apologies if I pronounced that wrong, reckons Denmark is way better off without Hamlet around anymore, as the Shakespeare star is simply not cut out for today's cutthroat decision a minute international political scene.

Martin Turner thinks the ancient Greeks would have abandoned the tradition of doing athletics in the nude if there had been slow-motion action replays around at the time instead of people just hastily painting stuff onto vases.

Whilst Emily Howells wonders if those self-same ancient Greeks, if they couldn't get to the Olympic Games, ever found themselves saying to their friends, don't tell me what happened in the wrestling final, I'm waiting until the vase comes out.

But in Greek, obviously.

Anonymous donor, initials HL, dreams of a world in which all parliaments are filled with balloons, because everyone loves balloons, so ironically, for an object most often associated with either children or explorers, it might help democracy grow up and stay grounded.

Malcolm Riddell has been reliably informed that if you eat pudding before main course, it halves the calorific content of both parts of your meal, but he cannot recall exactly who reliably informed him of that or whether or not they were in fact reliable.

And finally, Kate Katigbach thinks that if people are going to wear ridiculous platform shoes, they should at least wear platforms that are hollow on the inside and keep their packed lunch inside the shoe cavity.