Democramnesia - Bugle 4110

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers, this is issue 4110 of the Bugle. I am Andy Zoltzmann.
It's Friday the 24th of March 2019. And this is an emergency bugle.

We are just swearing distance away from where our Prime Prime Minister here in the United Kingdom, the beacon of all of our hearts, has just resigned just hours ago.

As we recall, there is no section in the bin this week. Theresa May has deposited herself in the bin in sacrifice for this.
There are no anniversaries this week.

This is the only date that counts in history. The 24th of May 2019 possibly be seen by history as the day when Boris Johnson's ascension to the throne became inevitable and nothing else will matter.

More on this later. Joining me this week to pick over the bones of this latest development in the unending bout of political diarrhea that has emerged from David Cameron's horrific guts.

Firstly, here in London with me, Mark Steele, welcome back.

Dear sad lamented departed leader

who cried. Yeah.

Cried a few minutes ago and she looked and emotion got to her and it must be terrible because I mean it shows how emotional she must have been.

You have to feel sorry for because she didn't cry at all when she visited the survivors of the Grenfell Tower she didn't cry at all over the windrush deportations the food banks anything like that

but this has really got to really makes you

put all of those for her all of those all of those trifles into perspective doesn't it yeah yeah Although, to be honest, I mean, if politicians did start crying at every disaster that happened, they would just be an unending deluge of tears.

So I guess some middle ground has to be struck. Also, joining us from the safe distance of a hemisphere away, where there is no new Prime Minister when there was possibly expected to be one.

Australia, it's Alice Fraser.

Yes, Andy. Hello, Mark.
Hello, Andy. Hello, buglers.

Yeah, in the ongoing quest to make forever Brexit the new status quo, soon-to-be non-Prime Minister Theresa May has announced her escape from the office of person most held responsible for the progress or non-progress of Brexit.

I'm excited.

Soon, a new Prime Minister will plunge like a reverse Phoenix into the ashes of democracy and clasp trembling hands around the poisoned chalice of a bad plan, like Major Arnold Ernst Toate, the bad guy in Indiana Jones' Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I think

the melting faces

at the end of that film, that's basically a fairly accurate description of

well, that's all of them, and one of them melted faces is going to be Prime Minister in a couple of weeks.

I mean, you have to admire Theresa May because she's a woman and also in the cascading champagne fountain of post-surprise Brexit decision in the referendum, her cup had the openest mouth.

But truly I cannot wait for feminism to get us to a state of perfect equality so we can judge ambitiously boring windbags with delusions of admin on the content of their degraded character and not on the comparative distribution of flaps in their equatorial region.

I just don't want to have to keep pretending people are interesting because they're women. That's beautiful.
It's a vision for a fair appointment. I think she could have...

The sad thing with a resignation speech, she could have, all of the damage she's done could all have been swept away if she'd done a proper resignation speech and she'd just come out and gone, oh, you fing do it then.

Go on, then. I've tried for three years and look at you.
Wankers, all of you. Ooh, I don't want that sort.
That's Norway something, Canada.

I've got bloody Barnier all day long.

Oh,

Brussels, backwards and forwards. What have you done? Mog, you bloody over-privileged Victorian twat.
You do it! Go on! So go on then!

I'm going for a ramble with this specky husband. F ⁇ off.

What if she'd have done that at the podium?

How do we know she didn't do it mate? We just play it backwards. There might be hidden messages within it.
If you like a

Jethro Tullo at it, I mean, mean, I really am glad that May proved you can be a mediocre bureaucrat who inflames anti-immigrant sentiments no matter what set of gendered insults people throw at you.

It is, I mean, it's a truly, truly historic day. And phase 48 of her resignation, which began sometime last year and has progressed.

It's a bit like, you know, when you play Monopoly, do you ever play, I haven't played it for years, but you know, sort of there's that Monopoly goes on for an hour longer than it should, when when one player has got all the hotels and the other one's got seven pounds

and she's been like that no if i could just hang on all right i'll i'll tell you what i'll give you a pound for landing on mayfair with a hotel and then and then oh god she's hanging on for an she's bolting herself in look i genuinely believe that monopoly was invented in order to inflame anti-capitalist sentiment because you always end up just flipping the board

she's i mean essentially staggered on like a cowboy gradually bleeding out while staggering through the saloon bar doors of every drinking den in town before just finally lying under a bus top and breathing his last she will uh bequit herself to political history on the seventh uh the seventh of june she will uh cease to be leader of the conservative she'll remain as uh

well i'm gonna say remain a sitting the lame duck prime minister even lamer duck well maybe maybe she'll go on the 6th of june if we send vans up Downing Street with Go Home on the side.

Oh, just the way she would do that.

I would remember Theresa May for all the terrible things she did that I've forgotten and all the stuff she didn't do as a result of everyone else being awful and her also being awful, but at least willing to try.

Truly, it is a prime ministership which will echo through the annals of history like a gust of wind through the anals of history.

I reckon in a quiz, if Theresa May was in a quiz in three years' time and she was asked to name all the prime ministers of the last 20 years,

she'd forget herself.

Yeah,

um, that's entirely possible. I hope we can make that happen.
You've got contacts in the TV industry, haven't you, Mark? You can make that happen.

Um, her parting on the 7th of June will be marked by a ceremonial national harumph of general dissatisfaction at 10:30 a.m. One hopes this does not overshadow the Pakistan B.

Sri Lanka Cricket World Cup match in Bristol that day.

And well, it was sort of made even more inevitable than it already was, if inevitability can indeed increase, when Andrea Leadson became the 35th resignation. Wow.

Do you reckon some of them were like reposted and actually just forgotten that?

Oh, Christ, she's forgotten she's already had me.

When they've been jumping ship, even though that ship has been stuck in a dry dock and have just been splatting on the pavement beside it, so and there have been a lot of post-mortems.

In fact, the post-mortems began before she'd even res post-mortems of a still twitching corpse.

And she's just become the latest to be slowly impaled on the rusty spike at the top of the political greasy pole.

Had she run out of rope, or had she just merely finally braided enough rope to reach all the way around her own neck? History will be the judge.

And she leaves after three years of blundering obfuscation, waffly pseudo-compromises.

And that's been a time we may come to look back on with a kind of fond nostalgia, bearing in mind who or what may be about to follow up. Yes, when we're all packing our bags and fleeing.

Oh, remember when we just had a bumbling, contradictory, dead-eyed, floundering vacuum in Downing Street? Oh, those were the days.

But many young children in Britain today may lie on their deathbeds in many decades to come and remember her as the greatest Prime Minister of their lifetimes.

And even then, in 30 years, she'll still be trying to bring her deal back.

She'll be wandering the streets, going up to the homeless.

Would you support my deal?

Just wandering around South America and that tribes in Amazon tribes. Will you support my deal? She's willing to dance.

Yes, exactly. Well, what a sign.
Isn't that a sign of what she represents? I mean,

150 years ago, British rulers would go... to Africa and they would say, we have come to take over your country, your land and your minerals, and there's nothing you can do.

And she went there and they said to her, dance, bitch.

She has how times have changed, isn't it? Maybe they said the same to Queen Victoria and she just didn't really understand. A bit of a language barrier.

As she announced her departure in Downing Street,

she issued a parting call for a country that truly works for everyone

and which can can only be interpreted as a savage assault on the Conservative Party.

She said, we're bringing an end to, she said, they can look back proudly on bringing an end to austerity and fighting the burning injustices that still scar our society, which is rather like a serial killer saying, well, I've got some fish fingers in my freezer now as well.

It's not all body parts.

I mean, she did, as we've discussed on the bugle numerous times,

she got dealt, as I keep saying, a bad hand. And, you know, basically got loads of twos, threes and fours and bid 15 no-Trumps in bridge parlance.

And in baseball parlance, this defeat, this has got to go on David Cameron's record. Sure, the relief pitching has been shit.

But these letters all stem from his flounderingly incompetent, arrogant, myopic pitching in the first innings. We are now left looking to

the future and the joys of a Conservative leadership election. Mark, I mean, you're presumably a massive fan of Tory leadership elections.
Yeah, yeah. Well,

usually, of course, the favourite has caused so much kerfuffle with their

by because they're so sort of

the hatred between them all is such that the person who hasn't upset lots of the other ones by stabbing in the back, shagging their wives,

whatever it is they do, and Boris, credit to him, he's done both of those things to every other person in the Conservative Party.

I think he's stabbed some of them in the back whilst shagging their wives, hasn't he?

I'm starting to think that maybe the British need to take a note from their own history and maybe ship in Merkel when she retires, like Habsburg's Mark II.

Oh,

bring back Lord Palmerston.

It shows what a great democracy we are, that our Prime Minister was essentially deposed after a secret meeting with a guy called Graham, presumably some sacred priest-like role, the official position of the Golden Graham, perhaps.

And our new Prime Minister will be chosen by 120,000 people,

Tory Tory members. Yes.
Essentially. With an average age of 98

who live in some rural bit of Suffolk

where they will vote for someone that can stop all the immigrants coming in when the last immigrant they had was someone who came from a different bit of Saxe Mundum who was beaten to death.

But it's all right because we've taken back control. We've taken back control of our democracy.
So yeah, exactly. Proper democracy, what we wanted.

Couldn't it say get our bloody democracy back so that we could have the Prime Prime Minister chosen by 23,000 demented rural twats. That's new democracy.

Could I vote for Lord Melbourne? And Bread is gone.

That's we've got it back.

Well, it's better than you know, when the European Union foisted Stanley Baldwin on us back in the 1920s. We had no choice in that.
It is old school democracy, right?

It's land-owning old gentlemen, right? Yes. I mean, that's what made Britain great, isn't it? You know, we'd never have organised slavery without it, would we?

I love a status, both of you

both know. And our next Prime Minister, following Theresa May, will be the fourth consecutive Prime Minister we've had who has not...
come into Downing Street, having won a majority at an election.

We had Gordon Brown taking over from Tony Blair, David Cameron getting on a coalition, and Theresa May when Cameron resigned and whoever replaces Theresa May. And this is a great British tradition.

We've had 32 different prime ministers since the Great Reform Reform Act of 1832. Of these, eight have come to power for the first time by winning a majority at a general election.

You also had Cameron getting in in a coalition, Ramsey Macdonald on a coalition having won, this is when they came in for the first time into office.

Ramsey Macdonald came in in a coalition, having not won the popular vote or the most seats.

The rest, resignations, assorted governmental collapses, internecine party backstabbings, front stabbings, and Julius Caesar style 360-degree pincushionings and the the very occasional clog popping.

This is our great democratic heritage. Three-quarters of our prime minister.
Mr. Percival was shot.
He was. He was a bit, he was, I think it was, that was 1812.

Yes, 1812. Oh, yes, 1812, yes.

So I got as far back as that with a stat, and I wrote it.

I'd wasted about an hour working it out and had to write some actual jokes.

We get three facts here on the bugle, and that's one of them.

I haven't double-checked my working either, so it might be a false fact. But it's roughly a true fact.
Um, as

Ian Dunt, the political uh journalist, um, tweeted um as Theresa May was about to approach what he poetically described as the lectern of infinite crisis, um, that uh shit is going down.

Um, now looking at the possible candidates for new prime minister, shit is also going to rise up and replace uh Theresa May.

It's going to be a challenge for the Tories to find the least politically putrid candidate that can be fished. Yeah, it's extraordinary that they've sort of the

sort of attitude seems to be, well, as there are so many people who have proved themselves so competent and qualified and wonderful over the last three years, it's only fair that there are sixty-four candidates,

including Dominic Robb, who appears to be second favourite, having been notoriously incompetent as Brexit Secretary to the extent that he didn't he hadn't realised that one of our major ports was a significant

stuff

you pick up in this job. Extraordinary.
I thought Sweden was on the northern line. I thought Volkswagen was abroad by giant ladybirds.

Marvellous what you pick up with your Brexit secretary. If you had a six-year-old child that thick, you'd say we're going to have to get rid of it and get a different child.

And now he might be Prime Minister.

I'd vote for you, Mark. I would vote for you.
Oh, Lord. And all the angry ones that were just angry.
Angry? That'd win.

That'd win the angry party. We're just angry what are you angry about this oh don't i'm sick of it just get on with it well i don't know

summon get on with it enough why is things green when they should be used to be yellow

thank you very much uh would the panel like to comment on that

uh boris johnson current a hot favourite his popularity seems to be increasing in direct proportion to how little he has been speaking in public um

Further evidence of the critical role of democramnesia in modern society.

And aged five, he apparently declared an ambition to be world king, which essentially should have meant that he was jailed for life.

I mean, to be honest, it is absolutely crying out for the queen to dust off that old suit of armor.

That bow of burning gold, the arrows of desire, last used by Queen Victoria, might explain the nine children, the cloud-removing spear, the chariot of fire, and the caffeine-addled narcoleptic sword.

Get back to business, Lizzy. Step up to the plate.
There was an incident that I came across, and I think it sort of explains how we've got here.

I was travelling to France, and I thought, it was the end of last summer, and I thought, I'll go on the ferry as a foot passenger. It'd be lovely.
But they don't really cater for it anymore.

They've sort of abandoned it all. And you get to Dover.
and P ⁇ O have got a little desk there that someone works in.

And you've booked up your ticket, and you just go out and say, I've booked up my ticket, and they look it up and they give you a little token.

And then a bus comes round, you get on this little bus, it takes you around the port and then onto the onto the boat.

So, half the people at this desk, all day, all week, must be French because it's just going backwards and forwards to France, being the ferry, as Dominique Raab may or may not have learnt.

And there was a French couple in front of me, they're speaking in English, and so

the woman says to the woman at the ⁇ Os, there she says,

and the woman, I swear, I haven't changed the word of this, the PO woman at the P ⁇ O desk at Dover Port went, oh, don't talk to me in French, my French is fing shit.

Now, the trouble with the left and sort of liberals, we've been, what a pointless waste of time.

This is the country we're dealing with. I actually really like this woman.
I thought there was something really sweet about her. For being so honest and humble.

Well, this is a new way of interpreting Brexit. It's just a bit of self-knowledge.
No, we can't cope with it.

We cannot. It was probably best for Europe if we step to one side and allow you all to speak to each other in your strange codes or languages.

Fuck shit.

Yeah, shut up, you frogs. Don't you know English is the lingua franca?

Anyway, do keep listening to the bugle for exclusive coverage of Britain's ongoing dissent into the inescapable clause of the incompetent maniacs, the retrospectorals, the corpsecrats, and the democratophagic viruses crawling into the open wounds of our slowly self-immolating political system.

This week,

we

were slightly overshadowed, actually, was the European elections. Now, we're not going to know the results until Sunday, but it looks like it's going to be catastrophic for both the Conservatives and

the Labour Party. And

I went to vote in

the local church hall.

It's nice that these things get used. And

I took my daughter to help me well to help me vote to introduce her to the glories of democracy before it is ripped from her the chance to vote in the European elections.

Something that she could look back on fondly in her later years. And there were two ballot boxes on the table.

And she went up with the folded ballot paper and said to the the guy at the desk, which one do I put them in? He says, It doesn't matter, but one of them's got a shredder inside.

She put the vote in through the thing, and this guy had on his phone a shredder sound effect.

She played the sound of a shredder.

It was unquestionably the funniest thing I've ever seen happen in a polling station.

And oh, we need more stunts in polling stations. Funny presiding officers.

That's glorious.

And a waspish satire on the nature of democracy and the pointlessness of voting. From my particular polling station, there are no votes as I went berserk with a flamethrower.

Oh, that's brilliant. I voted for the Revolutionary S-Club Party, as always.
Theresa May apparently just wrote, please help on her ballot paper.

Apparently, the majority of Tory MPs did not vote for Conservative

election. But we did still manage to get a nice bit of

institutional xenophobia in by a load of EU citizens living in Britain who were eligible to vote were prevented from voting due to administrational mix-up.

That'll teach them. Again, laying our cards firmly on the table.
We are not only

afraid of foreigners, but we are also logistically incompetent.

Team GB.

Well, why don't I go over here voting just because I live here?

Oh, God.

I I mean I can understand it because when British people go live in Spain, then the first thing they do is they just become acclimatised and so sort of so much part of the community speaking language so beautifully you can hardly tell that they're English at all.

I've been living it 16 years. I ain't never seen no Spanish twat.

The highlight of the European election campaign was the battle between Nigel Farage, the pickled chili and the eyeball of British politics.

I mean, yes, we did need to change the way we looked at things, but was that the way to do it?

And his battle with the milkshake,

the famous drink, in the immortal words of Kellis, my milkshake keeps all the shysters on the bus. And

he was

trapped on a bus by a milkshake-wielding crowd.

Possibly one of the most gloriously infantile displays of political protests in our great history.

I should say, we are the people, we do not support the use of milkshakes as a weapon of political terror.

Certainly, not dairy-baked-based milkshakes, which are so bad for the environment, of course, because of the impacts of dairy farming. A soya milkshake, not so much of an issue.

Same with effigies, if you must express your political disgust via the tried and trusted medium of destroying an effigy, please don't burn it.

Just make your effigy out of natural materials, ideally recycled, and express your anger by letting it slowly biodegrade. Should also accurately mirror the history of the Theresa May government.

There was a glorious phrase in one of the reports: a crowd, quotes, armed with milkshakes.

What kind of piddly civil war are we indulging ourselves in?

Alice, you in Australia, you've also had your

election result and

well, a surprise result.

Scott Morrison came through unexpectedly to retain the

coveted title of

Prime Minister of Australia.

Yes, Australian Azi lefties are tearing their hair in shock after an election that the polls indicated would be strongly Labour-leaning has instead come good for the Liberals and the Coalition.

To clarify, for US listeners, for us in Australia, the Liberals are sort of the Conservatives, except that because our voting is compulsory, our politics tends to be a little bit more boring.

So what we call Conservative, you'd probably consider centre-right, and what we call centre-right is what you'd call left-wing, being for example all for universal health care except for the immigrants we keep in detention.

In the UK what you call public schools and what we call private schools and what you call biscuits in America we call bread rolls and what we call biscuits you call cookies and what we call pancakes you call crepes and what you call pancakes we call flapjacks but what the British call flapjacks the Australians call muesli bars.

Right.

Two countries divided by a common language, once again.

I mean it's not all good news for populist strongmanning as the electorate booted out many of the high-profile high-profile dudes who were most blatantly fluttering their eyelashes at neo-Nazis like debutantes with jizz in their eyes.

Tony Abbott, Fraser Anning, and Clive Palmer all lost their seats.

Clive Palmer, in his continuing quest to be an incoherently blustering supermarket home brand knock-off of Donald Trump, is taking credit for the coalition's win in Queensland, having spent $60 million on mainly attack ads against Labour.

I was reading a couple of analyses of the results, and this came from the chief economist at the Australia Institute think tank chapter called Dr Richard Dennis, who summed it up as follows.

He said, landlords back labour and their renters backed for the coalition, so the Liberal Scott Morrison government.

So basically their landlords voted to give their tenants free childcare and free health care, while their tenants voted for their landlords to keep their tax concessions.

This is essentially political Stockholm syndrome, isn't it? Yeah. Oh dear.
So were people really, really upset about this thing, Alice?

Yeah, while it was going on, I was at the Australian Podcasting Awards. I did not win the Australian Podcasting Awards.
The winner was podcasting and not me. But

just the course of the evening got increasingly depressed as the results came in. After an initial sort of high when Abbott lost his seat,

just a bunch of lefty ART types slumping down in their seats and applauding with decreasing fervour at people winning awards for categories they didn't even know existed.

The Labour Party led by Bill Shorten who's now resigned, their plan of fighting climate change didn't seem to hit home with the electorate in the increasingly parched on-fire encroaching desert-based country that is ever more regular victim of extreme climate incidents.

Why do you think that was, Alice?

Well, we sort of decided to stick with the political coalition that's humiliated itself with bluster and infighting because it promised economic stability rather than choosing the Labour Party with its equally embarrassing infighting for the promise of greater action on climate change.

I think mainly because we don't mind if the world burns down so long as we're rich at the end of it. Oh, that's it.
Got to be winning when the world ends.

Gold floats, right?

Testify. Yes, I mean, Scomo is famous for presenting himself as a sort of a man of the people while clearly not being a man of the people.

And it has given rise to one of the greatest all-time memes, which has absolutely no apparent foundation in fact, but that Scott Morrison shit himself at Engadine McDonald's in 1997

is an

incredibly popular meme.

Is there any you know, there's no smoke without fire, of course, it's the first rule of well it he consistently finishes his his speeches by talking about his football team, right?

Um, that he's really into a particular football team, and he, you know, at the end of all his political speeches, he goes, yeah, but on that particular date in 1997,

they lost, and presumably he shit himself in rage

there's a plaque at the Engadine McDonald's

that's so Australian

maybe that's the secret of his popularity with with the electorate

effectively his party works directly against the interests of but maybe they can relate to a man who shat himself in McDonald's it's all about personal contact isn't it

well just as your people should relate

it's all changing ten years years ago, 15 years ago, it was just assumed if you said you boasted about grabbing a woman's pussy, that was the end of your career.

Probably every 20 minutes, Trump does something that 20 years ago would have finished your career. Boris Johnson, everything he does would have finished it now.

Now, 15 years ago, if you were ever filmed shitting yourself in McDonald's, but now.

God might have shed myself at McDonald's and your polling goes up.

I'm okay about it. That's his making a mistake, but he'd won by even more.

Maybe I mean, this, maybe this will impact on the Conservative leadership here. They'll all be up to Burger King.
Have Jeremy Hunt saying, Yeah,

I wipe my jam-covered penis on the curtains of a primary school, and we waltz to power. I mean, isn't it a nice proof that careers are evolving to be more resilient? Exactly.

And then they'll all be doing it. They'll all be there.
Sajid Javid will say,

I left the jam on mine

so it would attract wasps because I'm more of a leader.

I'm currently maintaining a functioning wasp's nest in my ball sack.

Let me show you.

Which is the sort of leadership that Britain needs. I did it when I was a bus driver.

Two of them stung me once, took the 133 straight through Woolworths.

Wasp nest on my ball sack was in fact the original version of Lipstick on Your Collar, eventually sung by Connie Francis, originally offered as Waspness on My Ball Tack to Paul Anko, who turned it down.

Showbiz News now, and well, Theresa May, of course, is not the only inexplicably long-running saga that has fizzled to an unsatisfactory ending whilst at the same time threatening to spawn some deeply unsavoury spin-offs.

Game of Thrones has witted into the TV sunset, and it seems to have riled its many fans by by being a bit shit at the end, like life, I suppose.

It ended after, I don't know, was it eight series and with a plot that had more holes in it than a millipede's trousers.

It tied up all the loose ends like Albert Einstein's hairdresser and made as much sense as the last three years of global history multiplied by the laws of rugby union.

And Alishi, the fans are not happy. And when even fiction is provoking mass protests, you know the planet is in serious trouble.
It's a terrible

International streaming sensation Game of Thrones has wrapped up its final season, its last episodes courting controversy with a series of exciting twists, deaths, and betrayals, which, despite literally a decade of prior exciting twists, deaths, and betrayals, has caused absolute uproar on the internet.

The series tracked

George R. R.

Martin's books, and people are pretty pissed and surprised that the last two episodes, particularly, aren't feminist enough, despite the original texts containing over 200 rapes, including child rape, murder rape, magic rape, and incest.

That feels like too many rape passages to be fun, even in fiction, Andy. What's the collective noun, an embarrassment of rape scenes?

Though I'm sure many of them are very narrative-empowering or formative for character development in a defensively feminist way. Don't at me, please.

Quick bit of

Donald Trump news, obviously in battle with various

forces arranged against him from in America and around the world. He called his former Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, as dumb as a rock

this week.

Well, I mean, A, rocks actually keep very detailed information going back hundreds of millions of years, which is possibly something Trump's not entirely familiar with.

And it's one thing to be able to spot someone who's as dumb as a rock, but it's quite another thing to pick that person out and then give them one of the most important jobs in the world, which uh donald trump has he basically went on strike and refused to do any any work which is i think the best thing we can hope for at this stage so it's been uh i mean on a plus side with trump he did not do any of the following things this week uh a personally drown a puppy on national tv b ban all women from laughing c invade france d urinate out of air force one whilst flying over a school for special needs children e dry hunt the lincoln monument or f charter a helicopter and airdrop rotting seal carcasses over the crowd at the minor league baseball game between the toledo mudhens and the Columbus Clippers while trailing a banner behind his aircraft saying, What if a Mexican or Muslim was doing that?

Hashtag build the wall. So, you know, it could have been worse, it could have been a worse week.

I do think he's saving all them up for one week.

I reckon probably late October next year, week before the election.

Sport now, and uh, well, the Cricket World Cup begins begins on Thursday and this makes me enormously excited.

Partly because I'm going to a ridiculous number of games in my other job in England. Aren't you going to all of them including when there's two on the same day?

Not quite. I mean if the logistics allowed Mark then yes I'm going to about two-thirds of the games at the World Cup because some of those statistics aren't going to look themselves up are they?

And quite incredibly England actually have a genuine chance of

winning the Cricket World Cup. They are in fact favourites and well, they've been the best side in international one-day cricket since pretty much since I started covering it for the BBC.

So you're all welcome.

Yes, the Cricket World Cup begins on Thursday and ends as all cricket matches do, either when one side chooses to ritually disembowel themselves rather than continue the game or when play is interrupted by the heat death of the universe.

They say those who are tired of cricket are tired of life if you take the word life in that sentence to mean cricket.

well i mean you're not actually that far off where there was a game in uh 1939 uh famous timeless test england playing in south africa uh where well they used to just play games with no sort of end time now it's five days for test matches and they played for two weeks and then they called it a draw because england had to catch the boat home yeah and then a war broke out so i mean it was pretty close to what you've just described alice essentially and uh but wouldn't it be just if it was the heat death of the universe ending the game, the commentary would just be, oh, well, that's rather a shame.

There's the heat, death of the universe.

Let's not let it spoil some of the wonderful sort of four days we've had. Marvellous Innings of 83.

I think it's worth noting that I do love cricket, Andy, but I can love cricket and also objectively realise that it's awful, like the cake that my auntie used to bake for our birthday every year and would burn it every year.

It's one of my favourite flavours in the world, but objectively horrendous.

Well, I went to see Kent versus Surrey, my first county game of the year, the other day, and alarmingly a few things happened in the first hour and a half, but then nothing else happened.

And I prefer it like that. And a couple of years ago when I was at Canterbury, I think that was the incident that sort of said, this is county cricket.
There was about 90 people there,

all of which were sort of

even older than the average Conservative membership. They were so old.
Most of them there because they'd been there the previous year and didn't realize winter had come and gone.

They were still there. And

about three in the afternoon, there was an announcement over the tannoy.

You are reminded that the sponsors for today's game are whatever it was, funeral pair.

It's good to know your clientele, isn't it?

Excitingly, this year, and much more on the Cricket World Cup, on the unbelievable podcast that I'm doing for ABC in Australia with the wonderful Felicity Ward and also this week with Artif Nawaz, looking ahead to the World Cup.

Excitingly, Mark, the World Cup official song has been released before the tournament.

Whereas in 1999, the last time I saw a Cricket World Cup here, the Cricket World Cup song was released the day after England were knocked out. Oh, yes.

We're learning from our mistakes.

Teresa may I'll have a song come out tomorrow. I'm going to be prime minister.

Well I mean there's further good news for England.

I mean obviously almost all sport is dictated by historical coincidence and England actually have a much better average at Cricket World Cups when the previous general election has resulted in the victory of a female prime minister.

So they reached the final in 1979

after Thatcher had won the 79 election. They reached the semi in 83.
They reached the final in 1987 after Thatcher had won the 87 election. They reached the final in 92.

Now, Thatcher had gone by then, but they hadn't yet had the 1992 general election. So every time England have done well at a Cricket World Cup, a woman has won the previous general election.

And since 1992,

all general elections up until the last one in 2017 won by men, England failed even to qualify for a semi-final. So this is Theresa May's one positive legacy for this country.

She's too modest about it.

Anyway, do tune in to future bugles over the next few weeks. I will no doubt touch on the World Cup, given that I will be spending most of my waking hours watching it and

most of my sleeping hours thinking about it.

And the

Unbelievable is available wherever you get your podcasts or on the ABC website. Well, that brings us to the end of this week's Bugle.

Mark, thanks for it's been a delight to have you on, as always.

And

what an

interesting day to

unleash the full glory of your

love.

Love and affection. Yes.

For the people in the news.

Alice. Because

if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything.

Yes, I think that's something that I don't think either of us have really followed through with in our careers. Alice, a delight as always to

have you on the show.

shows to plug?

Yes, my

filmed show Ethos is up on my Patreon and I'm doing a show Mythos in London on the 10th of July

at the Museum of Comedy. It's all on the internet.
Just look it up on the internet. I'll be there.
I'll be on the internet.

There's a Bugle live show at the Underbelly on the 22nd of June featuring me, Nish and Alice. Mark, have you got any tour shows or anything coming up you want to alert people?

No, but I'd like to go to Australia one day. So if I can plug that

if anyone in Australia would like to fly Mark Steele over

to my dad has a spare bedroom that I was recently staying in, so

this is a trip coming together.

If you can deal with him talking about your eggs, Mark, I'm sure you guys will get on great. That's all right.

To play you out, as always, in current Bugles, some lies about our premium subscribers.

To join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme, go to the Bugle website, thebuglepodcast.com, and click the donate button.

Choose one of the options there or make up your own contribution, regular or one off. And if you choose one of the lie including options, I will tell a lie about you on this show.

And you will join some of the following people about whom I'm about to bullshit.

Deborah Swain thinks the word whelped is underused and should be spread more widely to refer not just to doggies firing puppies out of their doggy tum-tums, but also to the creative process of writing a novel, solving a sudoku, or providing an assist for a goal.

Michael and Nicole Kelly are not concerned about the Chinese government spying on them through technological snooping because they themselves installed a wiretap in the Forbidden City when on holiday in Beijing in 2004 and have shared the information gleaned through a series of coded letters to the Sun newspaper.

Someone known only as Phot Ph has proved that the real reason that Theresa May resigned is that someone has video evidence that she was in fact one of the 1980s all-female American rock band Vixen and was replaced by a body double when she was elected as a local councillor in South London in 1986.

Ken Samuels is unimpressed by Clouds, calling them fluffy time-serving conventionalists which have not evolved or improved in literally millions of years.

Christian Quaser would love to see what baton twirlers could do with real weapons.

He reckons they would have been very useful in wars up to around the mid-15th century, but that it's now probably too late to find out.

Stephen Way has formulated and costed proposals to replace roads with zip wires, which are amongst the most environmentally friendly forms of mass transit available.

Whilst Emma Colville is not convinced that swans are all that, and wonders why they don't use their long necks more in combat and social situations, reckoning they could hook their beaks around lampposts while flying at high speed and use the centrifugal force to whiz round and knock the ice cream out of a child's hand.

Kirk Roberts would like to do away with maps on the world's underground and metro systems, thinking it would help rebuild communities and disadvantaged areas if you just had to get out and see what was there.

Who knows what you might like, buy or invest in, or whom you might meet. Roberto Tyley thinks postgraduate study should be allocated to the people who most need it, not the people who most want it.

He says that the intellectually curious and gifted are still going to be curious and gifted even if they don't spend four years studying the mating rituals of ferrets or how capitalism causes acne or whether atoms exist.

It's the people who don't take an interest in learning about the world who would gain the most.

Luciano Silva wonders whether popes genuinely float or whether they only stay on top of water because their special pope cassocks trap pockets of air. Whatever, at any rate, he's never seen one sink.

On the subjects of sinking, it is a constant irritation to Neil Harrison that the Titanic gets so much more media attention than all the boats that never sank even once.

And finally, Kieran Johnston would give anything, and I mean anything, to see the Queen play the trombone unexpectedly during the state opening of Parliament, just to see A.

how the MPs will react and B how far her royal cheeks will puff puff out. More lies next week.
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