That Pen is revisited - Bugle 4105B

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to Bugle issue 4105, sub-episode ah, ah, or ah, delete according to how you're feeling about your planet right now.

We are having a week off for bugling this week.

It turns out to have been quite well timed, aside from it being the the Easter school holidays, because Brexit has been on the back burner this week.

I mean it's slow immolating itself on the back burner, but on the back burner nonetheless and all our attention has turned instead to the far far less pressing issue that the world is basically doomed.

Bring back Brexit!

At least that's just one nation catapulting itself into the comforting concrete of freedom, not an entire species.

We have some top-notch goodies for you in this week's sub-bugle, including some ripe offcuts from recent shows, something Chris has put together for your delectation,

well hopefully delectation, something from a decade ago and some lies about our premium voluntary subscribers.

Details on the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme are on the website.

To start us off this week here's something that we've allowed to mature and ferment gently on the cutting room floor.

There was also some

entertaining

entertaining democratic procedure.

in the House of Lords,

our glorious second chamber.

Don't forget, we've got to respect our democracy.

I don't know.

But when you hear the House of Lords, just and you don't, because we hear it so often in the news, you don't think about it, but it's only when you think about the phrase that you go, yeah, of course, we've got a society called the Grand Wizards.

We've literally got a building called the House of Lords.

So

there was a filibuster in the House of Lords in an attempt to delay

the Yvette Cooper-Letwin Amendment.

Yeah, the Cooper-Letwin Amendment.

That is an extension to Article 50.

For those of you who don't know, quick

Brexit terminology quiz.

Who or what is a filibuster?

Is it A, Jacob Rhys-Mogg's third daughter?

Is it B, a World War I tank that due to a glitch in our unwritten British Constitution can be driven into the houses of parliament and parked in front of either the House of Commons or the House of Lords doors to stop any members getting in, resulting in a significant delay to debates and legislation?

Is it C, a medical device, the filibuster, installed in the brains of members of parliament that renders them immune to any sense of awareness that their current words and actions stand in obvious and direct contradiction to their words and actions that they may have said or done in the past, considered vital to the smooth functioning of politics?

Is it D, a British fruit, like a potato crossed with Japanese knotweed crossed with another potato that smells like a dead hedgehog, that is set to replace all school meals after Brexit as we get back to basics?

Or is it E, a personalised wrestling move used in recent cabinet meetings by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, to try to win people round?

The move involves Hammond jumping onto the cabinet room table in 10 Downing Street, then dropping a fellow cabinet minister with a suplex power crunch choke wobbler quadruple Nelson

and shouting, consider yourself filibustered,

before the spluttering victim struggles back to his or her feet, whimpering about the will of the people.

Or is it F, a tried and trusted means of respecting democracy by blocking anything happening?

The answer, of course, course, is F and A.

Yeah, it's an attempt at willful democratic constipation.

Yes.

And very popular in America.

Used to more in America than here these days.

Yeah.

The greatest democracy in the world, of course.

And as if things weren't bad enough, they'd had to delay their debate yesterday, or it had to be postponed, because there was a leak in the

chamber in the House of Commons.

And the Evening Standard reported it thusly.

It is understood water began pouring into the press gallery in what some have described as an apocalyptic metaphor for Brexit.

But that's not a metaphor for Brexit at all.

It would only work as a Brexit metaphor if some of the MPs had, for absolutely no reason, smashed a hole in the roof and started pouring water in themselves whilst yelling something about immigrants.

It also

suggests it was just like a minor leak in Eva.

I mean, everything's gone downhill in this country.

Even the divine punishments have gone downhill.

Because

1834, the whole place burned down, isn't it?

Even God's lost his edge.

Keep trickling little piddly microphone.

That's one of my favourite bits of the Old Testament is when Noah had to deal with that leak.

As I'm sure you guys may know, I've been consuming way too much Brexit media.

And it's reached a point where every headline I see now, I just assume is related to Brexit.

There were a few headlines this week that turned out not to be related to Brexit that I thought were, including this one.

What would happen if humanity detonated every single nuclear warhead on Earth at the same time?

Which I just assumed was some kind of counter-offer.

Some kind of brinkmanship.

Living fossil given new home.

I assume Jacob Reesembogg has been sent to jail.

No.

Will we be able to leave the boring jobs to robots?

I assume was an overheard quote from the Brexit Secretary,

hoping that we can get the humans out of this terrible process.

And Brits are more likely than other people in other countries to combine drugs drugs with sex.

Survey finds, which shows the pressures on our time management as a nation that Brexit has brought about.

My favourite Brexit story is something that happened today when Roger Helmer, who's a former member of the European Parliament, this morning tweeted, it's less than four weeks to go to the local elections.

I intend to go to the polling station and write Brexit in big block letters across the ballot paper.

Great.

Spoil your own ballot paper.

paper by just writing.

I mean, I hope he's extending that to every element of his life and just writing Brexit everywhere.

Like Jack Nicholson and the Shiny.

Oh, man.

Back to the present now.

And, well, the Mueller reports has been released in full, apart from the bits that had to be bleeped out.

And it shows, all in all, that Donald Trump is, in fact, a paragon of non-Russio-Kaludic virtue who rescues puppies from crocodile-infested bathtubs on an almost minutely basis and would not obstruct a bit of justice if you went down on your bended knee and begged him.

Or not, depending on what tone of voice you read it in.

We do have a full version of the Mueller Report here with different redactions.

In this one, the bits redacted are all the bits showing Mr.

Trump in a light that confirms him as someone patently unfit to be president.

So here it is, the full report with the unpresidential bits redacted.

The Muller Report by Robert Muller.

Once upon a time there was a the end.

Well, there you go, interesting reading if you can get hold of it.

Now it's Chris time.

He's made something for us.

I don't know what it is, but we are all about to find out.

So strap in.

Hello, all around the world.

Indulge Britain again.

Leave means leave, by the way.

Another British political victory over history.

In 2019, Britain will be threatening countries to death like Germany and Brighton.

Brexit.

Bafflingly, still a massive problem around the world.

Leave me to leave.

Okay.

Very good advice.

Theresa May is urinating across Jeremy Corbyn.

And she's had quite a lot of praise for this, but Jeremy is living.

Well done.

Yeah, Brexit is inspirational and indeed iconic amongst supporters of malaria.

So this is a microcosm of Jacob Reese Moggin's good bugle audience, Eupheral Bleating, very, very shortly before conception.

What a sentence!

Chris there, he has a bionic hip now, so do be careful what you say to him.

He can spring over a 10-foot wall.

Archived time now, and well, it is hard to believe it, but just three weeks ago, it was 10 years ago, since arguably the most important story in the history of humanity.

Back in Bugle 69, this fearless investigative audio journal delved into the very heart of an issue that would come to define modern humanity and all who sail in it.

So here's a hearty chunk from Bugle 69, including not only the story to end all stories, but also, to begin with, some hogwash.

Well, anyway, this is Bugle 69.

We'll report back next week on the birth Bugle 69, John.

In the year 69, of course, there were four Roman emperors.

Two of them were killed, one bumped himself off to save anyone the trouble of having to kill him.

This episode of the Bugle doesn't see quite the same level of politically motivated bloodletting.

Although all I can say is Louis is dressed up like a centurion, so things aren't looking good at this end.

Also, this is for the week being Monday, the 30th of March.

That means it will be the 150th anniversary of the patenting of the world's first pencil with an eraser attached to it.

What?

That's true, John.

Tomorrow

that is the first dual-use thing humanity ever invented.

And that paved the way for things like the clock radio, the two-in-one shampoo and conditioner, the ejector seats.

wait until that piece of military technology trickles down into the civilian market.

Watching TV or attending tedious business meetings will never have been so exciting.

Also, the pretzel dog, what a snack, what a pet, probably best in the reverse order.

Also, the landmine milk jug, the barbed wire envelope, and the crocker Bible.

Half man-eating reptile, half-religious tract.

On both counts.

On both counts, watch out.

Oh boy, every week you come up with a new convincing case for going to hell

There's always some sections of the doodle going straight in the bin this week the first 10 in a series of audio self-help guides including you and your cupboards how to drink without drowning what to do if there's a sniper in your kitchen filing for first timers how to start a war why stealing cars is illegal the psychological effects of shelves how to tell if you're alive or dead how to tell whether you're being told off or seduced and a man's guide to screaming and uh I see that was 11.

And also in the bin part one in the serialization of the hit audiobook Can Ducks Duck and 50 other wordplay-based questions about animals, including why aren't foxes foxy?

Do hippos have hips?

Is my rhino a whino?

What are the correct legal channels for making an allegation against an alligator?

Is it rude to flip a bird to a bird?

What do I do if there's an impala in my parlour?

What do I do if my stick insect gets stuck in a sect?

Oh no.

Would my mallard feel more if I dressed it up like 1850s US President Millard Fillmore?

Will excessive reading of Don Quixote make my donkey OD?

Oh, no, no.

Strike two.

Strike two, Andy.

Will an ant elope with my antelope?

Do strike three.

Two wood cocks have wooden cocks.

How big is a Mamba's member?

How come great tits don't have great tits?

Do blow flies, blow flies.

Is my hornet horny?

Do ocelots tocelot?

And is my horse pimping horse?

I'm done.

Top story this week and penises on roofs.

You see Andy, the bugle is already changing.

It's in LA and it's already become attention-grabbingly commercial.

We are dumbing down.

It's happening.

Damn this city of fallen angels.

It's true, this story is indeed about penises on roofs.

An 18-year-old in Britain secretly painted a 60-foot drawing of a phallus on the roof of his parents' £1 million mansion in Berkshire.

It was there for around a year before his parents found out and they've said

they're going to make him clean it off when he gets back from traveling.

What a story, Andy.

A fortnight ago, it was monkeys who stepped forward to take the bugle's coveted top-story slot and provide much light relief to a world frozen in economic fear.

This week, step forward, rooftop penises.

What a story.

Well, this is unquestionably the new story of the decade, I would say.

I mean, there's a global recession.

You can take that.

You can take your funky new president in America.

Your looming environmental mega-catastrophes, your ongoing wars, the gradual devastation of everything we as a species hold dear.

And even that meteorite that's going to destroy the planet Earth next Wednesday.

That's a bit of a boogle scoop, that one.

But there's only one story in town in the first decade of the third millennium, and that is this boy painting a massive Wang on the roof of his parents' mansion.

Everything else seems irrelevant now, John.

A boy's painted a gigantic Johnson on a big house.

And I think what this goes to show is that when times are at their toughest, John, and when the present is bleak and the future is even bleaker, humankind will go back to basics, back to its roots, and commune with its primeval prehistoric self and draw a massive cock on something.

It's happened since the dawn of time, John.

Look at the Cernabas giants.

Down in the West Country in England started off when a teenage caveman chiseled a giant Willian balls onto his parents' hill.

His dad was so embarrassed that he drew a giant man around it it and pretended it was religious.

Well, so when God was drawing up the blueprint for the human being, John, you know, he created something simple, elegant, without too many vulnerable external protuberances.

All of a sudden, he gets a bit bored, draws a cock and balls on it, giggles, goes to bed, oversleeps and wakes to find out that his over-efficient secretary has already sent the drawing off to be made up into a living being.

That's where the problems began.

I'm 31 years old.

Why do I find this story so funny?

We'll put the photo of this up on the website and I heartily encourage you to go and take a look at it because it truly is a work of art.

Michelangelo had the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the heavens.

This kid had a roof and a massive penis.

They're basically the same.

But for me, this story brings up a number of key questions, Andy.

One, what does this do to the house price?

Because

if they find that it's actually added value, then perhaps people will have to draw massive penises on their roofs to compete.

These are tough times, Andy, to buyers market.

People used to have the smell of freshly baked bread and coffee to shift a house.

Now it's all about the painted roof penis.

I think there's another question, John.

What on earth?

What is that question?

What on earth possessed a teenage boy to paint a massive schlong on his parents' roof?

And I guess the obvious answer to that is that he's a teenage boy and his parents have a roof.

And, you know,

nature decreed he was going to draw a penis somewhere.

Okay, I have another question.

In retort to that, Andy, I'll point out simply that they had it for an entire year without noticing, which really makes you think.

Can anyone truly say they are 100% sure that they don't have a massive penis on their roof right now?

When was the last time you were up on your roof?

A penis could be there right now.

How does the lesson go?

Laugh not at the penis on your neighbour's roof until you're sure that you don't have an even bigger penis on yours.

It's like one of Aesop's more obscene fables.

The ones he wrote when he was drunk late at night.

How about you, Andy?

Can you be absolutely sure you don't have a penis on your roof?

I can't be absolutely sure, John, but

I can verify that no penis-shaped aircraft have landed on my roof by mistake, thinking that was a penis craft pad.

But I guess, you know, there's another way of looking at this, John.

There's a tangential way of answering your question about whether I've got a penis on my roof.

And that is that this, it could be a fertility symbol.

You know, maybe this lad just wanted to have a little younger brother or sister to play with.

He was trying to summon the assistance of some primeval divinity to bring fruit to his mother's womb.

Who knows?

All I do know, John, is that when my wife and I were trying to get pregnant for the first time, we painted a dangler and two nuggets on our roof.

But unfortunately, at the time, we were living in a downstairs flat.

So we had some very angry neighbours from the upstairs flat asking us to replace their living room carpet with something a little bit less obscene.

Also, the parents here claim that this is their son's doing, but let's be fair.

He's not there to defend himself from this charge.

They could be stitching him up.

Let's play Colombo for a second here because this case may be trickier than it initially appears.

Could it be they are framing their own son to protect themselves from the truth that they painted a massive penis on their own roof and were hoping no one would notice?

It's the perfect crime.

Or was this a more supernatural occurrence?

Aliens have been said to regularly swoop down in the middle of the night and create mysterious crop circles.

Perhaps they're branching out.

They finished their crop circle phase and now experimenting with roofs and penises.

Well I've got another explanation for this John and I think the boy is guilty of this charge of painting a massive penis on his parents' roof.

But I think what it is John is it's the pitch.

It's actually the pitch markings from the old English sport of the roof game, which is an early form of football which originated on the roof of Eton College Chapel in the 16th century.

Now the story goes that an infestation of dry rot resulted in the discolouration of the roofing timbers on the chapel in the shape of the aforementioned anatomia.

And during a decade of flooding, the school was forced to move the entire school operation onto the chapel roof.

Now they started playing the roof game using

this kind of pitch marking that nature had created on their roof.

And now in the roof game one team defends the Naj end, named after the two semicircular shapes at one end which look like an ecclesiastical naj, which is a two-headed scepter used by school chaplains in medieval times.

Yep.

This team was known as the najes.

Now the other team defended the end nearest the chapel's main bell or the bellend where the dry rot fungi had grown bountifully around the outline of a spare bell that had been left on the roof after the school campanology society meeting had degenerated into an alcoholic sea of fumbling homosexualism

as is traditional at schools such as Eton.

So that led to a bell left unattended on the roof on a stormy night.

This team of course was known as the Bellends.

Now the attacking side had to use the slope of the roof to curl the ball which is originally made from the stomach of the school's least popular boy to curl that around the defenders up the long, narrow centre of the pitch.

This process was known as shaving, as the boys would roll up their school gowns or shafts to use as slings to impart extra spin on the ball.

Once the team had reached the end of the main central portion of the pitch, its players would shout the word shaft to signal that the shaving phase of the attack was complete.

On the call of shaft, the attacking team would attempt to score.

For the bell ends, this involved scratching the nadges or tagging each member of the nadger defence with the ball whilst in the nadge zone.

And for the nadges, to score,

required them to

yank the bellends.

In other words, to wrestle the defenders out of the bell end area, leaving an attacking Nadjah with the ball in the unoccupied zone.

Now of course neither side scored either a yank or a scratch between 1604 and 1856, making it very like the Eaton Wall game.

When a successful scratching of the Nadjas attracted such nationwide press interest that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were invited to pop down the road from Windsor Castle to watch a game.

Whilst observing from above in the Royal Health Air Balloon, the professional queen and mother of eight were seen to succumb into fits of giggles, pointing at the outline of the pitch and chuckling to Albert, who himself then began to laugh.

Queen Victoria was then seen to apparently grab Albert's nethercocks with her royal hand, provoking yet more laughter as the loving couple disappeared from view into the balloon's basket.

Albert reappeared briefly, just to sever the cord tethering the balloon to the ground, and the royal balloon floated off somewhat unsteadily, rocking vigorously from side to side to the sounds of lascivious growls from the Prince Consort and ecstatic whoops from Her Majesty.

Nine months later, Princess Beatrice was born, but the headmaster and provost of Eton were so disturbed at the moral and psychological devastation wreaked upon the schoolboys from seeing the monarch thraggling her husband that they instantly banned the roof game from ever happening again.

Having viewed the roof from above and realising that it did in fact look quite like a gentleman's exhibits, they covered the old wooden roof with a giant tarpaulin which currently resides in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's largest posing pouch.

And the roof game fell into obscurity until it was just recently heroically resuscitated by this brave young teenager from Berkshire.

And of course the terms nadger, Bellend and Shaft remain in popular usage today.

You are a husband and father of two.

I love my history, John.

Was that a crime?

It is shameful upon both of us, Andy, that this story has inspired us so much.

This has been the greatest muse of the last 69 bugles.

Well, I think, John, that's, you know, it's a depressing world.

we live in and we have to grasp it.

You know, not just good news stories, but fantastic news stories like this.

Yeah, I suppose that's true.

It's just, it says, I shocked myself last night with

how many jokes I was inspired to write about this.

I have another one just down here saying it's a chalk outline.

It looks like an active crime scene, Andy.

It's like a gigantic penis was murdered on their roof.

In which case they should leave it alone, because clearly it's an ongoing investigation.

So his parents have said he will have to, the young lad called Rory will have to clean the massive 20-metre prong off the roof himself but I guess as he does so he'll be able to console himself that however long he lives whatever happens in the rest of his life when he finally prepares to meet his maker his final thought will be I painted a 60 foot wang on my parents roof and he will die a happy man John

Well, that is almost it for this week's sub-bugle.

Don't forget you can now access the Bugle through the Entail app, E-N-T-A-L-E.

That will feature some pictures and other visual goodies as you listen.

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Martin Hopkins thinks that competitive food fighting is the future of all entertainment and thinks that bouts should start with an airdrop.

An anonymous donor, known roughly as

is unafraid to disagree vehemently with the popularly accepted proposition that heaven is a half-pipe.

Mark Komorinsky once went undercover in a local nightclub and discovered that the DJ at the regular Friday night disco was in fact the supposedly dead former Soviet Politburo member Andrei Gromyko, who it transpired had quotes the incurable horn for all members of Boney M.

Dale Bates invented a wrestling move called the barking squid but was banned from using it after one of his prosthetic tentacles flew off and broke a window.

Sam Gordon is understandably unconvinced that bats are mammals and thinks that if they aren't allowed to call themselves birds then penguins should be reclassified as amphibians and it is very hard to argue with that.

Robert Laird often wonders what happened to Oliver Twist later in life and worries that the celebrity Dickens character would in fact have suffered some serious psychological scarring from his most unusual childhood.

Darren McNamara programmed and ran a computer simulation that suggested that if the dinosaurs had never died out, a triceratops would currently be president of the USA.

Mirko Kaman, meanwhile, does a sensational Lyndon B.

Johnson impersonation.

I mean seriously, you have to hear it to believe it.

Derek Snyder doesn't really see the need for any other musical instrument than the kazoo.

Gaynol Flora believes the host city of the Olympic Games should be forcibly awarded to the world's shittiest places to force them to smarten up.

Roll on Moggadishu 2028.

Mia Henderson wonders on an almost daily basis whether the Queen has ever tried to rap and anonymous donor initials SH tends to exaggerate the circumference of tomatoes when describing impressive salad bars to friends.

CC French thinks the main reason that Tiger Tiger Woods endured an 11-year gap between major championship victories was because of a decade-long fear of dimples, making him tremulous when whacking the golf ball, renowned of course as the world's dimpliest object.

Simon Hawkins likes to shout gotcha when he opens a jar of pickles before saying so which one of you green vinegary bastards is the great Gherkin?

Paul Browning once had a three-way shouting match on a crowded commuter train over whether Archimedes was a scientist, a sex symbol or both.

Anonymous donor donor, Initials AF, thinks football would be a much better sport if the goal was made bigger in the second half for the team whose supporters had been more polite in the first half.

Finnegan Southey wonders if telepathy could be taught and learned via a long-distance course using only the power of the mind.

Another anonymous donor, Initials MH, thinks that the lack of zebras in top-level horse racing is more than just an aesthetic disappointment.

It is, quotes, yet another example of societal prejudice against stripey things such as as wasps.

Graham Jones, well, he tends to veer on the side of caution when estimating the number of grains of rice it would take to fill a 50-metre Olympic swimming pool, and Stephan Jordan has patented the design for the world's first wireless wire.

Quinn Van Order would like to pep up courtroom trials by making judges use red and yellow cards like football referees, yellow for a community service punishment and red for a custodial sentence.

Magnus Hustweit has theoretically developed a means of turning a sausage back into a live pig, but thinks it would be a waste of electricity to do so.

Adam Warren is not sold at all on brunch as a meal and prefers a combination of bribble, a breakfast nibble, and snunch, a snack lunch.

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