Ferry bad start to the year – Bugle 4092

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to an entirely new year of human existence to be chronicled exclusively for posterity by The Bugle, audio newspaper for a world entering at least its 39,000th consecutive year of being predominantly visual, probably more.

I am Andy Zoltzmann and here I am in London 2019 a year which as we speak is already speeding towards its conclusion.

What will this year bring?

Brexit, Trump peachment, the UN imposing a three-month sabbatical for all humanity to just kick backs, take stock, refresh and regroup, England winning a Cricket World Cup, all things that just a few short years ago would have seemed absolutely f ⁇ ing impossible.

What the year will certainly bring, and I can say this with a high level of confidence, is an absolute minimum of one appearance on the bugle by Alice Fraser.

Because she is sitting opposite me and she is now laughed, so that counts as that one.

Her work is done for the year.

She's truly a visionary.

She looks,

I can see the future.

She looks uncannily like someone about to talk about some of the things that have already happened this year on this world-famous planet of ours.

Happy new Bugle Year to the Flare of Flamingos herself, Alice Fraser.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

It has been already an eventful year, which it shouldn't be, because this is the doldrums of the year.

Nothing should happen in the year before my birthday.

Right, which is 7th of January.

7th of January.

Accepting all gifts or Patreon subscriptions.

This is the point.

You know, I feel like nothing should happen, and so much has already happened.

It's really depressing.

What's the point of having an arbitrary break in the year?

I quite like the idea, actually, particularly with Brexit coming up, of, well, I think what we're going to need for a start is a leap month.

Just an extra month called Brexuary or Brexemba or something.

Yeah.

Between now and the 29th of March.

Britain Day.

And or yeah, just

maybe July should just be that every the entire world should do not just sit down and think about what it's done.

Yeah.

I mean all comedians do that after August.

Yes.

When Edinburgh's finished, then they realise that what they've done with their lives is as much a waste as it was before.

Don't give away the secrets of the trade.

So well, happy birthday for the 7th and coincidentally also your twin brother's birthday.

Yes, although his comes about five minutes after mine if we're being technical about it, which I consistently am.

I refuse to let him start celebrating until I've been going for about five minutes.

I mean, obviously, traditionally, very, very impolite to ask a lady her age, but how old will your twin brother be?

So we will start this bugle year with a quick look at what's happened so far.

Alice and I have been busy bagging and tagging 2018 in the Certifiable History Show at the Soho Theatre.

Thanks to all of you who have come to see the show.

I hope you've enjoyed it.

Later in the show, we'll tell you about the forthcoming bugle tour of the USA in late February and early March and the one-night bugle tour of Glasgow also in March.

But first, we are recording on the 4th of January, which is, of course, is three days after the 1st of January or New Year's Day, as it is so often known these days.

But that wasn't always the case.

Back in history, that murderous, murderous, murky land of parsonists full of bastards, death, and general human shittery, New Year was thought to be on the 25th of March.

This proved to be incorrect because obviously the year begins on the 1st of January.

But

Europe used to have New Year's Day on the 25th of March.

Most of Europe picked up on this mistake around through the 16th century.

England, however, held out until 1752.

Yes, independent-spirited Britain.

That's right.

Clearly, we've never been compatible.

You know, if we spent 150 years not agreeing when New Year was, how in the name of merry f are we get to agree a Brexit deal?

January the 1st, also the day on which Jesus Christ, the original Christmas baby himself, had penis reduction surgery or circumcision.

And the foreskin of the godchild ascended even unto the heavens, carried aloft upon a sacred golden surgical tray by two archangels.

I forget which ones.

I think it was Jeff and Kim.

We just consult the gospel according to St.

Alvin.

Oh, yes, here it is.

Chapter 1, verse 8.

And as the infant todgelet miraculously healed into the perfect, unsoluble wangle of Christ, the four skinny of us of our Lord, besliced from his williard by a single snip of the holy circumcisors of Antioch, was heft away into the skies by the archangels Jeff and Terry.

Sorry, it was not Kim, it was Terry.

For Archangel Kim was still off.

Correcting your own bullshit is next level, Andy.

For Archangel Kim was still off work with a nasty wing injury after clipping a tree while flying in too fast in an effort to make it on time to the birth of the holy child, just eight days

beforehand.

For Kim was running a little bit late, being as he was, hung over like a Russian after the Archangel's Christmas party.

And so Jeff and Terry did lift the penilitudinous severance aloft, and as they ascended heavenlywards for to show the godly excisioned helmet wear unto the Lord himself, Terry did glance at the membrane relicuary, and Terry did verily wince, and Terry did say, L!

And Jeff Jeff did reproach Terry, saying, obviously don't look at it, just don't look at it.

And Terry did humbly accede to the advice of Jeff.

And Terry did say, yep, eyes off.

It's just, you know, quite weird.

And Jeff did say, sure, but a job's a job.

What the boss says goes, come on, flap your wings a bit harder and we'll get there quicker.

Here endeth the lesson.

As always, a section of the bugle.

is going straight in the bin.

Like an unwanted foreskin.

I'm still baffled as to

why that was read in a Victorian British accent.

Because that's the language the Bible's written in, Christian.

But since the James Bible,

he wrote it in that accent.

Everything in that accent.

Why would the angel, why at least was one of the angels a cockney?

Don't be so prescribed.

Just because you're a cockney, doesn't mean you can't be an angel.

No, you should know that.

I'm offended.

You're from Estics.

Classes.

Classes are all angels.

Happy New Year.

Happy New Year.

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

This year, we have a range of New Year supplements going in the bin, including New Year, New You, a guide to rearing and shearing your unwanted Christmas sheep.

New Year, New Hue, a guide to all the new paint colours with which to spruce up your house, car or self, from Spurious Hedge to Vaudeville Nosebleed, to Pigeon Death Torpenard to Solid Belching to Uzbek Despot.

New Year, yep, another one.

New Year, New Year, some fresh fonts for you to use when typing the 21st letter of the alphabet.

And New Year New Hue, a full fashion and makeup photo shoot special in which former Chinese president Hu Jintao is dressed, coffeed, and cosmetics by celebrity makeoverists Daliance Kiggage and thence Harbinger McNibb.

But we're keeping New Year Nude You, which is just a full-length mirror that you stare into yourself and regret the mistakes of the past.

That's basically what Britain has been doing for the last two years.

Top story this week, 2019 so far.

Well, as a year, Alice, 2019 has a lot to live up to or down to, following as it does years such as 2018, 2016, 2017, 1390, 73 BC, 1600, and so many others that have gone before it.

And so far it is shaping up to be another memorable 12 months for this planet and its many fans.

It's now, as we record, just 84 days until Brexit releases Britain from the suffocating yoke of peace, prosperity, and progress with which the EU has shackled my people for too long.

The 2020 U.S.

unpresidential election campaign will crank up, and I mean crank up, whilst the 2024 and 2028 campaigns will also begin in earnest over the next 12 months.

And we could hear some early pre-rumblings from the 2032 campaign, which on current predictions will see Vladimir Putin running Miley Cyrus very close indeed.

Now, I should point out this point.

Previously on this show, we did make jokes about how funny it would be if Donald Trump ran for office.

Apologies if the Putin-Cyrus race does now happen, but we are still working on how to control the history-shaping power of this podcast.

It's not easy.

2019 could also be the year in which the environment finally comes to its senses and realises that its constant threats that it makes about our future are winning it, no friends whatsoever.

But already, we have seen some spectacular action here in Britain, Alice, in the world of ferries.

Yes, indeed.

this has been a very exciting thing.

The Department for Transport is getting stick mainly online for having hired a company to replace the current EU-based ferry services out of Dover when Brexit happens.

I mean, it sounds unfair to be mean to the government for hiring a ferry service to provide ferries until you look at the fact that the ferry service they have hired to provide ferries has no ferries to provide.

It has not previously run a ferry service and has no crossings in place.

That is like saying, Do you take this woman?

And you go, yes.

And then the priest goes, Psych, there is no woman.

This isn't a church.

I'm just a bus driver and by bus driver I mean I've never driven a bus but you got to have dreams

I mean it's understandable how it happened all the people involved in the deal know each other someone was like oh I need a ferry company and their friend was like yeah I could run a ferry company and they go oh my god and they're like sure

let me cobble together a website That is literally what happened because the terms and conditions on the ferry company website are clearly the terms and conditions that have been cut and pasted from a takeaway food joint website.

That is like showing up at your wedding and being all like, thank God that bus driver's gone away and having the priest go, do you take your hands and put them on your head?

You have the right to remain silent.

Anything you do or say is admissible in a court of law.

Well, I guess you've got to give the government some credit in a way for appointing a ferry company with no ferries.

Because what they've essentially done is appoint a metaphor for Brexit to deal with an aspect of Brexit.

It's just, I mean, they do sound similar, actually, Andy, but it is fairies that come into being if you just believe and clap your hands.

Fairies, you need to build.

You have little faith.

The government is just...

Alice, I'm going to pick you up on this because, I mean, it is all a matter of belief, Brexit, isn't it?

You have to believe in Britain.

You have to believe in Brexit.

And if needs be, you have to believe that you're a ferry company, even if you patently are not.

Keep the faith.

It's like the film Field of Dreams.

If you make them a ferry company, they will find some ferries around the back of the filing cabinet.

Being a ferry company, Alice, is 98% psychological.

There are loads of organisations with ferries that are not ferry companies, so why can a ferry company not be a ferry company even if it lacks ferry?

Don't be so hidebound by tradition and dogma.

A ferry company can be what it thinks it is.

Ferries are, and we want warships anyway.

It's Britain, it's Brexit.

Warships, not ferries.

Ferries are square.

I mean, this is such a perfect story to begin 2019 because it's one of the many nuanced operational realities implicit in peeling the basically heeled-on sticking plaster of Europe from what is increasingly obviously the extremely thin thin skin of Britain.

And it's just the government is like 120,000 steps out beyond the edge of uncharted cliffs, desperately trying to build a logistical bridge under their frantically peddling promise feet, like Wiley Coyote in the moments before he accepts gravity.

And he has just looked down and then straight to the camera.

The terms and conditions are quite spectacular.

It included Seaborne Freight, Brackett UK Limited,

saying that it is the responsibility of the customer to thoroughly check the supplied supplied goods before agreeing to pay for any meal stroke order

and it is the responsibility of the customer to ensure delivery address details are correct and detailed enough for the delivery driver to

locate the address in adequate time.

I mean I guess if you're delivering a ferry,

you do have to know where it's going.

I mean does this mean you can insist

that the ferry delivers you directly to your house?

Well I think that's Brexit, isn't it?

It can be what we want it to be.

And also when you suddenly become a ferry company unexpectedly, you're going to be busy and you don't have time for things like writing your own legal terms and conditions.

So why not just borrow them off someone else?

And also, many is the time when I've been halfway through a chicken burger for a late-night fast fooder, and I've suddenly caught sight of the terms and conditions on their wall warning me that the bat my chicken burger is in should not be loaded with more than 120,000 tons of freight.

I mean, the government asked in or out, but they did not ask if-out how do ferries work.

Because that's not how referendums work, nor is it how referendums should should work, and maybe that's why there shouldn't have been a referendum in the first place.

But there's no point in crying over spilled transport logistics.

Testify.

And also, rancid uselessness has become very much the hallmark of our preparations for Brexit.

From the prancing prickishness of the parliamentary proceedings to the nebulous nincumpery of the negotiations, at least, Millie fits into that narrative rather snugly.

How late did you stay up last night?

The Labour MP, Mr.

Tonia

Antoniazzi, Mr.

Labour MP, Tonia Antionazzi, Antoniazzi?

Anti-Nazi.

I don't know.

Antonio.

There was a Labour MP who said, we know our ports aren't ready for a no-deal disaster, but is hiring a firm that's never dealt with this kind of thing before really going to help?

This idea should have been sunk before it saw the light of day, to which the ferry service said, funny you should say that.

Well, as Brex rule, Brexit-Britannia is becoming more and more imminent by the day.

Further portents have not been good.

This was from just before Christmas.

Gatwick Airport, the renowned airport and transport hubble for hundreds of thousands of travelers every day, was brought to a flight-free standstill by any guesses?

Was it a Soviet air blockade?

Was it a giant flock of pterodactyls?

Was it a nearby volcano?

No.

It was a small drone.

a small remote controlled identified flying object and the combined minds, might and majesty of the British security forces and military and even monarch were unable to stop this thing from buzzing around and preventing aeroplanes from taking off or landing.

So essentially, a significant part of British infrastructure was brought to its knees by a dweeb with a remote control, which does not bode entirely well for our efforts to plow a glorious British furrow through the choppy waters of the modern world.

Reminiscent, of course, of when King Henry VI's cavalry charge at the Battle of Bluren-Vaufleur in France in 1445 was stopped by the presence of a single rat, which made all the knights scared of getting plague.

They refused to fight.

My favourite part about the whole story was when they arrested a completely innocent middle-aged couple and held them for 36 hours under terrorist laws with no recourse to lawyers or family.

Yeah, well, that's.

On Christmas.

That's what Brexit's all about.

I mean, in America, they have presidential pardons.

Just let the Queen randomly arrest some people for allegedly flying a drone.

I think they had once had a drone or something like that.

No smoke without fire.

So yeah,

the combined forces of Britain could not find the people wielding the drone.

They couldn't shoot the drone down.

They couldn't even hack the drone.

Which, given how easy, for example, Russia seems to have found it to hack our entire democracy and national soul, is also worrying.

They couldn't work out how to trap it in a net, despite the use of an ancient Roman gladiatorial retiarius flung out of a catapult.

They couldn't hoodwink the drone down into

mating with a roosting puffin, or magic it down using the royal magician laureate, the incredible Alamazam, using the same spell with which his predecessor, the great Kwazocchio, helped get rid of the Hindenburgs in World War I for George V.

Nothing worked.

Nothing worked.

One drone and the country just didn't.

Team GB.

Team GB.

Andy, I know you were using satire then, but in this instance, they actually did have a falcon on standby that they were apparently reluctant to use because they didn't want to kill the falcon.

Well, maybe the falcon would have have tried to escape on a drone.

Can a Falcon hijack a drone?

These are the questions that the 21st century is throwing up, that humanity has never had to confront before.

Who would have thought?

The reaction, of course, was an almost flamboyant level of administrative incompetence and obfuscation as Gatwick Airport sunk into a rightly knocked morass of delayed passengers, seeing their Christmases dissolve before their eyes.

It was not Britain at its Brexiterious finest.

Well, 2019 is four days old, and it has not taken Donald Trump long to get his rusty talons hacking away at the living flesh of this year, like the mechanical shit eagle he clearly thinks himself as.

The undisputed Da Vinci of delusion, the agoraphobic tarantula scrabbling around in the underpants of global politics, has been sticking his oar into his own face at everyone else's face, as always.

Not only has the U.S., apparently today, stopped cooperating with UN investigators looking into potential human rights violations in America, a delightful late Christmas present for the despots of the world.

Not only has Trump already struck truth several firmly impolite blows in the face with his petulant penis of provocation, but he also bizarrely took a pop at the controversial opinion-sharding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for having the generosity, stroke, temerity to fund, build and open a library in Afghanistan.

Yeah,

he took a swing at Modi saying that the U.S.

spends heaps more money in five hours and also what's a library and reading is for nerds.

And then he gave the Indian Prime Minister a wedgie and then told him how attractive his wife was.

I mean, it's sort of an astonishing thing.

He couldn't be reached for comment later because he was already off somewhere else saying something insensitive to somebody else.

But it just seems like a really weird way to go about politics.

Well, yes.

I'm probably a bit late to start.

pointing that out to him, I imagine.

But very much the words of a man who, you know, just raised skepticism about the England's quite nice idea, isn't it, it building a new library for a war-torn nation?

So it was very much the reaction of a man who, shall we say, has not wasted an excessive proportion of his life perusing the wisdoms to be found on the shelves of a library.

Other Indian projects in Afghanistan have included reconstructing a school in Kabul.

Donald Trump's reaction to that was, what's the point of educating people in Afghanistan?

I never went to school in Afghanistan and look at me, I'm emperor of all the Americas.

India has funded scholarships for a thousand Afghan students a year to study in India.

Trump's reaction to that is those places should have rightly gone to Rust Belt workers from Michigan.

India's built a 218-kilometre road in Afghanistan.

Trump's reaction to that: well, there's no casino or golf course at either end, so what's the fing point?

A dam to provide irrigation to farmers.

That's another Indian project in Afghanistan.

Trump's reaction to that is: terrorists eat food, you're just feeding the flames.

And most significantly, of course, India provided the opposition for the first test match played by the Afghanistan national cricket team, to which Trump's reaction is: what is cricket?

Is it a disease?

He also said some bizarre things.

He said about Afghanistan, why are we there 6,000 miles away?

Which, in some ways, is a good question.

It seems hopeful.

It means he knows some geography.

Yeah, I mean, it's nearer 7,000.

But the answer

is complicated.

A lot of history in Afghanistan, piled on history, piled on history.

So I'll tell you what, Mr.

President, with all due respect, which, as in all cases, when anyone says with all due respect means with absolutely no respect whatsoever, why don't you read up on the history of Afghanistan?

And if you don't own any of your own books on the subject, why not pop down to this very smart new library I heard just recently opened there?

He also dismissed Syria as being of little importance, saying we're talking about sand and death.

We're not talking about vast wealth.

I think he might be mixing Syria up with the TV series Spartacus Blood and Sand.

We don't know.

Yes, he has addressed troops in Afghanistan saying we are no longer the suckers and we're no longer going to be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, explaining his recent decision to withdraw US troops from Syria.

And it is fair enough that America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, but if they don't want to be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, they should maybe also not be doing the realpolitic oil-money-driven deliberate destabilization of the Middle East for every nation on earth.

You know, you can't have one without the other.

Going into the new year, the US government's shutdown is nearly two weeks old, which is good because as it's been Christmas and New Year, Year, no one's really noticed.

But just under 400,000 government employees are taking a nice unpaid holiday, sorry, terrifying holiday full of uncertainty about the future.

And just over 400,000 are working without pay, which is the American dream.

Sorry, the American history.

They will apparently be paid back for their work later, but I wouldn't take an IOU from Trump if he wrote it on the money he owed me.

On the bright side, mail is still being delivered.

The military law enforcement and entitlement programs are still still mostly functioning as usual, but Homeland Security, Justice, State and Treasury, as well as federal agencies have been affected.

I'm sure they're not important.

I mean, either all the libertarians are right and we'll all find out that they don't need the government, in which case maybe stock up on barbed wire and man traps because it's about to get Netflix up in here, or you find out that you really do need the government and, in fact, the modern world is a complex web of interconnected organisations, so maybe someone should stop throwing big balls of toilet paper into the complex web.

Thank you, Trump.

Justice news now, and

here in Britain, a judge

has said that the grammar and punctuation in text messages sent by to convicted drug dealers was of a much higher standard than was normally seen from those in their line of work

and spared them a prison sentence.

It's not clear whether this was, he spared them a prison sentence because he liked their grammar and punctuation, but

there was certainly associated.

It's very mixed messages for the youth.

He said that

this very good grammar and punctuation indicated a higher level of education of these people, which in my day used to translate as they should have known better, but here is apparently being used as a reason not to punish them.

On one hand, yeah, sure, it's fine.

Marijuana is one of those illegal drugs that's only illegal if the cops are trying to ruin your day for other reasons.

And it's sure, it can destroy your life, but usually by unspectacularly sapping your ambition and drive over years until you're a perfectly pleasant waste of potential or serious psychosis if you start in your teens.

But my point is, you can achieve most of the same life-ruining effects with too much pizza.

It's just the optics of only punishing people who've made bad choices because they have limited education, socioeconomic hardship and no other options become more stark when they're put right next to smirking dick pags who've made those bad choices for fun.

So it's quite interesting, isn't it?

That grammar and punctuation is of a higher standard than normally seen from drug dealers, and as you say, indicate the high level of education is nothing nothing in this country not being gentrified.

I mean, it's all about who you know these days, isn't it?

Bloody Oxbridge Elite, Bank of Mum and Dad, setting up your first cartel for you.

Makes me sick.

The judge told them, I hope a court never sees either of you again.

I don't know if that means that he wants them to put their lives back on track or if he just hopes that the justice system will

end, the logical end point of austerity Britain.

And it'll all be done on the internet soon anyway.

We won't need courts.

The whole legal process, process, each side will simply tweet its evidence in.

A Ministry of Justice bot will process the tweets, pass sentence, and the guilty party will be then able to download a prison cell to print out on a 3D printer to serve

his or her sentence at home with their mobile phone playing hourly video threats from a virtual reality inmate serving a 30 stretch for GBH.

That's the future.

It will save the economy £5 trillion an hour.

I mean, that's very good, but you forget that they didn't publish the second half of that sentence.

I don't want to see you in here again, but I'll see you and your dad down at the golf course on Sunday.

Defection news now, and it's just been revealed that the North Korean ambassador to Italy has disappeared.

He's gone AWOL.

in Rome.

He apparently escaped the diplomatic compound back in November and has not been seen since.

I mean on one hand that's news and on the other hand they did send him from North Korea to italy well exactly this is rome of course he's gone awol he's probably just stuck at a really nice wine bar at the campo de fiore or something three quarters of away through the bottle of the bottle of barolo if my personal experience is anything to go maybe he's engrossed in a museum that can teach you everything you need to know about the human condition based purely on some 2 000 year old bits of jug and a mosaic of a penis or he's sitting quietly on the steps of the 16th century palazzo thinking how the f did that italian man drive that car so fast down that street that is apparently less wide than his actual car?

It's Rome.

It's a city of endless fascinations.

I've gone AWOL in Rome with Mrs.

Saltzman a few times.

Well, maybe not the O of AWOL.

I've gone A-Awal in Rome.

It is awesome.

Particularly, as you say, if you've come to Rome from an arid communist backwater where the most exciting thing that ever happens to you is not being personally slain by a despot with a rocket launcher.

And I mean, of course, this is not the first North Korean diplomat who has gone missing.

And it's the problem with their North Korean diplomats is they keep letting them leave.

Yeah, that's a bit of a flaw in diplomacy if you're a country like North Korea, isn't it?

In sausage roll news now.

Oh, I'm listening.

Is it the kosher one?

Have they finally discovered the kosher one?

Well, almost.

They have got to the point where Greggs, the popular pie shop and sausage roll shop, has published an advertisement saying that they are about to start selling vegan sausage rolls.

And Piers Morgan, as is his wont, has said that he has been betrayed by Greggs, that this is not what he expected for Greggs, and that nobody wanted a vegan sausage roll, sort of entirely ignoring the realities of capitalism.

What's next?

Petrol stations selling anything other than petrol?

Chocolates at the pharmacy?

Look, I can get on a bandwagon with the best of them, but more than anything, is this just a story because it's fun to make fun of?

Is this the tulip frenzy?

Is this oppositional inflation?

Do we need a nationwide referendum on Greggs' product offerings?

No company offers a product that they think they can't sell.

If they provide a product that is not going to sell, no one's going to buy it.

The government isn't offering a rebate on vegan sausage rolls.

Yeah, I mean, you say that, but then, you know, we did not fight world wars to be forced to know that other people are eating vegan sausage rolls.

But I mean, I'm starting to think, with this kind of pattern of Piers Morgan saying something awful and then everyone lashing back, that he is actually got heavy shares in Greg's.

He's got heavy heavy shares in himself.

I mean, I guess the thing is, it's, you know, as a meat eater, other people eating vegan sausage rolls undermines the sanctity of my meaty sausage roll.

It's like gay marriage all over again.

Well, apparently, to Piers Morgan, it is.

I just want to carry a vegan sausage roll in a baby pupoose.

Watch his masculinity disintegrate completely.

That's the ultimate image of modern life.

In Future Soldiers News Now, soldiers have reacted angrily to a new recruitment campaign that is targeting the phone-obsessed.

The posters call for snowflakes, phone zombies, and selfie addicts to sign up, failing to realize that nobody identifies as a phone zombie.

And if people were to acknowledge their problems honestly enough to identify as any of those categories, they'd go see a counselor, and the counsellor would tell them about the statistically poor mental health outcomes for people who joined the army

In a debate...

That was bleak.

It's New Year.

It's nearly my birthday, Andy.

I'm allowed to be bleak.

In a debate discussing the merits of the recruitment drive, Colonel Bob Stewart defended the campaign as an attempt to recruit young gamers, suggesting that digital abilities could be transferable.

He says, we want people who can game and can help protect the country from cyber warfare.

Some of these people can play PS4 really well, like my 15-year-old.

I just have to say Andy the idea that gaming makes you good at warfare is pretty amazing in that it is depressing if it's true and also depressing if it's a lie.

Bugle feature section now and New Year fitness regimes.

Well the Bugle is always looking to help its listeners shape up and get healthy, particularly after the Christmatico Novo Annu Aerial festivities of Christmas and New Year.

So, this week, the Bugle offers you more ways to get fit without the efforts, inconvenience, or embarrassment of having to go to the gym, with simple modifications to your everyday life, and specifically, your meal times.

Beginning with breakfast.

Breakfast has proved itself to be one of the must-have meals of the third millennium, and nowhere more so than here on earth.

But why not get some quality exercise along with you, morning num-nums, by hanging a giant cauldron over a large fire, filling the cauldron with porridge, oats, water, and or milk, plus a squad of salt, and then jumping in.

You are now the human spirtle, stirring the porridge with your arms and legs as it gradually comes to the boil.

A perfect workout begins nice and easily, then gets gradually tougher as the mixture thickens and the temperature rises.

You'll really work up a sweat as you struggle through the potentially lethal vat of tasty oati goodness as it congeals around your slowly flailing limbs and you desperately call for help to be extricated from the glutinous mega glob of pure breakfast.

Once the emergency services haul you out, not only have you burned the equivalent calories to fighting a bear in an elevator for 38 minutes, but you've also got enough breakfast to keep you and the rest of your neighborhood going until lunchtime.

Lunch.

Well, we all like a sausage sandwich to fill the lunchtime break.

Well, maybe not all, but let's say we either like or would like a sausage sandwich for lunch.

Either way is a fact.

So why not boost your upper body muscles and cardiovasculars by slaying your own sausage?

Hunt down and kill a pig, boar, cow, or buffaloid, or ocarpi, or vegetarian, ethically, of course, we're not animals.

Do it in the open air, not in an abattoir, please.

Depending on the size and wildness of your sausage filling, tracking, hunting, grappling with, and strangling your lunch is equivalent to three 14-hour sessions on a very tready treadmill.

And dinner.

That's hard.

You've got to hunt down all the buttholes.

It's a high-quality sausage,

not on a bargain based on it.

It can be high-quality buttholes.

There's a whole segment on red tube for that.

Weren't you in a bank all that once?

Sometimes the old ones are the best.

Dinner.

Go for the dog's dinner.

What animals are traditionally fitter than their owners?

Correct.

Dogs.

And what is the secret of their canine athleticism?

They bury their bones and then have to dig them up again.

So learn from the masters and bury your dinner somewhere in the local woods early in the morning before sunrise.

Then in the evening, after sundown, dig it up with your bare hands.

In the darkness, you'll probably have to dig several holes before refunding the location if you're chicken chassis, roadkill, stroganoff, SM salmon allagimp, or spaghetti Milton Keynesi.

But the more the better for your dorsal sculpturings and absolums.

You will become fit as fiddles with the Bugle New Year meal fitness regime.

Can't we just stick to swearobics?

Always good to hear swearobics.

Nads.

Shit, shit.

Good.

Bum cup.

Squeeze

Nad Nat Nads Shit Good Good Gooch

Bum Bum Bum Hole

Squeeze

Nads

Gooch

Bum Hole

Squeeze

So well 2019 Alice still 361 days to go

so I think it's time to look into our crystal balls for

you cannot say that after just going on about buttholes for

the wonderful new future we live in.

There are things that I can say that you could not.

Oh, is this progress?

Yes.

I ask you.

Is this what feminism was supposed to be about?

Yes.

Well, I mean, I've looked into my crystal ball.

Okay, let's do it.

Let's have a crystal ball here.

Can you do a sound effect of

what does a crystal ball sound like, Andy?

Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop.

Was that in the middle of the mall?

You don't have to do a sound effect now.

Bloo-loo-loo-doo-loo.

Like that.

Right, I'll just...

Well, so let's look ahead to

the rest of the year.

I'll just switch the bugle crystal ball on.

Anyway, Chris, whichever works better.

I mean, this is unedited.

This is going out as

Well, looking into the crystal wall for 2019, I see 3,500 metre-high volcanoes springing from nowhere all across Britain and erupting, causing logistical mayhem across the entire country.

Joint Prime Ministers Corbyn and Boris Johnson, new heads of a special government of national disunity, issue a statement saying, Whilst it has long been disproven that natural disasters were God's punishment for the toleration of homosexuality, it has now transpired that he can dish out some divine vengeance for the toleration of deep political incompetence.

Icon of the year, I can see 16-year-old Grendel Sklabit from America, a tragic teenager who becomes a global sensation after getting stuck saying the word like.

As long feared by professional languishians, overuse of the word like eventually leads to this social media-obsessed teen being unable to complete a single simile despite saying like 18 times in a single sentence, and then within days, becoming trapped in an eternal cycle of saying like, like, like, like, and becoming regarded as a living, repetitious metaphor for our times.

Sclabet will end the year on display at the Tate Museum's new living art wing, alongside a newspaper columnist who is now able to write only the words, why don't they just get on with it?

Meanwhile, in the Crystal Valle in Australia, the Australian Prime Ministerial Rolodex has started moving so quickly it's begun to generate clean energy while nothing in the country changes, which it turns out is what everyone wanted in the first place.

Donald Trump.

Tricked into hibernation, ends the year asleep, covered in twigs, mud, leaves, and ironically, newspapers in the White House gardens after being convinced that he's a bear.

The President's likeliest challenger for the 2020 Republican nomination has emerged late in the year after the ghost of Dwight D.

Eisenhower throws his hat into the ring from beyond the grave during a Ouija board session on the new hit BBC TV current affairs show David Dimbleby talks to the other side.

Meanwhile, in Britain, I see attempts to boost British patriotism by promoting the nuptials of the 364th in line to the throne Duchess of Len Hutton to the little-known Bolivio South African actor Scalciano Lopez-Geseitenkasten Heisman, who once appeared as a stunt double for Harold Bishop in a low-risk bicycling scene in Neighbours, to promote that as a royal wedding and inspire national unity.

It proves largely unsuccessful when only 900,000 well-wishers line the streets of Windsor and the happy day earns less than 26 hours coverage on the BBC News channel.

Meanwhile, wokeness online and the right-wing backlash have become so polarised that both sides finally agree to saw the world in half and shoot off in opposite directions.

Oh, that's the perfect compromise to everything, isn't it?

And film of the year is going to be Black Panther, the big-budget remake of the 2018 mega hit.

It will smash all box office records and be praised by movie industry bigwigs and remake aficionados alike as quotes entirely pointless and simultaneously almost indistinguishable from and considerably inferior to last year's superb original.

Black Panther will outgross Galaxor 2 Sledgehammer of Destiny, the the preemptive sequel to the as-yet unmade superhero blockbuster Galaxor Space Vigilante, which will earn celebrity producer

H.

Drellard Butt Clark two Oscar nominations for most commercially cynical film and least ambitious production.

So it's an exciting year ahead, Alice.

Oh, it's a good idea.

It's all going to happen.

It's all going to happen.

And we will, of course,

we will, of course, chronicle everything from this year here on the Bugle.

Also, in 2019, here's a prediction.

The Bugle will do a live tour of North America.

What?

The dates currently confirmed are as follows.

26th of February in Brooklyn, 27th in Washington, D.C., 28th in Boston, 1st of March in Providence, Rhode Island, 2nd of March in Northampton, Massachusetts, the 3rd of March in Philadelphia, the 4th in Chicago.

Got me busy.

5th in Minneapolis.

The 6th in Denver, and the 7th in Portland.

Then, a few days off before, San Francisco on the 11th, and Los Angeles on the 12th.

Those dates are all confirmed.

Not all of them are on sale yet on the internet, but those are all confirmed.

We will put ticket links up on the Bugle podcast website.

I mean, it's quite a tight tour.

You'd better hope that no American infrastructure proves substandard.

Yes, that could be true.

The distances aren't that big in America.

Oh, you can just hitch.

So, do come along to all of those shows.

All of them, please.

The Bugle will also be doing a one-night-only tour of Glasgow on Tuesday, the 19th of March, doing a show at the Stand Comedy Club.

I'm then doing a stand-up show in Edinburgh on the 20th of March.

Further dates to be announced in due course.

Alice, anything to plug?

Other than your birthday, of course.

Yes, I would like to plug my birthday, the 7th of January.

I'm doing sorts of all sorts of things.

New show, Mythos, this year.

It'll be in Sydney and Melbourne and Perth and London and various places in the UK.

Most of my dates are up on my website alicefraser.com or that's about it.

Right.

Consider that plugged.

Yeah.

Well,

there we go.

That's what this show is all about.

Well, that brings us to the end of this first bugle of 2019.

At least many more to come.

Possibly even more than that.

We'll be back.

We'll be back.

Potentially, we can hope for too many.

Slightly too many shows to to come in the forthcoming year.

Thank you for listening.

Do send your emails in to hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com.

Book your tickets for the US tour and the Glasgow live bugle.

And we'll be back next week.

Until then, Happy New Year and Happy Birthday to Alice Fraser and her twin brother.

Goodbye.

Aged, redacted.

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.