Why the dolphins keep leaping – Bugle 4095

The Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4095 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world for the week beginning Monday the 4th of February 2019.

If you can believe that and can we believe even that or are dates just another part of the global conspiracy of lies?

Is time even real?

Well, we don't have time to discuss that, which now starts to look a little bit suspicious to me.

Very convenient for time.

What is it trying to hide?

Apart from the past, present, and future, obviously.

I digress again.

I am Andy Zoltzman, and I am in Salford, England, in a hotel room with a picture of a microphone on the wall.

But joining me from London, not in a hotel room, with an actual microphone in a studio.

It's Alice Fraser.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

How are you?

I'm well, thanks.

Well, I say I'm well.

I did what I think is technically called I fed my back the other day lifting a box.

A box?

And I don't feel old enough to have done that.

Like, I'm not old.

But I am getting old enough that I can f my back lifting a box.

I'm also old enough that if I told you I was married, you wouldn't assume I was religious, which I didn't realise was a milestone until I passed it.

Yeah,

to rite of passage in the modern world, isn't it?

Yeah.

Oh, if I murdered someone, you wouldn't blame my parents.

No, I mean, not that's how old I am now.

No, but

I've met your father.

I wouldn't blame him anyway.

He's a very noble man, my dad.

You are also on with, not in either the hotel room or the studio, but in his own home, the newly behipped bionic super producer Chris, who was just regaling us with how he'd had, I think, 30 bits of metal removed from his arse or something.

Was that it, Chris?

Yeah,

I was stapled up with 30 metal clips, which I

Andy, I've had no dignity in the last two weeks.

But I appreciate you saying be hipped and not de-hipped, which is probably closer to the truth.

But

it's nice to be back and not on morphine.

It's nice to have you back.

If I had a pound for every time I've heard someone say that to me,

I'd be a very rich man.

So three of us in three different places.

I think this truly is the devil's triangle.

We are recording on the 1st of February 2019 on this day in the year 484.

King Huneric of the Vandals organised a conference between Catholic and Aryan bishops at Carthage, which does make you wonder what the conference merch was like.

I imagine the bishops schlepping all the fing way to Carthage in the year 484 would have been thinking, there had better be more than a fing tote bag and a branded memory stick for this.

The meeting in 484 was described on no lesser source than the internet.

It said this about it.

It said, it appears to have been an exercise in browbeating more than a genuine debate.

And that was only just over 1500 years ago.

So onwards and upwards in terms of human communication.

On this day.

That's a good thing to know that we don't do that anymore, Adney.

On this day in 1793, France declared war on the United Kingdom.

That's why we needed to get out.

Leopards never change their spots.

In 1884, the first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary was published.

It covered from A to Ant.

Must have been hugely exciting for all the word fans waiting for volume two.

I'm absolutely aflutter about anticipated ability.

Ah, ah, I can't finish

anything.

Shit, we haven't even got to fing anything yet.

On this day in 1893, Thomas Edison finished building his first motion picture studio, the Black Maria Studio in New Jersey.

And the following day, after the building of the first ever motion picture studio, was the first recorded instance of a 55-year-old man blowing cigar smoke into an 18-year-old woman's face and saying, I'm going to make you a star kid.

Just sign this and touch this.

One of the very first films ever made in Edison's Black Maria Studio was, I discovered this this morning.

This was glorious.

He made a film of cats boxing.

Little cats in boxing gloves in a little boxing room.

And this is way before YouTube, Alice.

He's a visionary.

Old Eddie the inventor.

Oh, wow.

He's the Nostradamus of cat memes.

He knew,

less than a year into the history of the moving image, that what people really wanted to watch is pets doing weird shit.

I mean, you know, 100% if he was on top of the internet that far in advance, he was also taking pictures of his penis.

Section in the bin this week.

Well, unfortunately, due to a lack of time, the section in the bin has gone in the bin, along with the other section in the bin, which is hope for humanity.

That is

also just gone in the bin.

That's so meta.

Alice, can I just ask, do you think there's no section in the bin this week because there's a test match on?

I don't dare to make correlation equal causation, Chris.

Do you think that there were pieces of metal being taken out of your butt because you had hip operation or because you got really intimate with a transformer.

It is not for me to say.

I mean, the truth is both.

Yeah, Alan, let him live how he wants to live.

It's the 21st century.

No judgment here.

No, there is a test match on, and that's in fact why there was no bugle last week.

Sorry for that.

We are giving you

a minute and a half extra, free at no charge in this week's show.

That was the last minute and a half.

That was absolutely free as a nut.

But yeah, I'm in Manchester

working in Inverted Commons on the BBC's cricket coverage of England getting absolutely hoarse in the West Indies currently.

And it's great to see because West Indian cricket, they used to be the greatest team in the world.

It's been

a tough couple of decades for them.

And sport is supposed to be about joy.

And the England cricket team has brought a lot of joy to West Indies cricket fans over the past 10 days.

So fair play to them.

Do you get extra pay for mental pain and anguish

if the English team plays badly?

Well I don't know.

I mean if that is BBC rules

then all of their political reporters over the last three years must be under an absolute

mint.

Top story this week and well we needed a week off Brexit to be honest to go with last week's week off Brexit on the bugle in which we've got a week off everything.

So we're going for a rather funnier happier story and that is the rise of rough sleeping in Britain.

I mean,

is that a better news story?

The fact that we are essentially making people sleep rough in the middle of winter until some of them freeze to death.

I've lost all perspective at this time.

There's a lot about Britain that isn't showing it in a great light at the moment.

And the latest government figures have shown that rough sleeping in Britain has gone up by 165%

since 2010 when, by by coincidence or not, the Conservatives came to power.

And I use power in its loosest sense.

The official figures show that there are around about 4,700 people sleeping rough in Britain.

Now, we need to bear in mind, Alice, that these government figures are essentially a lie.

They're based on a snapshot taken on a single night.

Please cross-refer to Donald Trump's personal research on climate change, on why this isn't necessarily the best way of measuring things.

But I guess this is one way of, yeah, at least partially solving the problem.

Just

not so much manipulate the statistics as smash the statistics around the back of the head with a frying pan and bundle them into the back of your car.

It's like a 60-a-day smoker cutting down to 12 a day by counting how many cigarettes he smoked between 2 a.m.

and 6 a.m., multiplying it by 6 to get the 24-hour average, and saying, I feel fucking great on it.

It's that.

Yeah, indeed, Andy, the homeless people, aka rough sleepers, aka differently bedroomed persons are on the rise around Britain.

But I'm not sure we can trust

these statistics either from the other direction.

I blame the nanny state for the statistics.

Have we thought about the possibility there has been no increase at all, and actually the poor, the mentally ill, and victims of domestic abuse used to be a lot better at hiding, and it's our coddled modern society that's leading them into the open rather than huddling in the sewers and starting their own subterranean society.

That is trickle-down economics, Andy.

Jack Kerouac, now there was an age of a real hobo.

Jump on a train, see the country, steal an apple pie from a windowsill.

That's the real Britain, isn't it?

Isn't that the idyllic past where Brexit is all about?

Are you launching a run for high office, Alice?

Is this your presidential campaign for America and or Britain and or Australia for 2020, beginning now?

Yes, absolutely it is.

Charities and pressure groups have blamed this increased figure on

welfare cuts, housing shortages, and spiralling rents.

Go, Team GP!

All of which, of course, will be solved by Brexit, along with other national problems such as inequality in education, corporate tax aversion, crumbling transport infrastructure, the exploitative zero-hours jobs market, the repeated failure of the England batting line up in test-match cricket, and the lack of left-footed midfielders in this country.

All will be solved on the 30th of March.

It's fine.

So, we have to get this story in now before everything in this country is fixed.

I mean, that is true, Andy.

Although the Liverpool Mayor, Joe Anderson, has called for people who sleep rough to be treated as a protected category under hate crimes laws,

citing some findings from 2016, which said nearly a third of people sleeping rough said they'd been deliberately hit or had faced other types of violence.

About 45% said they'd been intimidated or threatened, while 7% had been urinated on.

And the concern here for me is that these people, stripped of their rights, excluded from the life-saving bureaucracy that keeps our most vulnerable from falling through the cracks, unable or unwilling to access the limited resources that are available, are now being asked to fill out surveys.

Surveys, Andy, have they not suffered enough?

That puts a whole new perspective on it.

And also, the fact that there are so many crimes committed against homeless people.

I refer back to David Cameron, our former Prime Minister, on the day that he left office and dignity and the future behind him, he said that we are a nation with a British sense of fair play.

Now,

committing crimes against homeless people in the street, that's not fair play, is it?

Well, that is, I mean, I know on the flip side of that, a win's a win, but it does rather raise questions about what we are.

We're supposed to support the underdog in Britain.

Surely we are.

And I would like to make a note, just as a side note, that while I am, for this podcast, often asked to write satirical comedy about terrible things that are happening in the world,

finding the lols while scrolling through horrible things drunk people have done to people on the streets has been a challenge.

It's certainly made me much more nervous about sitting on a stoop to tie a shoelace in case some hopped-up lad on a banker's night out decides he needs to express his neo-capitalist philosophy in the form of literally pissing on me.

Yes, the parabola of neo-capitalist philosophy.

Doctrine of waiting to happen.

On the the flip side of this spiralling issue of street homelessness, 11,000 homes in Britain have been empty for more than a decade, and more than 200,000 have been empty for more than six months.

But if only there was some kind of solution to this street homelessness problem, but I just I just can't.

I can't see and also in politics sometimes the most obvious, practical, humane and cost-effective solution is not necessarily the best one.

Well let's open this up to you, the people.

If you, whether in Britain or otherwise, have any solutions to the street homeless crisis that don't involve using any of the hundreds of thousands of empty properties in this country, please email them to Teresa May, careofthegovernment, London.

Although I think she's a little bit busy right now.

In other being outside news now, a polar vortex has struck the US, with temperatures plummeting as low as minus 30 degrees centigrade, particularly in Chicago, popular memes of people throwing boiling water into the air and watching it freeze before it hits the ground have been circulating across the internet, proving that while the revolution may not be televised, the apocalypse certainly will.

I for one am looking forward to cannibal tribes roaming the frozen waste engaged in bloodthirsty Twitter wars.

News channels have sent out reporters to the front lines of this war on ice demonstrating that it's possible to freeze a bubble, freeze an egg or freeze ramen noodles mid-air.

Cutting-edge journalism, really bringing home the core message of it's cold for all those Chicago locals who were wondering why their ears were falling off and their waters gone all crunchy.

The Chicago Tribune front page headline read, Expert, avoid being outside, which about covers it.

Even Donald Trump was absolutely up with the science, saying people can't last outside even for minutes.

And that is very important in a country where many people still follow a belief system that requires them five times a day to go outside, facing the direction of Washington, D.C., and shout,

yeah.

Donald Trump has engaged with the issue on Twitter because, of course, he has, citing the freeze as proof that global warming isn't happening.

The fact that it's colder in Chicago than it is in Siberia is definitely not a terrifying indication of climate change.

And also, can we please get a local weatherman to test how quickly it takes for the fart-centered hot air of politicized anti-science bloviating to freeze into a beautiful ice sculpture?

Oh, I can't wait to see that.

He said,

what the hell is going on with global whaming?

He missed out the R of warming.

Or maybe he meant global whamming, which is coincidentally what he wants to do with

the US's nuclear arsenal.

He said, please come back fast to global warming.

We need you.

Politically.

Politically, maybe he does, because global warming, of course, is a significant factor and set to be even more of an ever-increasing, increasing factor, significantly, in global migration patterns.

So, bearing in mind his wall issue, maybe global warming could just give him enough people massing on the borders of America to justify not just one wall, but a hundred walls on top of each other.

I mean, maybe, I mean, clearly, Donald Trump, a hyper-intelligent being, and just joshing with his people and planet about this minor little issue of

planet destroying itself.

So, it does suggest that, you know, if he thinks that maybe this cold snap in Chicago is proof that global warming has ended, we just need to take him to an airport and show him a plane departing for somewhere in the world outside the USA.

And I hope he thinks, well, that looks like immigration is sorted.

What's next on my to-do list?

Making transgender people miserable.

Okay, can anyone help with that?

Oh, look over there, Mr.

President.

That's a non-transgender person looking happy.

You can tick that box off as well, you fing tool.

But on the subject of global warming, what if he's right, Alice?

What if this cold snap is in fact the end of global warming?

I mean, how do we know that it isn't other than through science and evidence, both of which have proved notoriously unreliable through history?

Trump has had a, well, a jaunty week in some of his, I mean, not just global warming, but others of his

classic Trumpian tropes on Twitter, described in the New York Times again as the enemy of the people.

An interesting phrase was

reading up about the origin of the term enemy of the people.

It was used against the Emperor Nero by the Roman Senate, Nero, a megalomaniac despot with an uncontrollable ego who quite literally set fire to his own people.

So

peas in a 2,000-year-long pod, perhaps.

It's a phrase that's been used to scapegoat opponents and dissidents by such distinguished democratic institutions and individuals as Soviet Russia, Mao Zitung, Nazi Germany, and the Daily Mail newspaper.

That is one hell of a bed to climb into.

My brother's daughter, who is my adorable niece, she has this thing where if you are not immediately in front of her face, she thinks you've disappeared entirely.

I'm wondering if Trump just never developed object permanence.

Well, I mean, in many ways, it's a tragic personal story on a number of levels, because clearly he is a brutal dictator trapped in the office of a democratic leader.

And it's horrible to see someone having to live a lie.

It's the 20th century.

Why can't we let him live the way he wants to live as well?

Are we not supposed to be open-minded and tolerate people whose lifestyle and political choices are different to our own?

Let the man suppress his political opponents the way he evidently wants to suppress his political opponents.

I mean, we saw a few moments of experimentation earlier on in his life, and then he obviously went back into the closet of pretending to be a real human being.

But I think we should celebrate and allow him to express his true self, which is a WWE wrestler on crack.

That's all he's ever wanted to be, Andy.

Can't you love him?

Yeah, Grover Cleveland was the same.

Gender equality news.

Now, the UAE Gender Equality Awards have all been won this year by men.

The Vice President of the UAE and ruler of Dubai presented prizes to a number of award winners at

the Gender Balance Index 2018 awards in three categories, all of which were collected by men.

And isn't this what we want, Andy?

People to be promoted and rewarded, regardless of merit or gender, or whether they reach their position of power in a society as the direct result of a deeply patriarchal culture or not.

It is.

That is proper equality.

It's not just this kind of token box ticking, you know, because this clearly, these are awards that really ought to be the preserve of women.

So if men can win them, I think that's showing genuine progress.

Well, in fact, this was one of the defences, was that some of the men were receiving the awards as the leaders of teams which included women.

Right.

So it's important to note that the women were also being rewarded, but the men were both the figureheads and receiving all of the acclaim.

Well, you can't.

You can't.

There's two things you can't hurry in life, Alice.

One is is love, as we know from the great Motown song, and the other is overturning thousands of years of patriarchy.

I mean,

I'm not going to comment on whether you can hurry love or not.

With enough lube, you can hurry anything.

That's right.

The two have sometimes overlapped.

In other gender equality news, Pope Francis has described Virgin Mary as the first influencer, proving that even being the Pope with access to billions of dollars worth of resources doesn't stop you being an old man who doesn't really know what an influencer is.

Hey, Andy, I want to tell you a story about a cool tech bro with some radical ideas about loving each other and not on Grindr, if you get my drift.

His name was Jesus, and he was a friend to all, which means he had even more friends than Tom on MySpace.

Actually, many of the Bible tales are truly more comprehensible to the youth in the language of the Bible, like the time Sodom and Gomorrah, or as I like to call it, 4chan, was subject to a distributed denial of service attack by God, or

malware was introduced into the Garden of Eden, giving Eve access to the whole of Wikipedia, at which point she googled nakedness and became ashamed of her body because she wasn't as hot as Kim Kardashian.

But Bible really is the YouTube make-up video of its time.

Well, so I mean, it's a bit of a burn in modern parlance for the Pope's boss, God Himself, of course, who probably quite fancied himself as being the first influencer.

I mean, the programmers never get the credit, man.

They don't.

And also,

of course, the first man to use tablets as a form of communication.

He was quite ahead of his time.

Of course, Mary saying yes to God was then followed by a number of concerns about a power imbalance in the sexual situation, as he sort of counts as everyone's boss, hashtag me too.

And then, of course, the backlash from the bunch of men's rights activists asking what she was wearing at the time.

Brexit update and, well, Alice, the clock is still ticking, which raises the the question, why the f did we not invest in a digital clock that doesn't f ⁇ ing tick?

At least

get it out of our minds for a bit.

Typical short-sighted.

It's got a kitten that makes it feel like the mother is around.

Does it?

Put a clock in.

Yeah.

Right.

Well, I mean,

do mummy cats eat clocks?

Yes.

There are only 56 sleeps until...

Brex time now, Alice.

That's just 56 days for our politicians to fit in all that they need to fit in.

All the bickering, squabbling, pointless grandstanding, grandstanding, strategic inaction, panicking, blame-flinging, finger-pointing, flagrantly disingenuous, pseudo-olive branching, quivering nervously, trying to sneak through legislation outlawing all future use of the occult to communicate with the dead, to preclude future generations from badgering us and calling us nasty names in and or beyond the grave.

That is a lot to fit in in 56 days.

56 days for the likes of David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Nigel Farage to hide in a bush by the battlefield on which they recently shouted, charge,

watching the carnage unfold while thinking, book deal, book deal, book deal.

56 more days to try to wake Britain from the democratic hangover from when we got ripped off our national nuts on a rogue batch of referendum moonshine and at least try to clean the vomit off our trousers to put on a good show for the kids on Brexit Day.

56 days.

Happy days in the independent nation of rural Britannia.

This week there were yet more votes in Parliament.

the upshot of which was that essentially nothing has changed, but everything has changed sorry i missed a couple of words out of that nothing has changed and everything has also not changed

um

uh theresa may having banged on like a shell-shocked parrot about how her deal was the deal the only deal and nothing but a deal nothing like a deal nothing i forget then said oh no we can definitely change it Let's change it, said the MPs.

Yeah, good idea, let's change it.

Even though you said we can't change it.

Europe came back and said, you can't change it.

And Britain mumbled, well,

we want to change it.

And Europe said, Well, you said, You can't change it.

We said, Change it.

Sorry, hang on.

I've lost my child.

No, leave it like that, Andy.

That's how confusing it is.

Yeah, I mean, I think I've probably summed it up accurately, to be honest.

Just fizzling off into a confused nothingness.

That was satirical ineptitude.

It was not me with my 20 years in Schopers experience

up a line that I've written myself about half an hour ago.

Jeremy Corbyn came out swinging, albeit swinging like a forgotten pair of tights on a long-abandoned washing line.

He laid down a tough line on behalf of the Labour Party saying, and I quote,

the government

election.

No, it's gone.

It's all in Hansard, if you don't believe me.

Did you watch the votes as they were going through, Alice?

No, absolutely not.

Congratulations on a week well spent not watching our Parliament disappear up its own fundamental.

But a quick tip for you.

Well, A, I'm moving house, B, I don't have a television, and C,

I will only care about Brexit as and when you pay me.

I mean, I read about Brexit when I'm writing jokes for the bugle, and other than that, I pretend it doesn't exist or sort of delude myself into hoping it'll be good for Commonwealth countries like Australia.

So essentially, when you get paid by the bugle, it's more emotional compensation for having to delve into Brexit than actual recompense for your work.

Okay, good.

Blood money.

Right.

Quick tip for our Parliament.

When time is running out in your legislative chamber and every single minute of debate and compromise and legislation is of the essence, do not waste fifteen minutes every time you fing vote on something, making six hundred and fifty people shuffle in and out of a small room into other small rooms to vote by a fing computer.

For f

sake!

In other Brexit news, the BBC pulled off a quite spectacular accidental mistake in which

they said Theresa May will be going to Brussels whilst showing footage of Spitfires from the Second World War,

raising hopes amongst the Brexit community that this is how our Prime Minister will travel to all meetings in future.

It is what the people of this country voted for.

In fact, we will all be travelling in Spitfires.

I mean, some were not happy.

Some would rather she goes to Brussels in a Lancaster bomber and really shows them who's boss.

But at least Spitfires is a step.

It's a step towards what the 17.4 million voted for.

I mean, that is how we will know that Brexit has fulfilled the Brexit promise to the Brexit people, which is that on the day of Brexit happening, everything will go back to black and white.

The editor of the programme, Paul Royal, has blamed Human Error for the tape mix-up, saying the Spitfire clip had been intended to be a foretaste of an item about a new Battle of Britain museum at Biggin Hill in London.

But I think we all know he's lying.

Nigel Farage, meanwhile, has written this week about the British fury at the arrogant, high-handed EU which could unite Britain behind a World Trade Organization deal, as discussed.

Nothing can possibly unite Britain.

And also, I've had a number of people saying that MPs have shown themselves out of touch with voters.

Well, let me tell you who else is out of touch with voters.

Voters.

Voters are out of touch.

We are all out of touch with voters.

I know this because I am a voter and I am out of touch with everything and everyone.

Remain voters are out of touch with leave voters.

Leave voters are out of touch with remain voters.

Everyone is out of touch with reality.

That's what democracy is

all about.

But essentially, you know, just let it's our choice as a nation, Alice, to socially and economically sleep per chance to patriotically dream.

Let us have

our dream of Spitfires for all.

Animals news now, and well, it's become increasingly clear that the human race cannot turn to itself for comfort and protection from itself.

So the animal kingdom is once again stepping up to the plate.

Now, obviously, Alice, history shows that when the animal kingdom steps up to the plate, usually it is dead, cooked, and about to be eaten.

But still, in these troubled, confrontational times, we are increasingly turning to non-human beings to help us navigate our way through the turds we have contributed to the turbulent bathtub of history.

Now, back in Bugle 4058, we reported on an emotional support peacock that was banned from an airline flight.

That ruffled a few ostentatiously on eight feathers for sure.

And it's emerged this week.

A man in America has an officially registered emotional support alligator.

I mean, this is what we're reduced to now.

We are turning to nature's cold-blooded killers for emotional crutches.

I mean, this is the important thing about alligators, Andy.

You can't domesticate them.

And I, for one, find it immensely reassuring to know that there is an animal that will actualize my self-loathing by biting me at intermittent intervals.

I don't know how it works in America.

I mean,

is this

state-funded?

The alligator is called Wally,

and apparently his owner frequently takes him out for meet and greets at places, including minor league baseball games.

Look, there is a time and a place for introducing people to deadly reptiles, and I just don't think when you're watching professional sport that you'd really want to also be watching something that might kill you sitting next to you with massive teeth.

I'm old-fashioned like that.

They're old-fashioned like that.

They haven't had to evolve since the dinosaurs.

Clearly, in Britain, we are in no position to judge or criticise anyone for finding comfort in the arms of something that is specifically designed to destroy them.

But, you know, anyway, it's odd times for animals.

Sam Neal, the Hollywood actor,

has received a lot of internet hits for films of him doing yoga with his pet pig Angelica.

I think it's important to note that he is doing yoga next to his pet pig Angelica and that pigs cannot do yoga or relax or

do a downward dog.

Right.

Everything for them is a downward pig.

Right.

They have one pose.

It's pig.

Right.

Do they not need yoga to

make them a little bit more flexible as a species?

No, they're the most relaxed of all animals in that they had the best PR agents telling God that they weren't allowed to be eaten early on.

Apparently, Sam Neal's also teaching his pig to speak English.

I mean, that's going to be useful, isn't it?

We are about to become a nation that eats only sausages, only British sausages, not that filthy European muck that's been forced down our throats by Brussels.

So pigs are going to need to be able to speak very coherently and beg for their fing lives.

In other animals news, a scientific project has revealed that having studied a number of marine mammals that have washed up on Britain's shores, it turns out that every single one had microplastics in its digestive system.

And, I mean, this is...

Well, it's terrific news on a number of levels, Alice, I would say.

First, it shows how awesome plastic is.

Because...

I mean, clearly these animals absolutely love it.

I mean, it's not even supposed to be food.

But there they are, getting a taste for it in the sea and thinking, oh, God, that stuff is so good.

I'm going to go onto land to get more of it.

Damn the fing consequences.

And also, notice that these animals were all beached in Britain,

not in Europe, in Britain.

Admittedly, it was a research project only looking at animals that washed up in Britain, but they all chose Britain, which shows what a great nation we are.

That these animals are quite literally throwing themselves at us.

And we're not even out of the EU yet.

We could build our economy purely on washed-up dolphin carcasses as long as we believe.

I mean, Andy, this is, I guess, really good proof that animals find plastics delicious.

And I was looking into the fact that there is so much plastic in the ocean now, and also the other day I found out that dildos are not recyclable,

despite being the most likely of all household appliances to be haunted.

Right.

So you're going to have to fill in some of the gaps there.

Well, you don't want one secondhand.

Of all the things,

they're the only thing you will not buy secondhand.

Right.

Yep.

They must absorb some sort of spiritual juices.

Okay, right.

You can't get them clean.

There is no level of clean that you would accept in a secondhand dildo.

So there are hundreds and thousands of unrecyclable dildos washing into the oceans.

Right.

Maybe these are just sexually adventurous animals.

Right, I mean, it's it's possible, isn't it?

I mean, is that is that are you saying that's why the dolphins keep leaping out of the water?

It's some kind of, they're in the throes of sexual ecstasy?

Yes, that is what I'm saying.

Also, I just thought the idea that dildos was haunted was funny, so I wanted to say it.

Haunted by what?

By

local

spirits of your past usage.

I think we need to close that wormhole before

Mr.

Magetti keeps.

Anyway, now.

You'll never find a dildo big enough to close that wormhole, Andy.

Let's move on, Alice.

Food and drink news now.

A French teenager has been jailed after going into a shop and weighing a PlayStation as if it was a bag of fruit and thus only paying nine Euros for it.

Then, so delighted was he with his scheme and you know, he was an economic pioneer, he tried to do it again the next day and was arrested and jailed subsequently.

I mean, I guess we've all been there, Alex.

You would have got away with it too, if it hadn't been for those pesky repeat offences.

We've all been there, or somewhere similar to that, or indeed the opposite of that.

I remember how disappointed I was just a few months ago when I bought a butternut squash, took it home, I cut a long thin hole in it, connected it to my TV using a long carrot that I'd cut into a spiral, then shoved a disc in and tried to play Tony Alcock's World Championship Bowls 2017.

Surely the best indoor bowl simulator of the last four years.

And it didn't work.

Simply didn't work.

So, I mean, who's the real victim here?

I mean, I'm sort of horrified that he was sentenced to four months in prison rather than being celebrated as the true fruit ninja.

But is this not a fairer way of charging for things by weights?

When you think environmentally, heavy stuff takes up more of the environment and weighs down the planet more, so it spins less quickly and requires more energy because it gets colder at night.

So, if there are financial incentives for buying things that don't weigh very much, like tinsel balloons and marshmallows, rather than heavy things like rhinoceroses, warships, and coal-fired power stations, would we not all be happier?

I ask you this, Alice.

Have you seen a child with a balloon?

Happy.

Have you seen a child being charged up by a rhinoceros?

Terrifying.

In future food news now, a new plant-focused diet will transform the future of the planet, according to some scientists.

An international commission for the first time has released this comprehensive planetary health diet that hopes to avert global environmental and economic catastrophe, while also allowing for the world's poorest to eat delicious food or any food at all.

Great news.

But in terrible news, it requires huge cuts in red meat eating in Western countries and radical changes across the world, so that is not going to work.

We are all for wanting a better world, just as long as we individually or as a society don't have to worry about other things than our own personal finances, comfort and individual priorities.

Oh well Alice, I mean you've got to look at the social implications of this.

If we're eating less meat, and I just see apocalyptic visions of

untethered lambs, beefs and porks running amok through our countryside, gorging themselves on our undefended vegetable crops.

I mean it's a lose-lose situation.

Well actually the diet is a win-win according to the scientists because it would save at least 11 million people a year from deaths caused by unhealthy unhealthy food while preventing the collapse of the natural world that humanity depends on, which sounds good, but also globally it does require red meat and sugar consumption to be cut by half, which sounds boring and not delicious.

And then also you have to eat more fruit and vegetables and double your consumption of pulses and nuts.

Ooh, double nuts, am I right?

But seriously, it's the most depressing story of the year for me because it's absolutely a reasonable solution and people will aggressively ignore it or get angry with it, contextualise the very idea as typical of their political opposition and actively reject it, just furiously gnawing on a live cow, mumbling bloody snowflakes or privileged white men imposing the patriarchy of science on us to delete as appropriate.

A dance as old as the internet itself.

But it just, I mean, also, I mean, we have to cut back on not just red meat, but also poultry as well.

And I mean, I do, I, I do worry.

I mean, I ask, is this a price worth paying to have a planet that is still habitable in 100 years' time?

I don't give a shit.

I'm going to be dead by then.

But what I don't want is to be pecked to death by a vengeful turkey roaming the streets of Britannia trying to settle a family blood feud going back over 40 Christmases.

Your emails now, this comes in from Istvan van Hoek in Leuven, in Belgium.

Dear Chris, Andy, and whoever reads this mail, I heard in some news reports

that

some people in Britain are stockpiling food and medicines and this has got me worried.

What should we in Europe stockpile that is made in Britain?

Please help us.

PS, as a Belgian, I always have a year supply in waffles, so food-wise, I'm okay.

So I'd

I don't know, and you ask what is made in Britain now, I think the answer is absolutely nothing physically since we've outsourced all our manufacturing to anywhere else in the world.

So

I mean it's just a s a general sense of misreading our own history.

Stockpile that.

You should stockpile drunken Bucks Nights.

They're Britain's major export to Europe, aren't they?

They'll really miss those.

And in Belgium, of course, I mean,

the Battle of Waterloo, arguably the biggest drunken bucks night in history.

Supermarkets have been stockpiling stuff.

They issued a collective statement to the nation saying, you might want to plant some f ⁇ ing potatoes in your garden and teach your cat to lay eggs.

It's about to get f ⁇ ing choppy.

Dear Andy, longtime bugle listener here, just wondering how your tour of North America constitutes a tour of North America if your only destinations are in the USA.

Sincerely, Jordan, a hurt Canadian.

Well, for a start, all Canadians are hurt.

That just comes from a nation that plays too much ice hockey.

Well, there's a number of reasons behind this.

One, I find it very hard at the moment, and I have since January of 2017 to say the word USA without feeling a bit sick to the pit of my stomach.

Something I have in common with many people from the USA.

Also, when I initially said it was going to be a tour of North America, there were a couple of Canadian dates on the putative schedule that sadly did not eventually materialise.

And on the flip side, my North American tour late last year consisted only of dates in Canada, albeit only one date in one place in Canada.

So I'm just evening it up.

But anyway,

the Bugle will return to, well, will come to Canada at some point in the hopefully not too distant future.

All the dates for the American tour through late February and early March are now up on the Bugle website and elsewhere on the internet.

Do come along and bring all your friends.

The show will feature me live, Alice live but on a screen

and contributions from other Bugle regulars and possibly one or two local guests.

So do come along to every single one of those shows with your family and everyone you know.

Yes, also if you're not in America come to my filming of Ethos on the 17th of February at the Museum of Comedy.

There's a 5pm and a 7pm so you can come see it twice.

Well, that brings us towards the end of this week's Bugle.

Don't forget to spend the rest of this week, and indeed all of next week, booking your tickets for the Bugle Live US tour shows.

There's also a Bugle live show on the 19th of March in Glasgow at the Stand Comedy Club, part of the fantastic Glasgow Comedy Festival.

And I'm doing a stand-up show the following day at the stand in Edinburgh.

That's the 20th of March.

So, see you at all of those shows, and we'll be back next week with more from

whatever is happening in the world.

no doubt it'll be a happy happy show and before I go this week

this morning while I was writing a bugle I was well devastated to read that Jeremy Hardy the fantastic British comedian has died after having cancer he was a delightful man as many of you will have seen who did my political animal gig a number of times you'll have heard him on the radio and seen him on on television he was one of the great inspirations to me as a comedian in the early stages of my career one of the people who made me want to do political comedy.

And yeah, it was very upsetting to hear that he died.

And do seek out his work on the internet.

He was one of the finest comedians I've ever worked with.

So thanks for listening once again, and we'll be back next week.

Goodbye.