Bugle 4064 – Mad Mike Versus Science

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, Buglers!

It's a moment the fans of the number 4064 have been eagerly waiting for.

It's Bugle, issue 4064, for the week beginning Monday, the 2nd of April, 2018.

You're going to be waiting a while for a year with that number, so please do enjoy this Olympic year, of course, 4064, so it is going to be a good one.

But according to my predictor,

the weather's going to be awful.

Britain will still be arguing over whether or not Brexit was a good thing, and Antarctica is going to be the most overpopulated continent in the world.

I am Andy Zoltzman and I am in my house.

I was going to be in my shed,

but unfortunately it's raining here in London.

And the roof of the shed, when it rains, is not adequately soundproofed.

But, you know, so I'm unable to do my shed introduction, which included me saying, Welcome to the shed, only immortal words, of Actual Rose.

And I was going to tell you all about the other great works of art that have been created in sheds, including Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and his magic garden rake, Jane Austen's Shed and Shed Ability, Arthur Wells' Animal Shed,

Damian Hurst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone in a Shed, also known as Sharkin Shed, and

the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which of course began as the Sistine Shed Ceiling.

Pope Julius II just wanted somewhere to keep his power drills and lawnmowers, and boy did he have a lot of lawnmowers.

But he liked it so much he thought I'll make this a special shed of God or chapel as they're often known.

Joining me this week via the miracle of modern technology and not in either my house or a shed, but from the hemisphere into which I will be catapulting myself imminently for my shows at the Melbourne Comedy Festival from the 10th to the 22nd of April, Sydney Comedy Festival on the 23rd and 24th, and the New Zealand Comedy Festival in Wellington on the 30th of April, and Auckland on the 1st and 2nd of May.

See all their details on the internet.

All the way from Melbourne.

It's the flamingo flyer herself, Alice Fraser.

Hello, Andy.

I am preparing the ground for you as we speak.

I am flinging bullshit into passers-by's faces in in order to prepare them for your imminent arrival.

It's going to be great.

Like a kind of John the Baptist of bullshit.

Yeah, slash monkey.

Whatever.

Yeah.

Very fun.

Whatever floats your shit-flinging boat, Andy.

So the Melbourne International Comedy Festival begins

basically roundabout now, doesn't it?

Tomorrow I open my show Ethos at the Chinese Museum, which is exciting.

It's literally a museum, Andy.

I am doing comedy while being stared down by a terracotta warrior, and it's a thrill.

It's a thrill unlike any other.

And I mean,

does the terracotta warrior like your shtick?

It's pretty deadpan.

He was there last year, so if he's come back again for another year at the museum, he must have enjoyed it.

They're known for their loyalty, the terracotta warriors.

We are recording on Wednesday the 28th, recording early this week because I will, as I said, be flying out of my hemisphere shortly.

So, apologies if all of this is out of date by the time you listen to it and everything in the world is either fine or completely destroyed.

This coming Sunday,

April the 1st, Easter Sunday, and also April Fool's Day.

Not the first time those two dates have coincided.

If I may refer to the very first edition of both.

I'm not in my tomb.

April Fool.

Yeah.

Well, of course, Easter, you know, a very prominent

festival of chocolate eating.

We discussed the origin of the Easter egg on the bugle before.

There is still some dispute, it should be said.

Our theory

is not canonical as yet.

The latest theological experts suggest the Easter egg may in fact not be the symbolic junkle glove eels of Christ after all, but instead the symbolic ping pong balls from the Last Supper when Jesus beat Judas in the final using balls which Judas complained Jesus had turned into unpredictable oval shapes.

He did not take that defeat at all well.

Not at all.

Controversial format, of course.

Always awkward when 13 people are in a tournament.

Jesus put

himself and his top three ranked disciples automatically into the quarterfinals, and the remaining nine had to play off in three groups of three with the winner and the best place loser on points difference going through to the quarterfinals.

That caused further eruptions.

So you can see why the whole thing started to fall apart.

The Easter bunny, however, we've never looked at the origin of the Easter Bunny before.

Chris, any ideas?

Was it Jesus' secret wife?

But no.

One from an egg on a mountaintop?

Close.

It was, of course, well, the origin was explained in the Gospel according to St.

Jack, the most arrogant of all the Gospel writers, old cocky St.

Jack, patron saint of France and Seafood, of course.

The Easter Bunny was a little rabbit who appeared during

the crucial fiction at Golgotha.

He looked up at the not very happy Jesus on the cross and said, eh, what's up, Doc?

Jesus, of course, known as Doc by his followers, due to his incredible skills at alternative medicine.

Although, of course, he wasn't actually a qualified doctor.

Not a qualified doctor, Jesus.

Failed his exams because in the practical, he turned all the other students' saline drips into vodka.

Jesus replied, is it not clear what's up, my big-eared friend?

I'm up.

That's what's up.

Anyway, the Easter Bunny scuttled off and brought Jesus back a carrot,

but it was spotted by a hungry centurion who shouted, Septimus, we found ourselves some dinner.

And just

as the rabbit was about to be spared by the centurion, Jesus miracled the Easter bunny into a mud-covered rock, hence the tradition of eating chocolate rabbits.

That is a fact.

Totally believable.

There you go.

I mean, is it a fact, Andy?

Well, I mean, who knows?

I mean, when it comes to that's a great thing with

history, is a lot of it was a long time ago.

And,

you know,

that fine line between...

I mean, it's hard enough to find out what is a fact or a lie from something that has happened yesterday.

So something that's happened 2,000 years ago.

Open season for me.

A section of the bugle is going in the bin.

In fact, an April Fool's Day section.

Many newspapers, news shows like to sneak in a fake story on April Fool's Day.

Classics include the BBC in 1957 covering the spaghetti harvest in Italy.

That's footage on the internet.

In 1996, Taco Bell announced that they had bought the Liberty Liberty Bell, one of the iconic artifacts of American history, and we're going to rename it the Taco Liberty Bell.

In the year 528 AD, the daughter of Emperor Xiaoming

of Northern Wei was made emperor as a male heir

by the Empress Dowager Who.

But she was deposed and replaced the very next day.

Well, that is a bad April fool, isn't it?

You're Emperor.

Oh, hard luck.

The Empress Dowager Who?

Who?

No, what?

Not widely recognised, but the first female monarch in the history of China, albeit only for one glorious funny day.

I mean, that's better than most Australian politicians manage.

Good luck to our American listeners this year on April Fool's Day, working out exactly what the fk is an April Fool and what the fk is just actual news.

My favourite one was the news that the Queen,

this was, I think, back in 1968, was being fitted with a propeller on her crown so she could literally, quite literally reign over us.

But the Hatlicopter sadly

never actually came into existence.

But somewhere in this audio newspaper for April Fool's Day is an actual fact bugler.

So

see if you can spot it.

Anyway, that section is going in the bin.

Top story this week, cricket.

Now, there's not often in the bugle where I have led with cricket

as a top story, despite the fact that cricket clearly is universally acknowledged to be the greatest thing ever invented by humanity.

This week it's made the news around the world.

And there's only one way cricket makes the news around the world, and that is when people have been cheating at it.

And this week, much to the delight of all England cricket fans, particularly after we got absolutely spanked in our recent series with Australia.

It is Australia who have been caught cheating, and it has led to probably the biggest single crisis in the entire history of the Australian nation.

Alice, I know you are technically not a cricket fan for whatever reason.

I'm not going to

judge you for it, but you're looking at the under-12s Bondi Waverly most improved player at this point.

Okay, sorry, my mistake.

But yes, indeed, Australian cricket has been rocked by a cheating scandal, which undermines our sporting nation's reputation for being a sporting, sporting nation, which is part of our national identity, according to my dad.

My dad often says, Daughter, he calls me daughter, daughter, the Australians have a reputation for fair play, apart from indigenous massacres and, more famously, the underarm bowling incident of 1981,

which was a dastardly affair in which the less good Chappell brother did an underarm bowl which was technically legal but very rude, like movie spoilers or leaving negative reviews on Pornhub.

But nearly.

How much research did you do for that one?

Any research is too much.

Nearly 40 years later, the newest player on the Australian team, Cameron Bancroft, was caught on camera dropping a piece of gritty tape down his pants for what people are leaping to assume were not innocent, sexually perverse ball scuffing purposes, but in fact, nefarious game-related ball scuffing purposes.

Bancroft attempted to hide the tape in his pants, and when questioned by an umpire, he said he was just wiping the ball.

I mean, we've all done.

Let he who has never put a bit of gritty tape down his pants cast the first stone.

There's some now.

Yeah.

Well, Andy, the nation is in shock.

Clearly, I mean, even your Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has found his moral limit.

But being caught cheating and then compounded, as Australia did, by admitting cheating after being caught cheating, which is the first rule of cheating at sport.

Never fess up.

Did they learn nothing from Lance Armstrong?

Never fess up.

Poor colonialism.

Well, yes, yes.

I mean, if you start admitting things you've done wrong in countries like ours, Alice, then that is a floodgate you will struggle to close.

Now, as you said, the cheat for non-cricket fans, what they did, they were trying to alter the condition of the cricket ball,

which deteriorates naturally over the course of several hours.

It's not like baseball, you have a new ball pretty much every

pitch.

So it's quite a crucial part.

And if you can make the ball move more in the air, it's better for the bowling team.

And Australia was trying to do that by,

and there are legal ways of doing it.

You can shine it on your trousers, you can rub spit in it, you can

sweat on it, you can look at it threateningly, you can abuse it, you can insult the leather about how its mother looked like a cow.

All fair game cricket.

But

also, it's inefficient, it doesn't always work.

And what Australia did was think, oh, hang on, why don't we get a player to get a piece of sticky tape, cover it with dirt, and rub the ball on the field.

Now, for those who are unaware of cricket as a sport, cricket is often filmed by TV cameras when it is being broadcast on television.

This it has in common with, for example, many other sports, and indeed, basically the whole of life itself now.

The world is permanently filmed.

So I think this is why Australia has reacted so badly to this.

It's not just the fact that it's cheated, but the fact that it did it so unbelievably badly.

And they passed a message out to Bancroft that he'd been spotted on cameras.

And he then tried to hide the evidence, you say, by shoving it down the front of his trousers.

You know, hard, as you say, to claim he just wanted to sand your lumpy junk.

I mean, he could have claimed that because it was just this yellow thing.

You couldn't tell what it was on camera.

He could have claimed he was merely feeding a cornflake to the lucky team hamster Ethel Jeff that was

always keeps hidden in the jockstrap of the junior member inside and has done, of course, since Warwick Armstrong's hamster back in 1921, of course.

So they had no choice, really, but to fess up after attempting to slightly lie to the umpires by pretending he was using something different.

Well, it's also that the idea of a fair go is endemic to the Australian character, and cricket is a symbol of fairness in our society.

The reason that cricket and fairness go hand in hand is that the idle colonial gentry who gave cricket its incredibly relaxed attitude to how long a game should go on and how exciting it needs to be, basically invented the idea of fairness, and then they applied fairness as carefully and topically as a hemorrhoid salve, which is to say that they used fairness mainly for rich assholes and not so much on the people they were murdering or stealing large swathes of land from or poor people.

But of course, that wasn't against the rules, which is more important.

Right.

I mean,

how many murderers apply a hemorrhoid ointment to their impending victims, Alice?

I mean, not many, which is the point.

It's just not cricket, Andy.

So yes, strange times for Australian sport.

The great thing about it from an English perspective is not that just that we lost to Australia recently 4-0 and we can now basically say, well, they were obviously cheating, and if they hadn't been cheating, we'd have won 5-0 probably.

But whilst this was going on, England was suffering one of their most humiliating defeats

in their cricketing history.

Bowled out for 58 runs by New Zealand.

At one point, they were 23 for 8.

Only two batsmen left for non-cricket fans, except for the worst score in the history of Test match cricket that goes back to 1877.

They just avoided that.

But thanks to the glorious cheating of Australia, that's basically been forgotten about.

We can just brush that humiliating thrashing by New Zealand under the carpet.

Or maybe that's why Australia did it.

They did not want New Zealand getting any glory.

They thought, oh, there's only one.

We're going to have to take this on ourselves.

In other Australian news now, a South Australian woman has been captured sunbaking on the picturesque Port Wollunga Beach while an intimate wedding ceremony took place just meters away.

The picture was captured by a fellow Adelaide resident and posted to the shit Adelaide Instagram page, which exists.

The woman who took the picture told the Daily Mail that she didn't think the woman noticed the wedding, saying she was just a metre away.

It was pretty funny.

I mean, I think it's it's very brave of her to stay in the way of a wedding because the last thing you want is wedding tan lines, where there's just a little outline of what statistics seem to indicate is a 50-50 coin toss on the future happiness of a pair of strangers.

But look, maybe she was playing the part of a metaphor.

Marriage is about dealing with the unexpected sunbathers in the pristine sands of your life.

That's a beautiful way of putting it, Alice.

But I guess, you know, she was there first.

I mean, there's a number of good reasons why she shouldn't.

I I mean, if you start moving for weddings, then where will it end?

Global chaos, clearly.

She's a product of the Trumpian era.

If she moves for that wedding, then, frankly, the entire population of Mexico is going to invade Texas by the end of the week.

It could also have been a protest against heterosexual wedding in Australia, which remains legal.

even though a homosexual wedding has now been legalised.

You would have thought there's only room for one sort of wedding in Australia.

So maybe it's her little blast against that.

But I think a further question is, what were these people having a wedding on the beach for?

Unless they are hardline Poseidon worshippers or,

I mean,

also the dangers of it, because weddings attract whales.

This is well known.

We've seen this played out tragically in Australia.

Because whales are a notoriously romantic creature.

They just love a wedding.

They absolutely love a wedding.

I mean, that is all whale song.

All whale song is just them doing Gregorian chants.

Yeah, so could have had tragic repercussions.

There's only six things you should do on a beach for me, Alice.

I'm not a beach fan.

My skin tone does not respond well to the concept of sunlight.

So for me, there's only six things you should ever do on a beach.

One, play beach cricket, obviously.

Correct.

Two, try to scoop the water out of the sea to counteract rising sea levels.

Three, scream, shark, shark.

Four, scream, oi, plastics, get back here, you little bastards.

We've all got to do our bit.

Five, you should get off the beach, or six, you should get divorced.

For me, a beach is a much better sit, much better location for a divorce than

a wedding.

I haven't really thought through the logic of that, but I guess, you know, it's that it's that

barrier between the

cold past of the sea and a more fertile land of the future.

It's a liminal and lawless space, the beach.

You can send them off into a riptide.

Testify.

In Pauline Hansen News Now, embarrassing red-headed politician who won't go away, Pauline Hansen, has announced that she is comparable to Nelson Mandela, which is so ironic given that she's famous mainly for racism,

but also for being the whitest woman in the world.

Well, so what drove her to make this comparison?

Well, she feels like she is a politician who's standing up for her beliefs despite aggressive responses by sane people and people with compassion and non-racists.

And so

she's also been in jail.

How long was she in jail for?

Oh, I don't know.

Not long enough, is the answer.

Oh, so I'm just looking at it.

11 weeks.

Now that is less than...

From memory, it's less than 27 years, isn't it?

I mean, that is the long march to freedom, right there.

Right.

They do have other similarities, though, to be fair to

Pauline.

Other than the fact they both spent time in jail.

Nelson Mandela never sang backing vocals on a track by the American heavy metal band Motley Crew.

Nor has Pauline Hansen.

Both Pauline and Nelson have at times utilised a bench, but neither Mandela nor Hansen have ever had to wrestle an angry alien live on global television with the future of the planet and humanity at stake, which is lucky for everyone on both counts.

Neither has ever met Napoleon Bonaparte.

Both were known at times to blink using their eyelids.

And Nelson Mandela, sadly dead, Pauline Hansen dead on the inside.

So it's that they have they've they're peas in a they are very much peas in a political pod.

We can only hope that at Pauline Hansen's funeral they have excellent bad sign language interpretation.

Yes.

There are differences, I guess.

Long term,

I'm going to confidently predict long term that Mandela will have more streets and public buildings named after him than Pauline Hansen.

You have to remember Pauline Hansen is doubling up with the famous boy band Hansen.

Yes, it's

well I guess I'm right.

I think even those two combined.

I still think Nelson has the edge.

In other cheating news,

it turns out that there's not only cheating in cricket, but also in politics.

Who would have thought it?

This country has been rocked to its very foundations by the allegation by a former employee of Cambridge Analytica turned whistleblower, that the Vote Leave campaign may have cheated to get around spending controls in the Brexit campaign.

Around about £600,000

of

funding could have

been used dodgily now to our American listeners, £600,000 of spending in an election campaign.

That is...

That is a drop in an ocean of shit.

But could the Leave Leave campaign have swayed the Brexit votes by cheating?

To be honest, it's a bit late for us to start giving a shit about that, frankly.

Flagrant bullshitting, more of an issue than a little bit more of election funding.

The fact that the Leave campaign won votes through their lies and dissembling is surely far more important than a few hundred grand of extra campaign funding.

And as a Remain fan...

who was disappointed that the lies and dissembling of the Remain campaign were far less effective, I find that completely unacceptable.

And I guess the thing with funding is you want people to be able to fund their bullshit and lies equally.

So Michael Gove, God rest his soul, he has claimed that the vote was free and fair in that both sides were free to lie as much as they wanted.

And it was fair in it was equally badly argued and prepared for by both sides.

If these cheat allegations are proven, though, will there be another referendum?

I'm not sure there is the need for that.

I think with the way technology is going, we just need virtual reality headsets for everyone so we can live out the European future we choose to live out, given that our world is 99% perception anyway.

We might as well just fully embrace it.

Besides, it's politics, and cricket is far more important.

There are levels of behaviour and ethics expected in cricket, but politics, you know, it's a results business.

So we shouldn't replay the ashes then?

After all their balls hampering.

Oh, well, to be honest, I'm not sure I could face England getting thrashed again without that excuse.

Let's just cling to the excuse.

If you do not think all sides are cheating in politics in some way, you have not been paying attention for at least the last two and a half thousand years.

I like the things that have come out of this story that I very much enjoy.

First, is that the Cambridge Analytica Group apparently chose its name in order to emphasise its close ties to Cambridge University, with whom it has no official deal.

And as an ex-Cambridge alumna, I'm mostly angry that they haven't used their evil powers to convince more people to buy tickets to my solo show.

Which is at least as much against their long-term political interests as Brexit, if I do say so myself.

And the second thing is that Cambridge Analytica said it played no role in the Brexit referendum and said Mr Wiley had no direct knowledge of its work after he left the firm in July 2014, accusing him of peddling false information, speculation and completely unfounded conspiracy theories, continuing that's our job

it's uh yes, it's very hard to separate the the shit from the slightly less shit in such matters.

Still,

there's not that long to go until the end of time.

So

this will just seem like pointless frippery.

In fiction and weaponry news now, young anti-gun activists in the US are fighting for their right to not be shot, but also doing it with a lot of Harry Potter placards.

And they are facing increasing criticism from the right for using Harry Potter analogies in their protests, speeches, and placards.

Many on the right wing are calling out the young protesters for taking he who must not be named's name in vain, reminding us all that Harry Potter is a work of fiction and not a blueprint for how to organise your life, to which everyone else says, Yeah, duh, at least it's better than organising your life with reference to sex in the city, where everyone was all like, Oh my god, you're such a Miranda, and I had to pretend to know who Miranda was.

I mean, running your life according to a long-running serial work of fiction is as good a way to do things as any, though I'm not super keen on the current trend among conservative politicians to choose as their guiding work The Lord of the Flies, which,

while a seminal coming-of-age novel and brutal reflection on the nature of young masculinity outside the confines of civilised society, is not a great roadmap for, for example, healthcare funding.

Well, I guess it's you know that, or the Bible, which is

similar long-running fiction in some ways.

There are the huge marches in America, the march for our lives across America, hundreds of thousands of people marching in favour of people not being gunned down as they go about their daily business.

And it does seem that America has finally reached a tipping point where there's a generational shift where enough people now do not want to be gunned down as they go about their daily business.

And that's now started to critically outmass those who do want to see other people gunned down as they go about their daily business and simultaneously be able to protect themselves from marauding dinosaurs?

I guess there have been similar marches before in the past, but perhaps this could be the moment when America finally has some vague vestiges of sense blasted into it.

The gun lobby, or the pro-death lobby, as they're also known,

quite literally won't go down without a fight.

And

you hear them chanting out their catchphrases.

So USA, USA, USA, for example, which stands for unbelievably stupid anachronism.

I do understand that it is, you know, it's an awkward thing.

Historically, you want to respect the founding philosophies of the American nation, the eternal truths and wisdoms of the amendment squad, as they may or may not have meant them in 1791.

And you don't want to abandon those nation-defining thoughts.

But at the same time, you're not entirely comfortable with the deaths of innocent people.

It's kind of a kill 22 situation.

No obvious answer.

There's no obvious answer, especially if you continually ignore the obvious answer.

I mean, the problem for me is that the Harry Potter books were that bandwagon that everyone jumped on that made nerds and book reading cool.

And I was the kid that was nerdy before it was cool to be nerdy.

You know, I read books in trees like an Enid Blight and an asshole.

It's not cool when becoming a nerd becomes cool when you're a nerd because then you lose the one thing that makes nerd life tolerable, which is feeling superior to the idiots who are bullying you.

I also just missed the Hermione window.

So when I was a frizzy head know-it-all who couldn't keep her mouth shut, it was less, oh cool, Emma Watson, hashtag I'm with her, and more, let's throw sandwiches at it.

Bugle feature section now, the Earth.

Now, it's a terrific planet in many ways for all its flaws.

But one of the great questions that continues to dog this planet is, is it flat or not?

We are still waiting for confirmation on this, and the latest piece of scientific research has been conducted by a man named Mike Hughes in California, who built his own rocket, a steam-powered rocket, fired himself 600 meters above the desert, then plummeted back to the planet, which he was researching,

suffering quite serious injuries.

He survived thanks to deploying

a parachute.

He says

his mission was to prove the Earth was flat.

He didn't quite get high enough to prove that, but I think 600 meters, no one's ever

been higher than that before,

from memory.

But

it's heroic for someone to continue to do the research that other people shy away from.

I mean, my favourite quote is he's known as Mad Mike Hughes, and he wanted to prove that the Earth was flat, saying, quote, I don't believe in science.

He said, I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about certain sizes of rocket nozzles and thrust.

But that's not science.

That's just a formula.

There's no.

I mean, his main sponsor for the rocket is Research Flat Earth, a group of people around, sorry, across the world who believe that the Earth is flat.

Many of them also suggest that Australia is a myth, which, if it is, I need to have a stern chat with about 25 million of my close friends about where we've been living all this time.

I mean, in some ways it is a relief because we can stop pretending kangaroos are real and we can send Hugh Jackman back to the factory.

He said, Do I believe the earth is shaped like a frisbee?

I believe it is.

Do I know for sure?

No.

That's why I want to go up in space.

Unfortunately, every single airline flight he could have got was fully booked

Now and the end of time So he had to make his own make his own rocket But you know I think it's good people you have to challenge orthodoxy that is how science progresses that is how you know would George Stevenson have invented the train if he'd gone along with the prevailing orthodoxy at the time that the mechanical eight-legged auto donkey was the future of transport no he would not And, you know, you go back, you know, Copernicus, Galileo, would they have discovered that the Earth was around...

Oh, hang on, no, I don't want to go down this road.

I don't want to go down that road at all.

Look, Mad Mike has said this is great publicity for him.

It's got a bunch of storylines.

He says, the garage-built thing, I'm an older guy, it's out in the middle of nowhere, plus the flat Earth.

But he admits that since there was no footage of him getting into the rocket, some are questioning whether or not he actually launched, saying, quote, the problem is it brings out all the nuts, people questioning everything.

It's the downside of all this.

That's

glorious, frankly.

So, if any buglers can confirm whether or not the world is round or flat, do email us into hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com, particularly if you have conclusive proof that

it is flat.

Because

that's what the politicians want you to believe it's around, because they get money out of it.

In slightly more positive news for humanity, as a species, Alice, we've always been defined by our constant restless quest for new boundaries to break, new realms to explore, and new achievements to carve into the pages of our history.

And that is why, for example, we went to the moon, climbed Everest, raced to the South Pole, and invented sports.

But this week, another great landmark in the history of human landmarks was marked on land.

The largest meeting of sausage dogs in human history.

For the first time, sausage dogs smashed their tiny-legged way through the 500-sausage dog barrier people thought it could never be done at a meeting on a beach in cornwall 601 sausage dogs met simultaneously and it showed that we will not let the forces of hatred win take that isis shove these 601 little doglets up your asses you dog gathering hating weirdos this is how little chance you have of winning over the british public okay isis you persuaded us we've come round to your skewed idea of a bloodthirsty pre-medieval caliphate of slaughter and misogyny but i'm sorry, we've got a real problem with you

not letting us try to break the world record for largest gatherings of specific species of dogs.

So I'm afraid it's a no.

We're not taking you on.

I mean, it's an incredible thing, Andy.

Sausage dogs came together from all over the UK, allegedly to beat the record, but actually to unite their political power towards a more sausage dog-based economic policies in what is being called the Bilderberg Conference for the World's Most Sausagey Dogs.

These little-legged long-paunch plutocrats patted patted along the sands of Piranporth Beach, smoking teeny dog cigars and discussing brand integrity like mini Forbes 500 wealth management moguls, but heaps more cute.

Reporters gathered to glean scraps of information from the owners of these low-slung business dogs, hoping to find out what the future holds for the stumpy industrialists and their doggy agenda.

I mean, I think it's a nice thing that they're all coming together.

They're, you know, an evolutionary dead end.

They're disenfranchised wolf descendants, constantly confused by their own stubby failure to embody the true wolf spirit, and their continued existence is powered purely by selective inbreeding and people's desire to take cool photos on Instagram and revel in the glory of owning a life form that shouldn't really exist.

I think Alice's message there was paid for by the Badger Association of the United Kingdom.

Again, it sends a very powerful message to the world, particularly Vladimir Putin.

It shows that we we are not scared of you in Russia.

We shall gather our dogs on the beaches.

We shall gather our dogs on the landing grounds.

We shall gather our little doggies in the fields and in the streets and in the hills, and we shall never sausagely surrender.

We have just one other piece of

world news.

It's just come through this morning, actually.

Rubber ducks are more dangerous than terrorists

in some ways.

It was the

front page of today's newspaper.

It says,

rubber ducks are so filthy they can kill.

Front page of the newspaper today, rubber ducks are so filthy they can kill.

They grow these fungals and bacterioids.

And that scientists, grow-up scientists, did a 10-week experiment and found that rubber ducks can be extremely unhealthy.

So it does suggest that rubber ducks are definitely more dangerous than terrorists at bath time.

because yeah over

prolonged periods the ducks can can grow these collections of disease-making bacteria.

Whereas if you leave a terrorist in a bath for 10 weeks, it just gets cold, wet, wrinkly, and interestingly, demotivated.

It could work, but also rubber ducks are poisonous if mashed up and eaten in a little pancake with plum sauce.

So, I guess the question, Alice, for all parents around the world, should you make your child bathe with a real duck instead?

Or would a rubber Andean condor, ironically, be healthier for your child to play with as a non-aquatic bird just ominously circling over your child's cots before bedtime?

I mean, I think all children should be given terrorists to play with, because what terrorist isn't soothed by a child?

Let us not answer that question.

Competition result time now, and well, this now goes back quite a long time.

We did have a competition to win a place on the Bilderberg Group group

a couple of months ago now.

And, well, because of the high-level nature of the discussions and judging panel, it's taken a while to get

the elite cabal of high-level operators together to decide on a winner.

The competition, just to finish this sentence, to win your place as one of the most influential behind-the-scenes operators in the world.

I think it is best if the biggest decisions affecting the planet are conducted covertly by an elite cabal of bankers, politicians, and oligarchs, because dot dot dot.

And well, thank you for all those who

sent in entries for the competition.

This came from Tom Page.

He says, because having it done overtly would be like watching the sausages made before you eat them.

It would be the worst idea ever.

So managed to crowbar in a sausage pun.

You are talking to the right show, if that's your way of ingratiating yourselves with the judges.

That's very much the bugle competition equivalent of

ice skaters sticking their pert behind towards the judging panel as they skate.

James from Maryland

says

I think it's best if these decisions are done covertly by the Elite Cabal because, as a white, middle-aged Anglo-Saxon male, I think they're doing a fantastic job.

At last, someone is standing up for us.

Dean from Leeds says, because they are the group with enough resources to create a Jurassic Park-style museum of hotties from history clones.

Oh, yeah.

There's a lot to be said for that.

And

Jerry Smith.

I think it's better if the biggest decisions affecting the planet are conducted covertly by an elite cabal of bankers, politicians, and oligarchs, because f you, that's why.

And that's not so much

an entry to the competition as a bald stating of the status quo.

So I think that probably qualifies as a winner, to be honest, unless we're going for the...

It's between that and the one that had a pun in it.

What do you reckon, Alice?

You can be be the official judge.

I like the one with the pun in it, Andy.

Oh, you too.

Tom Page, you are now a member of the Bilderberg group.

Do report to, I'm sure they'll be in touch.

So just report to whatever secret location their next meeting is being held in.

And please, please be merciful.

Do keep your emails coming in to hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com.

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

Don't forget that you can, for the next, what, three and a half weeks, Alice, see Alice Fraser's show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Alice, give it the proper plug.

I'm doing my solo show Ethos from the 29th of March to the something of April, and I'm also doing my trilogy on the 21st of April at 4pm, which is after the bugle.

I'm doing my last three one-hour solo shows in one three-hour solo show, which will be exhausting, over-ambitious, and quite possibly an enormous, disappointing failure.

And that's just for the audience.

Should get some of Daniel Kitson's fans along.

Come on!

It's being recorded for the ABC in Australia, so I've already been having nightmares about doing three hours of comedy to two deeply unimpressed people, both of whom are my dad.

So

come along to ethos, come along to the trilogy.

Also, come to the Bugle on the 15th.

I'm in it.

Yes, the live bugle on the 15th features Alice and David O'Doherty.

The live bugle on the 22nd of April features Tom Ballard and Aditi Mittel.

My one-man show, Right Questions, Wrong Answers, all new for Melbourne 2018.

Runs from the 10th to the 22nd.

I'm then doing two shows in Sydney on the 23rd and 24th as part of the Sydney Comedy Festival.

Then to New Zealand, I'm in Wellington on the 30th of April and Auckland on the 1st and 2nd of April.

Thereafter, we have the Radiotopia Tour, the Radiotopia Live Tour, in which I'm doing the joint Bugle Illusionist mashup as part of the show with Helen.

And live bugle dates in America, The 15th of May at Cobbs in San Francisco, the 17th of May at the Alberta Rose in Portland, and the 19th of May at the Neptune in Seattle.

Co-hosts to be confirmed, but do come along to the first bugle live shows in America.

And we hope to come to the East Coast and elsewhere later in the year.

That's all for this week's Bugle.

We're having a week off next week because I'm on holiday with the family before heading to Melbourne.

But we will put out some prime cuts of classic bugle stroke My Stand Up.

And then the next full bugle will be

from the live show on the 15th of April with Alice and David O'Doherty.

See you all there.

Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.

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.