Sex and Insects news – Bugle 4097

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, Buglers, and welcome to issue 4097 of the world's premier source of truth, The Bugle, for the week beginning Monday, the 18th of February, 2019, with me and Liz Altsman rising like a phoenix from its regular snooze on the sofa not not a particularly fiery phoenix we are here in london where as we speak theresa may is drafting her latest brexit negotiations plan well she's photocopying it on the downing street photocopy which still bears the discernible but unmistakable imprint of david cameron's arse of course

it's a sheet with plan a written on then crossed out plan b written on it b the crossed out c written in c crossed out d you get you get the point but this time she's writing a smiley face in the top corner it might work joining me to hold up the telescope of satire to the obviously empty eye socket of news and ask it what it can see.

Back again, all the way from last week and the week before, and many weeks before that.

Alice Fraser.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Buglers.

Yes, I have returned.

I am mighty and strong and otherwise lacking sleep.

Mighty strong and lacking sleep.

Yeah, I did a Valentine's Day gig last night to a crowd of people who were either in relationships or going on like first or second dates, and then I went home and had an existential crisis about it.

A Valentine's Day comedy gig induced existential crisis.

Yeah, indeed.

The best kind of existential crisis I think.

Yeah, I mean I like Valentine's Day.

I just don't trust commercialism and that's a complex web.

Right.

And joining us for the first time on Bugle Debut from America now living in Britain to see what a very slightly less politically idiotic country looks like.

Just straightway.

A huge bugle welcome to Desiree Birch.

Hey Andy, hey Alice.

Hey Buglers.

Excited to be here.

Not a lot going on.

I mean everything's going on in the world and I'm just trying to keep it real real quiet.

Spend false.

Totally everyone in the world took that attitude.

Everyone kept it real, real quiet.

Hey, you know, you have an opinion?

Launch a zipper.

But yeah, I think I would want if every, but it has to be absolutely everyone signing up for that.

If all 7.4 billion people on this planet agree to that.

I would say that you need to do it in shifts because absolute silence is incredibly daunting.

I've lived in in cities for too long, and so when it's quiet, I think I'm going to get axe murdered.

You know, I need to hear some distant, like half the world needs to be partying in the distance.

If something, if a car backfires, I'm like, that's great.

Right.

Yeah, I feel like the whole political landscape at the moment is not being as jazz as it should be.

They're listening to the noise, not listening to the silence.

Most sensible people keeping their f ⁇ ing mouths shut.

We are recording on Friday the 15th of February.

In fact, it's annual World 15th February February Day, or February the 15th day, as it's known in the USA.

This February is the 16th.

The day the world celebrates the fact that it is the 15th of February and raises awareness of 15th of February as a date using slogans such as, it's the 15th of February.

Sorry, I'm just hearing that this year's 15th of February Day celebrations have been postponed and they will instead be held in 365 days' time.

On this day, In 1493, Christopher Columbus wrote an open letter describing his discoveries on his first trip and the unexpected items that he'd come across in the New World.

I have an excerpt from it here.

Yeah, I was alright, I suppose.

Food was a bit crap, and loads of my sailors died.

Four out of ten.

On this day in 2003, protests against the impending Iraq war took place in 600 cities worldwide, involving an estimated up to around 30 million people, or according to police estimates at the time, eight.

It was the largest peace demonstration in history, according to no lesser source than the internet.

Tony Blair, then Prime Minister of Britain's response was, well, I'll ask God, but I don't think he gives a shit about you protesters, and I'm his special friend.

George W.

Bush said, well, I've already asked God, and he said it's fine.

In fact, he even said we don't have to do any planning for the aftermath.

It'll take care of itself.

God replied, I'm currently away from my desk until 25th of December 3000.

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

Two sections this week, including a weather forecasting forecasting section.

We're giving away a free ISO bar and some temperatures, including 23 degrees Celsius and 44 Fahrenheit.

Also in the bin, a special commemorative animal groundbreakers section.

On the 18th of February, 1930, Elm Farm Ollie became the first cow to fly in an aeroplane.

Not only the first cow ever to fly in an aeroplane, but the first cow ever to be milked in an aeroplane.

One isn't going to take an eight-hour journey.

She's just going to be like full and gorgeous.

Of course she had to be milked.

Does that mean there was a baby cow just crying and making a milk?

There was a bunch of other cows rolling their eyes.

Yeah, the cow handing out little sympathy packs to everyone around.

I'm sorry, I have a child.

Well, in fact, it was a man called Ellsworth W.

Bunts who milked Oli.

Becoming, unsurprisingly, the first man to milk a cow in an aeroplane.

And apparently it was for scientific research to allow scientists to observe the effect of air travel on animals.

Of course, at that time, it was still believed that cows might one day jump over the moon.

It was proved wrong.

So

they turned to making a space rocket jump over the moon with more success.

She produced 48 pints of milk during the flight, which is pretty good for a first-ever effort.

I'm guessing that has to do with the air pressure, you know, it's like the blood pools in your feet,

the milk is just making your nipples engorged, you know, like that makes sense.

My brother just flew back to Australia with his wife.

I'll have to ask.

To give some context,

they do have a small baby, right?

Yes, they do.

But that's a key bit of information.

Every Every morning I wake up to just videos of her doing incredible things.

Your brother's wife or the baby?

The baby.

I mean, the baby is the incredible thing that my brother's wife did.

My favourite two is her in a bath, her eating an umbrella, and her eating a table.

Her eating an umbrella?

I'll show you afterwards.

Which bit of the umbrella?

The handle or the handle.

The handle.

That's a great British tradition, actually.

The famous 1882 cricket match between England and Australia that Australia won by seven runs.

Someone apparently ate through the handle of their umbrella because it was so tense.

So obviously your little niece is a hardcore fan of 19th century cricket.

I mean this is why people need to come to the Bugle Tour in America because they need to see the look of like gleeful anticipation on your face before you deliver a ridiculous fact like that.

I only have about three facts in the history of this show.

Anyway, back to Ollie the cow.

Apparently her milk from this fight, the 48 pints of milk, was sealed in paper cartons and then parachuted onto spectators below.

That is real entertainment.

These people couldn't wait to get the milk until the plane landed.

They needed it immediately.

We heard there was dairy!

It didn't, sadly, prove to be quite the breakthrough in airborne cow exploitation that many had hoped.

And in fact, fewer cows are now milked in aeroplanes per cow and per plane than in 1930.

It's like the moon landings all over again, in fact.

So to commemorate Elm Elm Farm Ollie's historic achievement of being the first cow

in an aeroplane, there's a special animal groundbreaker section going in the bin in which we look at Fernie, the first crocodile to play for an NBA franchise.

Bit of a mix-up, which led to the 6-foot 11-inch Croat Zravko Splat Klaptovich spending 18 months at a Florida wildlife sanctuary refusing to go swimming.

Clabard, the first chicken to win a Grammy for its 1989 hit Kluck to Polis.

Dillis, the first pig to turn itself kosher by learning the Torah off by heart.

And Arthur the Dolphin, the first cetacean to play international sport.

Played one match for England's cricket team in 1921.

Didn't go too well.

And England's plea to let Arthur Dolphin have a tank of water to splosh about between balls was rejected.

Anyway, that section ended up being, I need to lie down.

You need less time, not more time, I'm realising.

Top story this week, insects are getting.

Insects are dying out.

There's going to be no insects left very soon indeed, unless we do something about it, which is looking pretty unlikely based on the entirety of human precedent with regard to the environment.

More than 40%

of insect species are in serious decline, and a third are endangered.

And if one of those 40% are not wasps, I'm going to be f ⁇ ing cross.

Oh, they're good day.

Come on.

Yes, indeed.

The first global review of insect decline has come out with the mildly worrying news that most insects on Earth are heading for extinction, which, if unchecked, will lead directly to a, quote, catastrophic collapse of nature's ecosystems, which sounds bad.

Super bad.

Why is it so like clearly all of these sort of signs of the apocalypse are happening?

And I just feel like there are still deniers out there that are like, God, give us a sign if something's wrong.

And it's like, okay, half the bees are dead.

But give us a sign.

It's like, at five of the warmest summers on record, but give us a sign.

There are polar bears.

Half the bees are dead.

Going up to people's houses and knocking on doors because there's no more ice for them to be on in Russia.

Like, what more sign do you need?

Half the bees are dead is the opposite of a plague of locusts.

That's a good sign.

Yeah.

So it's the inverse plague.

The researcher said the repercussions this will have for the planet's ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least.

Catastrophic to say the least, Andy.

Catastrophic is not usually the least-ish sort of thing you can say.

What is the top of that scale?

I mean, like, if catastrophic is the minimum.

The scale of the loss of these tiny creatures that are the backbone,

the backbone-free backbone of our entire technology

is hard to quantify.

And while many people are worried about, for example, the plight of the bees, they don't see the point of worrying about the loss of some of the less photogenic scuttlers.

Like, for example, not many people are worried about the massive drop in more than 350,000 species of beetle.

Nobody cares about the loss of dung beetles until they're all gone and there's nobody left to push the sun across the sky anymore.

Well the planet is viewed by scientists to be at the start of its sixth mass extinction event.

This one could be an absolute classic.

It'll be the first one that's been televised live of course.

So it should go down well globally even if the animals being extinctified aren't as funky as the dinosaurs.

And the report says unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.

What I want to know is why is it always us that has to change our way of producing food?

Never the insects.

Well, some of the insects are adapting, but they're the insects that are least popular.

Things like cockroaches seem to be adapting relatively well to these new, terrifying events.

Pretty much like the, it's just like humans: the things that are the least popular are the most adaptable and survive the longest, right?

In Puerto Rico, ground insects have declined by 98% in 35 years.

Stop grinding them then.

Yep.

And also, like,

let's maybe un-flood Puerto Rico so the brown insects won't be dead.

Butterflies in England have had a really, really shit time.

Why not moths?

Why can we not focus that?

I hate moths.

Butterflies?

I have no beef, although, obviously, as a Jew, I can't eat butterflies with any kind of meat fly.

The number of

honeybee colonies in the US has come down from 6 million to 3.5 million since 1947.

I'm not sure if that's because of the Mexicans, the Guatemalans, the Muslims, or immigrants in general, but it must be one of those four.

And fast action

is needed now, apparently.

So maybe not the best time for a prominent European nation, which shall remain nameless, to spend three years disappearing violently up its own arse

in an effort to respect the formal will of the people who are around in 2016.

Well, some of us are doing our parts.

Like, I buy, you know, easy peelers every week.

I eat one.

I let the rest of them rot.

There's so many fruit flies.

I don't know what more I could be doing to help this.

You are a hero.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We don't all wear capes.

I'm just saying.

So the decline in insects have been blamed on various things, including increased use of aggressive pesticides, urbanization, climate change, and the increased use of rolled-up newspapers over the past 300 years.

Although now with more and more people reading their newspapers on their tablets, that actually might be good for insects.

Yeah.

And good for Apple, probably.

We're smashing insects and iPads with them.

Although more and more tablets are being broken and swatting insects.

Alice, what's your solution to this insect crisis?

Stop eating insects.

Stop.

Start eating insects.

I don't know.

Show those birds and stuff.

I don't have the solution.

I don't know why you would ask me about the solution to this problem, Abby.

I'm not an insect.

We've got a global catastrophe.

So, Alice, what's the plan?

What's, yeah, come on, we're waiting.

I mean, look after your insects, people.

Buy organic food.

Yeah.

I mean, in a serious way.

Yeah, buy organic food.

Why not?

But that is kind of the solution because a lot of it is pesticides, right?

So it's like buy organic stuff.

And also, I would say make grocery stores less miserable because the problem is you buy the cheaper, non-organic stuff because you don't want to be in there.

Because I was in a Tesco Express two weeks ago and it was being robbed at the front while I was at the back.

And I was like, I don't want to hang out here.

You kind of have to make it like a ladies' lounge at like a toilet at like a fancy place where it smells really nice and there are like lounge chairs and then every seller's like, oh, here's a bowl of something you might want.

And then in the corner, there's someone that you inevitably have to pay.

Like that's what you should make the grocery store like.

So you go more frequently.

I think we need to take a hint from our soon-to-be extinct insect buddies and mass together and swarm Monsanto headquarters and burn it to the ground.

Right.

Or just attack everyone so they run out swatting at their faces for no apparent reason.

I mean, I think the obvious obvious solution is, well, with automation robotizing, robotizing, robotizing 99% of all jobs within the next 25 years outside of comedy and podcasting, of course.

We can just get all the newly unemployed to dress up in bee outfits and run around the countryside pollinating stuff.

Or

we can learn from the insects because we are humans are democratic species.

You're right, Andy, we need to start f ⁇ ing flowers.

Yeah.

I don't know that our fluids are going to necessarily.

You won't know until you try.

I don't want to be the first to try whatever grows from that.

I'm just saying that.

Spread about spreading the ponel.

Anyway, look, in other insect news, it's a bad time for butterflies in America.

Yeah, absolutely.

So not only is this borderwall insanity threatening the lives of the many children and migrants and just, you know, I don't know, bricklayers probably.

It's also threatening the National Butterfly Center in the United States because it's right along the border and, you know, there have been bulldozers going through there.

At some point, the Homeland Security cut their locks that protected their walls and then put their own locks on it, like a cutthroat synergy fitness or something.

Just like cut the locks.

It was like, nope, we're taking over.

And all these people are kind of like, okay, well, you know, you're killing the sanctuary and you're also making America smaller because the way that you're going going to build the wall is cutting into us and not into them.

And it's just completely silly because we're building up walls and killing butterflies.

Mexico's curing life-threatening illnesses the whole time.

Where it's like, no, none of that.

We'll be having none of that.

I mean, Trump's border wall is making a lot of people angry, which is making a lot of the people who support him pretty happy, but in an angry way, where they're happy that the people they were originally angry with are now also angry.

But you know, you are a next-level rage inducer when butterflies take out a class action lawsuit lawsuit against you.

They don't even have proper brains.

It's astonishing this kind of constitutional overreach that Trump's administration is going through.

They are, as you say, cutting locks, moving walls.

They're generally being the federal equivalent of a schoolyard douchebag who dumps his backpack on your lunch and then makes fun of you for spilling your lunch.

Just.

So the North American Butterfly Association,

no less,

sued the American government back in 2017 over its plans to build its giant metaphor for American decline right through its property.

And it does raise the very worrying prospect that some butterflies, some of these butterflies, will become Mexican and therefore instantly become criminal butterflies, members of the brutal Mariposa cartel, pollinating American flowers with their contraband hard pollen, which is often cut with custard powders and cut costs, making it

dangerously impure.

But 30% spicier.

Come on.

In other environmental news, children in Britain are on strike.

There's a school strike.

Children are walking out of school to protest.

They go on various protests in various towns and cities around Britain against the lack of action on the environment.

I mean, I think that is very inspiring and also incredibly against my understanding of the schooling process.

You know, when I went on strike as a kid, I was in trouble for truancy.

Children going on strike strikes me as the equivalent of a hospital strike where the patients all walk out.

That's not how it works.

And then, are there a bunch of like scab children that come in to take their place?

It's just like 30-year-old waiters who want to sit down real bad all day.

It's going to be a lot of division.

That's all I know.

Children going on home strike.

No, mother, you shall not make my lunch.

Anyway, the children are on strike, including my daughter, who's joined the protest in London.

And, well, I hope it's about 20 past two now.

So I imagine the protest is in full sword.

Hello, darling.

How's the protest going?

Sorry, I can't hear.

I can't hear you.

The light isn't very good.

Did people like your placard?

You used it to smash up a what, darling?

Oh,

right.

Your friend Pratula threw up after drinking a cup.

Oh, no, sorry, I'll get it.

Oh, she, yes, she threw a.

Yeah, she has got a good frog on, you're right.

I suppose you could write it up as your science homework.

You poured what all over a policeman.

That was supposed to be for your packed lunch, lunch, darling.

You shoved what through a letterbox at the shell building.

Yes, I know we have to send a message to the big oil companies, but

no, I think look, they won't hatch for a while, so you might get away with it.

You're doing what now?

Halfway up, Big Ben?

Gorilla outfit?

What's that you're chanting?

F the fing what?

No, darling, I will not be able to take the one phone call you're gonna be allowed from the police station.

I'm recording the bugle.

Call mum.

What do you mean mum's chained herself to what?

With what written all over her?

What?

Okay, darling.

Love you too.

Ask for a lawyer.

I have met your daughter, Andrew, and that is incredibly accurate.

Yes.

I've not met her, but I just imagine her with like weaponized Capri sons to squirt in people's eyes.

Quickly, before we leave the environment section, we have a quick bugle insect fact box.

Insects are fing disgusting.

With their hideous proboscises, their weird eyes that snoop on you like a little miniature government agency, repellent eating habits, and deeply perverted sexual practices, insects are disgusting.

Their behaviour often leaves a lot to be desired, which I guess is what you would expect of a biological group who make up a whopping 90% of all animal life forms on Earth.

Fact two, if you want proof that God exists but is really shit at his job, look no further than the long-nosed weevil.

Disgusting.

Insects weigh 17 times as much as humans.

But you wouldn't know it to look at them, though.

Was Jesus an insect?

Some insects can walk on water.

Humans cannot walk on water.

Join the dots.

There are more than 6 million different species of insect.

That seems too many.

250 should be more than enough.

It's like cheese.

Sure, it's nice to have choice, but many of them are almost indistinguishable.

And you shouldn't hide them in people's underpants drawer.

And some things you might think are insects are not.

Millipedes, for example, they might as well be insects.

Indeed, they want to be insects, judging by how they behave, but they're disqualified for having too many legs.

Insects hate things with loads of legs.

They get jealous, so they leg shape their millipedes by not letting them into club hexapod.

Other things that are not insects include spiders, biscuits, a horse with a jockey on it.

Remember the golden rule, all insects have six legs, but not everything with six legs is an insect.

And tennis.

And finally, the best insect is the cricket.

Not only does the cricket attract mates by rubbing its balls on its trousers like a cricket player and imitating the sound of a hard ball hitting a wooden bat, but it's actually also a sport star in its own right.

The ancient Chinese sport of cricket fighting dates back more than a millennium.

This is a genuine fact.

It was considered so much fun that Mao Citong, Lord Chief Comie of all the Chinas, banned it in the 1970s.

What was Mao's problem with letting people enjoy the simple pleasures of training insects to fight?

Who knows?

Luckily, Mao popped his lefty clogs, and now cricket fighting is back with a two-day championships held every year.

That if you've ever stayed anywhere in the countryside in the warmest place, you'll know is all that the crickets talk about these days.

Listen to them, it's like a thousand football phones happening at once.

It's no wonder that the top Pugilo crickets can win up to $2,000 for knocking another cricket spark out, according to an article from 2004 that I found on the internet.

That's probably true.

And Hollywood A-listers are keen to break the lucrative China market.

Have they been seen out on date with champion fighting crickets?

Dee Prevon Mulluggan, the star of the non-Oscar-nominated and historically questionable war epic Julius Caesar Nazi Slayer, as well as other hit movies such as the Texas Changework Amnesty, Gandhi's Lemon, and the nursing home rom-com Eric and Deirdre Get the Horn.

Well, he's been seen out with the Chinese middleweight cricket fighting champion Chirpy Helga.

Here endeth the facts.

What is a cricket going to do with $2,000?

I don't know.

I mean, it's usually the

spending on drink.

Well, the agents take it all, don't they?

Right.

It's like boxing in the 1950s.

One more thing?

Yeah, cool.

Right, right.

Let's not beetle around the box.

The locust of this issue.

The locust of this issue at this point is that unless we figure out a way to restore the ecological balance, we have few options but to fly this dead planet and encroach upon the stars.

You're welcome.

I'm sorry.

That was mercifully short.

About Beatle and his puns.

That was like an introductory paragraph.

Some people understand the value of restraint, Andrew.

Not on this show, Alice.

My show, my rules.

So this week in American news about racism, which is pretty much all American news that we get over here,

Blackface is back, guys.

It's been a huge expose on all of these people opening up their yearbooks, which is surely you should have thrown those things away once you turn 25, right?

But everyone's got a blackface picture of themselves in a yearbook, and it's all coming out.

There was the Virginia representative, Northam, who basically in his yearbook was found to be sort of dressed up as a blackface character next to a KKK character.

And he first admitted to having done this, and then the next day was like, oh, no, I didn't do that.

Cause I do remember dressing up in blackface, but it wasn't that blackface.

That one was somebody else.

But I totally did dress up like Michael Jackson and try to moonwalk and wear blackface.

And so he had to do a big press conference.

Everyone's calling for him to resign.

He is not resigning, doing a lot of interviews.

He was like, you know, I was born in white privilege, which I think is a town just outside of Norfolk, Virginia.

And, you know, he's trying to kind of claim responsibility without quite claiming responsibility.

And then there are all of these products that are coming out that are just sort of lines being slammed for having blackface representations.

There were the little Prada characters that, you know, one sort of was completely dark with ginormous red lips.

Here's a hint.

If you don't want to be mistaken for blackface, anything that's that black does not have bright red lips, all right?

That's the problem, okay?

You should probably date more black people so you realize that the lips are going to be a similar color to the rest of the skin.

All right.

If they're drastically different, probably blackface.

Then Then there was the Gucci sweater with the balaclava with the red lips around the black.

There's Katy Perry shoes that have big red lips on them.

There's all of these representations and people are completely kicking off about them.

And, you know, rightfully so.

Like, obviously, blackface, not our biggest of concerns, but it's just kind of like, why don't we understand why this is a problem?

Yeah, Gucci had to apologize for making a racist jumper.

I mean, not a racist jumper per se, more a jumper that makes the person wearing it look either racist or like they've missed the last 40 years of cultural development.

It's a black sweater top which retails for $890.

That's more than I've spent on clothes in my entire life.

The entire closet.

It features a funnel neck that covers the nose and mouth of the wearer with a red mouth outline and the thing that bothers me most about the whole situation is that they're charging nearly $900 for a shirt.

I mean for that price you want an item of clothing that the moment you put it on makes you look incredible, irresistible to the people you're attracted to, invisible to the people you're not attracted to, and give you the job, whatever job you want, the moment you walk into the interview room.

You do not want to spend nearly $900 to destroy any possibility of a future political career.

Worst of all, according to HuffPost's Julia Brucoglieri, balaclava sweaters are one of the season's hottest fashion designs, which makes me feel pretty depressed because until she said the words, balaclava sweaters are one of the season's hottest fashion designs, I'd never heard of balaclava sweaters.

And if I had heard of them, I would have assumed that they were something for small children so they don't lose their balaclavas or a very specific garment for fetishists.

fetishists.

So, not only have I learned that Gucci is either dangerously naive about how the things they make look, which is worrying because, as a fashion brand, knowing how the things they make look is literally their job, I've also learned that I'm very uncool.

This is the worst story ever.

There is an item of clothing that makes you irresistible to people who find you attractive and invisible to people who don't, and that is a cricket jumper.

I feel like all of these sort of blackface instances coming out are just an argument for more theater education because at some point they would have had that two weeks of mask work where they could have put on everything and just sort of been like, okay, now I can, you know, because ultimately a blackface is a mask for someone to act in ways that they normally would not otherwise, in ways that they attribute to a certain caricature, right?

And so they could have done that with some kind of ancient things that were crafted in Italy

specifically for comedia, you know, and also theater teaches you empathy, like don't don't be a racist, because sometimes that Mexican actor that's in your scene partner is super hot.

And, you know, like it opens you up to a lot of different experiences.

I'm just saying that, like, have more arts in schools.

That way, you preserve your children's future political careers.

In Women Around the World News Now, a Saudi Arabian app that has been used to track women and prevent them leaving the country will be investigated by Apple, according to its chief executive.

He was made aware of it during an interview because he wasn't yet aware of the fact that there was an app on his platform that was imprisoning women in their own countries.

Does he not use all the apps?

At all times.

He's on Tinder and Grinder, which is spreading your message and your bits.

I think this is fantastic news, this Saudi Arabian app.

It tracks whether you leave the country or not, which means that people, women who all have to have male guardians, can be prevented from moving around freely, which is, I mean, I think we should do that with all relationships,

not just oppressive states.

Everyone should have a sense of where everyone else is at all times.

It'll help stalking,

keep people from getting murdered.

And then eventually you can just upload your vacation photos.

I mean, we're all doing that to ourselves anyway.

What else is Instagram?

Yes, exactly, but a tracking device for your stalker/slash husband.

Yes, absolutely.

It's taking all the effort, challenge, and charm out of running an oppressive patriarch.

You can just do it all on a.

You can just hit hit a button and be like, nope.

So, everything's so disposable.

It used to take a lot of effort now, yeah.

You used to have to tie your wife to your leg with a rope.

Right.

That's a good one.

And then the radiator.

You're going to have her around you.

But I mean,

presumably, it works in reverse.

Like, as you're going away as the wife, can you check to make sure your husband isn't doing a goddamn thing on your couch exactly where you left him?

Just because sometimes you're just like, oh, good, he's not screwing anything up.

I feel so much safer leaving for two weeks.

In other women around the world news now, the UK girl who famously joined ISIS is trying to come home.

She's given up on ISIS fun times and is desperate to return to the home of her birth, although she might be charged with terroristic sort of activities.

Yes, she bunked off in 2015

with

two friends at I think the age of 15.

Now, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that joining ISIS was not a great idea in 2015.

In fact, rocket scientists, well, they know that ISIS aren't really into their space travel and advanced aeronautics.

So in terms of funding, for them, it's really off.

And of course, many teenagers bunk off from school or fall in love with the wrong people or don't tell their parents exactly what they're up to.

But she's taken this way too far on all three of those.

And I compare this with my teenage years.

I was mostly reading books about sport, learning how to conjugate Latin verbs for school and then writing books about sport in Latin

very different way of spending your adolescent adolescent years but you know I guess you know in some ways it's good you know people say travel broadens the mind and

it's a youngster it's good to get out and see the world I mean when I was there was this one time when I skipped school and went to Vietnam

There was a war or something.

I got a boat upriver into Cambodia and I killed this mad old dude with a machete.

It was that, though.

I did definitely, anyway, he seemed very worried as he passed away that he hadn't finished writing up his astrological predictions for people according to their zodiac signs so I couldn't even finish his word.

The horror.

The horror.

Well this young lady was asked by the Times journalist Anthony Lloyd what her experiences were like and she said it was just like a normal life.

Yeah.

Except every now and then there are bombs and stuff.

But other than that.

Yeah, every now and then just a head in a bin apparently.

She was like I was completely unphased by that but of course I mean she's 19 They're not no teenager is phased by anything they feel like all teenagers are like that part of gremlins where the water's on them and they're just bubbling and popping off like there's so much hormonal stuff going on of course she's unfazed in a decade she's gonna be waking up in cold sweats in the middle of the night when she recalls everything that she's been through but right now she's just like yeah it's just like an average day at a prep school in London so yeah at that age you get phased by someone not answering a text message quickly enough A head in a bin,

you're too cool for a head in a bin.

Right.

Put the wrong emoji in a bin, and suddenly your emotions are off the charts.

Like, what does it mean?

Does he like me or not?

Anyway, the point is: kids, A, stay in school, B, don't join a terrorist death cult.

And C, don't rush into settling down and having a family, especially if you live in a war zone under a terrorist death cult.

Brexit news now.

No.

We're taking a week off.

We are unilaterally taking a week off at Brexit, very much like the government.

Instead of Brexit, sexual health section.

We'll get the folly in later for that.

Alice, as our family show correspondent,

what have you got to bring us on in the bugle sexual health section?

In sexual emotional health right now, news,

we have a Kickstarter sex button, which allows couples to press the button that says that they want sex.

And if the other person presses the button, then both buttons light up and you have to bang immediately.

That's the rule.

It's like a very torturous game of twister.

But there's massive backlash to this idea of.

So is this a button on your phone or just a physical button?

It's a physical button, Andy, like a quiz show where the answer is always fing.

How is it?

Correct!

How is it supposed to change anything?

I've had a sex button my entire life and it barely gets touched.

All right.

So.

Well, the idea here is that for people for whom the sentence, do you want to have sex, is too much or would kill the mood, they can press this button, thereby abdicating responsibility for their own sexual desire.

Because this is a British company that's doing itself.

It is actually an American company that is doing it.

They're going for the British market.

Yeah, yeah.

They are absolutely going for the British market.

The kind of couples that, in order to to trick themselves into having sex, have to back towards each other in a darkened room and then trip onto each other's genitals.

But

it seems like quite a sweet idea for people who find it awkward to have sex.

The problem with that idea is that if you are too awkward to ask for sex, you're too awkward to ask for a sex button.

Yeah, that is.

What's wrong with a good, old-fashioned, handwritten invitation with an RSVP within two weeks, followed up within a month of the interpersonary groinal encoupolage by a thank you letter.

What is wrong with that?

I think the problem is that they're not anticipating the fact that at some point there is somebody who's going to get a sex button fetish and is going to be incapable of becoming aroused unless they are in the presence of a gang show.

And also the people who are going to find out that instead of their husband, they're actually really attracted to their cat, who's the one who's hitting the button all the time.

And then they have to respond to that, right?

You know?

I mean,

the problem also is that this is a you know, a mechanical device.

At some point, you're going to be able to look at the analytics of that and see like how frequently someone is just hitting a button like a mouse that's just, you know, in a maze, like, I found the cocaine button, just give it to me more.

You're going to realize what a freak your partner is.

Which, I mean, you should have done before you ever got married, but now it's too late.

The gadget is called Love Sink, which is what I call mine.

And

time to wash up.

It has the ability not to just to say that you want to have sex at a particular time, but to set the period for which you want to have sex, which I feel is dangerous.

So you can say,

a historical period.

You can say, I'm up for it now and will for the next two and a half hours.

But that's a terrible thing.

It's not 16th century Italy.

Only, only cave sex.

What happens if then, you know, something very unhorny happens in that time?

You know,

your toilet gets blocked, your floor is covered in in shit, but you've still got 45 minutes left on your button.

I think there's a complex pattern you can push to turn it off that no one will have read the manual about and will never have mastered.

So you'd just be asking for more sex.

And also, how long,

how do you know how long you're horny for?

Right.

I mean, it says here that your partner can simply just cancel their desire, which is a review of a relationship I had once.

Oh,

but it just shows how technology is

is changing.

I mean, the the modern art of seduction is uh very different to you know how it was.

I mean, I've been with my wife a long time now, more than uh two decades.

And when we were first together, we alerted each other to any feelings of gonadiri and lustules by writing a sonnet, posting on a notice board in the kitchen.

And when we both posted a sonnet within a week of each other,

then we would get our agents to schedule a conjugal within the month.

It worked a treat.

Two sonnets, two children, hyper-efficient.

so in other exciting sexual health news there's a cure ladies there's a cure uh mexican scientists have cured hpv uh and at least 29 women in mexico uh hpv uh the leading cause of cervical cancer and also the leading cause of bullshit guys saying that they won't go down on you because they don't want to wind up like michael douglas that's garbage all right i'm telling you i've heard i don't want to get throat cancer from your HPV.

And it's like, are you sure it's not the five packs of cigarettes you're smoking today, asshole?

Get down there.

So anyway, I'm just saying, women, you can all, you know, I mean, yes, there's been a vaccine for a while, but if you've already got it, you don't have to die in five years.

Congratulations.

Some nice Mexican doctors will shine a light up your hoo and fix it.

It's a photodynamic treatment.

Like they send something in there with oxygen and they shine a light on it.

And it's like that tooth whitening thing you do at the mall in like an hour your HPV is gone and your smile is twinkling.

So

I just don't know how we get our hands on this, but like go for it, all right.

And this will mean that Mexico is going to actually pay for the wall because all the American women are going to be flooding the border in the opposite direction, trying to get down there and get themselves fixed up.

Yeah, this is a non-invasive technique, and it's called an efficient method to prevent malignant neoplasm, which is my favorite death metal band, and also the second highest cause of death among Mexican women.

Yeah.

To conclude our sexual health section,

we've been digging into the British archives and, well, as we've discussed, the Brits are not the most open of species about sexual matters.

And I've actually got here a sexual advice column from the Daily Telegraph newspaper in 1954

entitled Ask Gemma.

Gemma being Field Marshal Lord Sir Strange for Gemma.

Dear Field Marshal, I'm a 16-year-old boy and I've started wondering about my sexuality.

I find it hard to meet girls and I'm beginning to think that maybe I'm subconsciously avoiding them.

I don't know who I should talk to about it.

Yours, Trevor.

Dear Trevor, we're British.

Keep this kind of thing to yourself, you fucking idiot.

Of course you find it hard to meet girls.

That's what we invented the private school system for.

And the reason you don't know who you should talk to about it is because there is no one you should talk to about it.

Bottle it up.

And remember, if your secret gets out, you're pretty much a write-off.

Sincerely, Gemma.

Dear Field Marshall, I am a 28-year-old woman.

I love my husband and he loves me, but we both find sex unenjoyable, awkward, and sometimes embarrassing.

What should we do to improve things in the bedroom?

Yours, Katerina.

Dear Katerina, this is a common problem for young couples.

The intimate aspect of a marriage can be complicated, no matter how loving the relationship.

My advice would be to never speak of it again.

Sleep in separate bedrooms, take up a hobby like knitting or something, and assume that at some point in the next decade your husband will have an affair with his secretary and it won't be your problem anymore.

Sincerely, gemma dear field marshal i am concerned about erectile dear whoever you are let me interrupt you right there and tell you that it's none of my business sincerely gemma

uh your emails now and um well this uh comes from uh well an old friend of the bugle uh dear andy john very old chris alice hari and whomever else is involved these days i greatly enjoyed your uh your letter from your listener craig at the end of the last episode i was wondering if you could pass on to my well wishes for good luck on his surgical procedure as the original bugle vasectomy guy

it is my duty to support like-minded knuckleheads all the best i had so uh were there a lot of a lot of copycat vasectomy guys

we did have at least there were at least two or three weren't there chris there were a few people who had listened to the bugle whilst uh while they were getting the vasectomies vasectomized

i mean this is either a causation or a correlation situation where people who are listening to the bugle desperately don't want to have any more children.

What?

Because they become so depressed about the state of the world.

Possibly.

Possibly.

Well, we're doing our bit for the planet.

Dear Andy Chris, an insert guest co-host here.

Whoever else, it's me.

It's us.

In response to your question in Bugle 4096 regarding bugle podcast-related injuries, I would like to take you back to a balmy summer night in 2017, simpler times.

Whilst walking home from a birthday meal, I donned my headphones and began listening to your Kobe beef grade A quality bullshit.

Lost in a happy haze.

That's the wrong bit of the Kobe cow you're eating.

Lost in a happy haze of political satire, I was unaware that I was no longer on the pavement and was instead in, I now realize a perverse foreshadowing of our current Brexit cluster f ⁇ , walking ignorantly towards a ledge.

Wow.

Blindly stepping out into the void, I plummeted to earth, hitting the pavement like a paper bag filled with soup, shattering my ankle in the process.

In an ironic twist of fate, I spent the next few weeks working my way through historic bugles in the vain and in retrospect futile hope that laughter is the best medicine.

Yours faithfully, Leo.

P.S.

Finished my vasectomy now.

But how big was this ledge?

And how exploded did his ankle?

Yeah, you've left a lot of questions.

Probably six feet.

As someone who is not a friend of gravity at my sinus, I've had many a fall and can probably gauge the injury.

I'm guessing it was like some bit of construction.

Like he fell into a grave, a graveyard-sized hole.

Anything more than that, he would have shattered a knee or a limb.

Duke Remos coming in to hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com.

And while you're doing so, don't forget to put your tickets to the forthcoming Bugle live tour beginning on the 26th of February in Brooklyn and concluding in Los Angeles on the 12th of March.

All details on the Bugle website and other places on the internet will feature me plus Alice live on a big screen.

Amazing.

We've just added an extra show in Washington, D.C.

on the 27th of February.

Denver, on the other hand, is not really troubling the extra show scoreboard.

So if you're

in the Denver area, do come along and bring your friends.

Tell them there's free weed.

Free weed.

You don't have to, they'll forget by the time they got there that you said that.

So it's fine.

Just tell them that.

They'll show up.

That brings us to the end of this week's Bugle.

The Bugle is going independent.

We will have full details on this next week week and how you can contribute to and get involved in the future of this show.

That will all come next week.

Until then, Desiree, it's been a delight having you on the Bugle for the first time.

This has been brilliant and I've learned so much, so many facts that are not applicable to anything else.

Or even true.

Or even accurate.

Yes, that is true.

Kind of fact.

Uh-huh.

That's what's going to arm me for the future, this political landscape.

Where can people find your tour dates, your work pages?

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

So, yeah, you should, you can go to desireebirch.com.

Uh, that's birch like church with a b and desiree like the way it's supposed to be spelled.

In May, I'm gonna be on the Netflix, so you don't even have to like go out of your house or put on clothes to find me.

I'll be in your room, non-creepily or a little creepily.

Uh, for me, uh, I'm touring in Australia with my new show, Mythos, Sydney, Perth, and Melbourne.

Look at that up online.

Also, uh, patreon.com/slash AliceFraser is uh where to look for my blogs, and I'm trying to do some video content for that as well.

But we'll see.

Thanks very much for listening.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

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

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

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