Bugle 4049 – Grafting Harder Than Ever Before.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, Buglers, and welcome to issue 4049 of The Bugle.

I am live in New York City in the Argo Network Studios where, of course, former American President Dwight D.

Eisenhower recorded recorded his novelty 1954 Christmas single, Big D's Dong-along.

And it's notoriously controversial for the time B side Bootylicious, later covered, of course, by Destiny's Child.

As I record, there is a slightly alarming photograph of Ike shaking it on the wall, glaring me in the face.

Also,

this is

more relevantly to the bugle, and perhaps even more factually, where John Oliver used to record a long-running podcast down a phone line with a British guy in London called Andy

Ziltzman.

Hang on, I know someone that name.

It's me.

Small world.

Small world.

I am Andy Zoltzmann and this is The Bugle, the audio publication which in its 10-year existence has now outlived the vast majority of the world's ferrets whose standard five to nine year lifespan is no match for this show.

Thank you, everyone.

I'm not saying all those ferrets had to die to make this podcast live, but I am saying if I had a choice between doing the bugle for 10 years or being a ferret, I would definitely choose the former.

Testify, brothers and sisters.

And I am here in New York, the city that never sleeps, and in doing so is doing serious long-term damage to its health.

I don't care how many salads and smoothies it forces down to compensate.

And joining me from a city where I once inadvertently ate an udder, Calcutta in India.

it's Anuvapal.

Yes, hello, Andy.

I am sitting here in the New York of the Bay of Bengal,

which

is not really a landmark, but I am in Calcutta.

Thank you for having me.

And I'm happy to report it looks exactly the way you guys left it.

Not much has changed.

We haven't repaired a single building

or a road sign.

And it continues to this day as it was in 1947.

So hello buglers and hello Andy.

Andy I have a quick question.

Now that Donald Trump, a resident of Midtown Manhattan, is in Asia, does Manhattan look any different?

Is there a collective sigh of relief from the tri-state region?

Well, it's just non-stop partying.

And as soon as he gets back, then they just return to normal, just so he doesn't notice.

But just on the streets, it's like the Rio Carnival, but ten times more so.

And with more bologna and hot dogs.

So it's very late.

It's what, 1 a.m.

in is it, should we call it Calcutta or Kolkata?

What do the locals call it?

Because

it's a bit confusing.

Well, a bit of history here, Andy.

Job Charner,

a petty trader and a thief,

a British gentleman, found himself on the shores of of an unknown Indian port in 1666.

He got into a slight altercation with a farmer and

he said to the farmer, who owns this place?

What is the name of this place?

And the farmer thought that he was being asked, when did he cut the harvest?

Another classic case of British Indian miscommunication.

At which point the farmer said, Kalkata,

which translates to, I cut the harvest yesterday,

to which Shopchana took that to mean that was the name of the city, and he promptly moved in and took over.

Now, how somebody talking about the harvest should immediately lead to invasion, I do not know, Andy.

I don't know much about how the empire was built, but it seemed like a nomenclature confusion led to the beginning of one of the largest economic invasions in world history.

We've seldom needed more of an excuse than that.

On the subject of which, we are recording on Friday the 10th of November.

On this day in 1674, the Treaty of Westminster was signed.

This was during the Third Anglo-Dutch War.

That seems like quite a lot of wars

between

Britain and the Dutch, but this was the third Anglo-Dutch War.

And the Netherlands gave New Netherland to Britain.

Now, that was a sweet old chunk of North America, including this very studio, or at least in 1674, the land beneath this studio.

New York, of course, was a rather different place then.

It had been bought by the Dutch Chancellor Peter Minuit about 50 years before for about 40 bucks in a bag of spanners, according to, well, let's call it history.

And I've now come to claim it back on this historic anniversary.

Please, New York, come back to the mothership.

We can do each other good.

Also, on this day in 1983, Bill Gates

launched Windows 1.0, launching a new era in home swearing.

People swearing at inanimate objects in their homes has increased by over 99%

since the launch of Windows.

So that's a historic moment in human language.

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

This week, the Country Music Awards section, hot on the heels of my visit to Nashville, Tennessee.

They're holding the annual Country Music Awards.

Interesting place, Nashville, incidentally.

For those of you who don't know, it was my first time there, and I had not known before I went there.

What Nashville has, that you wouldn't necessarily expect a city in Tennessee, USA, to have in the year 2017, is a full-scale replica of the Parthenon, the famous ancient Greek temple that sits proudly on top of the Acropolis in Athens.

It was built in 1897 for the Nashville Exposition, and it's still there.

I mean, it's quite fascinating, I don't know, one of these relics from

time gone by.

But clearly, Nashville sat around in the late 19th century and thought, well, we're a growing city.

What do we need?

What is going to see us through the next few thousand years?

Any ideas?

How about a fucking Parthenon?

Why not?

Which leads to a number of questions, Andrew.

A number of questions.

Americans, you know, have always had a fascination for antiquity.

You know, they like picking up stuff.

You know, the Senate's called the Senate.

You know,

at some point, they're going to build a Roman circus and, you know, they're going to have Republicans versus wild boars and stuff in there.

But my question here is, is there anyone in Nashville who thinks that this is the real thing?

Well, I'm not sure.

I didn't see many people

bowing down and worshiping the goddess Athena, which was disappointing for me because I think she was the goddess of wisdom and I think America could really do with her right now.

Also, to add to the list of classical influences on America, of course, they currently seem to have an emperor who's acting like Nero.

So it really goes pretty deep.

Big awards at the Country Music Awards, as always.

A lot of speculation over who's going to take away the big gongs, including Biggest Hat, Most Hats, Least Original Song, Best Beard to Hat Ratio, Most Objectively Sinister Lyric A Young Woman.

That is always very hotly contested.

And

least original album as well.

So there's some very tightly fought categories.

Some of of the big stars at Country are performing live, including Hinkley Struggins.

He'll be singing his hit song, I'll Give My Soul to the Devil, but he ain't getting hold of my truck.

And Grayvon Hudge, showing the influence of Donald Trump with his recent country chart number one, I'll build my wall around your hearto, because I've seen you looking at Ricardo.

Anyway, those sections in the bin.

Top story this week: Donald Trump in Asia.

Now, Anuvab as our Indo-Pacifico-Asio-Northeast quartersphere correspondent.

How is your continent enjoying the visits of Mr.

Trump?

Well, you know, Andy, he flew over us, because that's the only way you can get to China, because he's not going to fly over Russia.

It just looks bad.

I mean, even though it's the fastest route, it just doesn't look nice.

given where we are today.

But one of the things that's going on in the world, Andy, is that India loves American presidents, right?

He loves American presidents.

And

he flew over us, and I think he made a flippant comment like, boy, am I flying over India, or something very generic like that.

And we would run that as a headline that said, Donald Trump flying over us, desperate to land.

Sadly, the winds took him to China.

So that's...

That's how we're looking at this trip.

But Andy,

I have a question.

If you remember, remember, a couple of years ago, Donald Trump tweeted very angrily about China.

He said they were a currency manipulator and so on.

He said they were not nice and that he, you know, he would come down hard on them.

But it seems like from the photographs, I'm not a very intelligent person, Andy, but it seems in the photographs when he's having champagne with Xi Jinping that he's not really.

I don't know if, unless the world has changed, drinking champagne and laughing is not really coming down hard.

Not generally, no.

I mean, he did also say at a rally in May of last year, we cannot continue to allow China to rape our country, and that is what they're doing.

It's the greatest theft in the history of the world.

Now, you as an Indian and me as a British person may be able to slightly argue with him on whether it's the greatest theft in the history of the world.

But that was a comment that all the delicacy of language and tone, the rigorous, almost fanatical devotion to historical accuracy that so rapidly became Mr.

Trump's campaign trademark.

Sorry, I must stop letting that strangely secretive guy, Yevgeny, write my material.

But as you say, it's fair to say that he has scaled back on that angry rhetoric.

Maybe having watched a Chinese army parade and thought, holy shit, these guys have some serious military manpower.

And this time they have not made the mistake of making them out of terracotta.

Is it safe to say then, are we deep into the presidency to sort of make the relatively inaccurate observation that nothing he says really means anything.

And is that a precedential quality?

I mean, does that need to now go into the annals of a precedential quality?

You know, tenacity, rigor,

forthrightness, leadership, and your word not meaning anything.

Well, I think that would make a lot of sense, actually, because if you think about it, it's only because people listen to what he says and interpret his words according to what they mean that they get angry about them.

So, if you just assume that they are completely meaningless, then it just becomes almost like a branch of experimental jazz.

I mean, not necessarily the kind of jazz that you'd want as your first dance at your wedding, but maybe you've stumbled upon the great contribution of Donald Trump to global politics.

You know, saying completely meaningless words, so meaningless that eventually people will just stop listening and it'll just be noise.

I mean, it's kind of the verbal equivalent of the Queen's Wave.

Maybe this is the future.

Also, America complaining about international trade practices of other countries is somewhat reminiscent of the

parable by Jesus H.

Christ, the alleged Messiah and parable star.

The famous parable of the baby-eating crocodile complaining about the mosquito bite.

It seems a little bit rich, given quite how much America has profited from this planet.

And Trump said, as part of his conciliation,

who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens?

Now, let me just repeat that question, and please try and bear in mind some of the things that Trump has said over the last couple of years.

Who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens?

Well, I have a few quick answers to that.

Answer A: Anyone.

Anyone can blame a country for doing that, or at least anyone with a vague sense of social conscience and a global collective good.

Anyone who thinks of countries as more than just a base commercial entity.

Anyone who can measure national success in terms other than how much it swings its economic junk in other countries' faces.

Answer B:

The people who can blame the country for doing that.

Are the people of the country being taken advantage of?

Historically, they often get a little bit pissed off.

Answer C:

Tibet.

Tibet can blame a country for taking advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens.

Maybe Trump might like to mention that to his new buddy, Mr.

Xi.

Answer D: International law

can blame a country for taking advantage of others.

Answer E, America.

America can do that.

If you recall, 1776 and all that, America seemed to get a bit knocked off with Britain taking advantage of it.

In fact, the whole foundation of the country I'm currently sitting in is basically

a country blaming someone else for taking advantage of

its citizens.

And answer F, Donald Trump.

Donald Trump does that all the time.

And he basically did did it almost immediately afterwards when he started complaining about how unjust the world is to America again.

Now Donald Trump is not going to India as part of his 10-day tour which is a little bit odd given that India is

well in layman's terms fing massive and increasingly fing important in the world.

But his daughter Ivanka, the thinking nepotist's first lady,

she is going to India.

She's going to Hyderabad.

And as a result of this, Hyderabad has taken some action to ensure that Ivanka has a lovely trip.

Anuvab, just explain exactly what they've done.

Well what they've done is they've taken a lot of homeless people and they've put them in dormitories and as you know in India there are loads and loads of people on the streets.

Some of them are homeless.

Some of them are just walking.

I don't think the government discriminated.

I think they just

looked at the path that Ivanka Trump was going to take from the airport to the hotel and picked up whoever was on it.

So, right now, there are some homeless people with much better homes than they could have deserved, and then there are some people just kidnapped.

So, they basically just cleared beggars.

They cleared beggars.

I think the goal was to clear beggars.

But in India, it's hard to tell who's a beggar and who's a millionaire because everybody's just walking on the streets.

So, India looks quite empty now.

The police commissioner in Hyderabad

said this extraordinary thing: It has come to my notice through the public that many beggars are begging arms in an indecent manner.

Now, I've been to India a few times, and if you need someone else to let you know that there are lots of beggars there, you really are walking around with your eyes shut.

And if you are a police commissioner there, then that frankly beggars belief about how you got your job, as indeed many people in important jobs in India beggar belief.

So, yes, several hundred of these alleged

beggars and bystanders have been lodged at basically a rehab center at a local jail.

Now, a rehab centre, I don't know what exactly what type of rehab center it is.

Even criminal rehab, I'm not sure quite how this is gonna work in terms of curing people of begging.

They're gonna have

some kind of rehabilitation psychologist or something saying, right, you've got a duty to yourself and society to go out there and not have absolutely no money, having been left with basically zero life chances by centuries of entrenched inequality and exploitation.

Off you go.

Is that going to work to cure India of

this obvious social problem?

The answer, Andy, is of course yes.

Of course yes.

Because, you know, basically, historically, economics has shown, you know, from the Friedman School of Economics down to Adams, everybody said the best way to alleviate poverty is to kidnap them, put them in some sort of rehabilitation for a problem they don't have like alcoholism and then once they get used to these these new housing situations make sure that they never leave creating a further burden on the government

because now they're they're they're in housing that they actually quite enjoy and now they're never going to leave so Ivanka Trump will leave on a Monday morning but the government of India will just have its jails filled with beggars.

And that's the last thing you need a convict in Hyderabad to be facing.

Solicitation from beggars.

He's already murdered a bunch of people.

It's rough for him in prison.

And now a bunch of people are begging in there.

Well, it's the first rule of social cleansing, out of sight, out of mind.

That is beginner's level stuff for any politician wanting to put a lovely little glitter tattoo on their tummy to cover a festering, gaping wound.

And Andy, you know, you know, just to add, your Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales and Lady Camilla Parker-Bowles, they were here.

They were here.

They were were in New Delhi, Andy.

They were in New Delhi yesterday

because His Royal Highness runs a big trust, the British Indian Trust.

And the thing is, of course, they were going to clear the roads of Delhi of beggars.

But

I don't know if you've heard, but the Delhi air is so polluted that His Royal Highness couldn't actually see anyone.

So it wasn't a problem.

It wasn't a problem.

Nothing had to be cleared because he couldn't see beyond his hands.

So we didn't have to be able to do that.

This is a significant problem for Prince Charles because,

as widely recorded, his mother, the Queen, now is world record holder for longest ever reign by a British monarch.

And so he's been

basically waiting to get his new job for, what, 65 years now.

And, you know, he's getting on himself now.

And basically, on current standards of Delhi Air, spending one day in Delhi knocks about 15 years off your life expectancy, as far as I can make out.

According to CNN, breathing is equivalent to smoking 44 cigarettes a day.

That's correct,

you see.

You see, the problem with the world is that, you know, you guys have different role models for clean air, right?

You guys, you guys in the Western world, you look towards the Scandinavian countries for clean air.

You look at their recycling mechanisms and you say, oh, look at the air in Norway.

Look at the air in Greenland.

They're so good.

Look at the air in Iceland.

We look at different things.

And we looked at the movie Blade Runner

and we said, oh, look, this is dystopian air in a sort of futuristic society where, you know, where there's just garbage and crushed metal.

How about that?

You know,

who said progress is only going to be positive?

But that's a lot of cigarettes.

44 cigarettes a day.

Although I think if you do also smoke 44 cigarettes a day that cancels out the air pollution um i'm not a doctor but i like maths i respect maths and i fear maths so i assume double negatives apply to matters of health as they do in uh basic uh basic arithmetic absolutely great and the tautology true true yes true

but apparently the pollution was so bad that it went beyond what the city was able to measure using the the pollution measuring instruments at its disposal.

Now that's when that is that's impressive because I mean it's been a long-standing problem in Delhi.

So presumably they got some pretty pretty high-tech kit that they could turn up to 11.

But now basically just breathing it's equivalent to eating 50 kilograms of coal three meals a day.

Do you know what is being blamed for this?

For the current pollution?

Andy reports say

a wind of some sort from from

burning crops or something.

That's apparently what's causing the haze.

I read slow slow winds and slightly colder temperatures have been blamed.

But I mean, that's really blaming that's very short-term blame.

That's like a young spiv in a flash car blaming the fact that he just had a crash on a deer running out suddenly in front of his car, rather than the fact that he was driving at 130 miles an hour in an unlicensed Lamborghini without a license, having never driven before while swigging from a whiskey bottle in the middle of a zoo.

It's really not blaming the underlying causes.

Andy, Andy, one of the great things about India is

that

it's always good to look at a temporary solution to a much larger screw-up that we've done over the years.

If there's a wind blowing over our heads, why should we blame the fact that we have thousands of trucks that are bellowing out thick black smoke for the last 55 years, which have traveled without any sort of pollution regulation due to rampant corruption?

Why look at that

when you've got a bit of a yellow cloud above your head?

You know, it's clear to us that the temporary solution, you know, in India, we have a word for it.

It means it's jugar, which is just literally means plugging the gaps.

Well, I guess in a country like India, I mean, it's, I think I've said this before when you've been on the bugle.

I've been three or four times to India, and the population has more than doubled in 25 or 30 years.

And to me, the miracle is that it works at all.

Not that it has all these problems, but that it even functions to the extent that it does.

It's a logistical

miracle.

Well, I don't know.

Andy, I think, you know, like, I think strong measures are being taken.

Like for the Delhi crisis, for example, the government immediately stepped in and said, right, we need to do something about this.

So they decided that if you own more than one car, if you have a number plate that ends in an even number, you can bring out the car one day.

If you have a number plate that ends in an odd number, you can bring out the car another day.

It's a complicated thing, but it has to do with odd and even in number plates.

I know you like mathematics, Andy.

There was only one small glitch in the problem, which is that the air was so thick and orange that no one could actually see any number plates.

So people decided to bring out three or four cars at once and see what the hell happens, just to mess with the government.

So there you go, Andy.

You know, we've got all the right things in place.

You've also got all the right people breaking the rules.

So it allows for a thriving democracy.

So I really don't know where the complaints are.

The latest fashion trend in Delhi is a lot of people dressing up like the Batman villain Bane.

That seems to be very popular in the malls, you know, getting their masks going,

getting that outfit going.

And, you know, the Bane look

is the winter party look for Delhi.

So, as I said, we are recording on Friday the 10th.

I did my the final show of my US tour in Washington, D.C.

on the 8th, Wednesday, the 8th.

And thanks to everyone

who has come to see my shows here in North America on this tour.

It's been hugely enjoyable for me.

And thanks, it's been great to see so many Bugle fans out there.

And, well, I mean, apart from Bugle fans, I think I could have done the entire tour in one gig in a lift.

But the 8th was the one-year anniversary of the election.

I was in Washington, D.C.

Obviously, the home of

American politics.

But it was also the one-year anniversary of

the demonetization

foisted upon the Indian people by Narendra Modi last November when he basically took out, was it about 80% of all functioning currency was just made instantly illegal.

80% of the currency

made illegal.

And a year down the line, apparently the analysis after a lot of study is that it wasn't perhaps a very good idea.

See, I think you did your first ever show on the bugle, I think, the week after that happened, didn't you?

And I think you said that something very similar at the time, that it wasn't a very good idea.

And it's interesting that history seems to be backing you up on that.

Well, you know, I'd like to quote the comedian Andy Zoltzman.

I don't know if you've heard of him when he talked about the sub-brian mortgage crisis.

And he had said,

and I quote, that

if you give money to people who can't pay it back,

you won't know unless you actually try it.

Unless you give money to people who can't pay it back and then they don't pay it back.

You have to go through that process.

Like, I think, Andy, you had, you had, you had, I think, I think the parallel you had given us was something to do with slamming your door on your testicles.

Yeah.

Precisely.

I mean, yeah, it's one of those things that, yeah, you have to, you have to know, you have to do it before you know for sure if it's definitely going to hurt.

And as I also said, you cannot build a global economy on hypothetically painful testicles.

A direct quote from J.K.

Galbraith.

And

to take it from testicles to the Indian economy, which is a transition many have made,

unless you actually take away 80% of the people's currency, theoretically, it seems if you take away away 80% of people's currency, they would be disappointed, confused, and poor.

But unless you actually do it, Andy,

you won't know.

Just to add that the leader of the opposition, the inheritor of the Gandhi dynasty, if you will, Rahul Gandhi of the Commerce Party,

basically said that

Prime Minister Modi himself single-handedly was responsible for removing 2% of the GDP of an economy.

It seemed like some sort of a theft of some custard or something.

You know,

he made it sound like he'd taken a chunk of a reasonably appetizing dessert.

And he wrote this in one of your newspapers, Andy, in the Financial Times.

I just want your view, Andy, on whether you thought that that was an.

I always thought that that paper was very objective, you know, middle of the road, balanced.

But I think if the leader of the opposition,

of the party that hates Narendra

If that guy goes in there and says, Prime Minister Modi, I hate you, I'm not sure how balanced that argument was.

Well, I guess that's the nature of modern media, isn't it?

And

I'm sure the Financial Times will give Modi the right to reply.

It has pink pages after all, the Financial Times, which pink is, of course, the colour of objectivity in journalism,

I think that's

why they use it.

But has, I mean, because the the idea was that it was

to stop corruption and money laundering.

So has removing almost all of the functioning currency in India cured India of all graft?

It has, Andy.

It has.

It has.

I'm glad you've got it.

Oh, God.

That's good.

It has, Andy.

And what happens is that once you've got no money, you can't be corrupt.

I think

they've gone for the all-in game, if you will.

If you remember, one of the best quotes from what we discussed last year was that the Prime Minister had burned down the entire forest in search of two corrupt wolves.

And once you do that, Andy, once you remove all currency, you realize that some people are less corrupt because they don't actually have any money.

Right.

Well, that's an interesting way of going about it.

I like the term graft.

We don't really use it in Britain.

But

I like that as a term for corruption.

I prefer it because it gives a sense of the efforts and tedious logistics involved in stealing millions and millions of dollars worth of public money.

I like that.

I think it needs to be used graft more in Britain.

Yes.

There's an art to it in India, Andy.

We find corruption scams in so many various areas.

There was a corruption scandal in India involving cow feces.

There's been a corruption scam in India involving mineral water on trains.

There has been corruption scandals in India involving

uniforms of railway workers.

So

once you've taken corruption to a level where it's an art form, you have to use a word that sounds like art.

So we use graft.

So

I can't remember if we did this on the bugle or not.

I've done it in stand-up.

There was the Uttar Pradesh Elephant Memorial scam.

Yes.

which was like $150 million worth of public money grafted off in a scheme to put up public statues of elephants.

And that's genius, isn't it?

I mean the creativity that's gone into that.

It's brilliant and

because Michelangelo, when he builds in stone, he sees only sculpture.

But when the UT government builds in stone, they see Swiss bank accounts.

Britain news now and well, the festival of government resignations twenty seventeen has continued this week.

The International Development Minister Pretty Patel, has quat.

She resigned after

going on holiday,

which she's allowed to do.

And while she was on holiday, holding 14 unofficial meetings with top-level figures in Israel, which it turns out she's not allowed to do, including an unauthorized hookup with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister.

Classic holiday activity.

I think she did it because you got a discount, like a two-four one if you booked a ride on the open-top tourist bus and a meeting with Netanyahu at the same time.

I mean, it's Anuva, this seems an odd way to

go about your holiday.

I mean, certainly, I don't know what her, what Pretty Patel's family situation is.

I know when I go on my family holidays, I like to, you know, leave high-level trade and diplomatic talks to one side.

I mean, that's also one of the reasons why the UN so rarely meets in Ibiza, because the two just don't go very well together.

The problem for Pretty Patel was that aside from conducting high-level meetings as a government minister without telling anyone, which is frowned upon these days, as I said, thank you, Brussels, was that she was then not entirely 100% honest about things afterwards.

The classic glass of port to the standard cheese course of ministerial wrongdoing.

Now, we've all done things on holiday we slightly regret, as I believe the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, said at the official closing ceremony for the British Empire in 1981.

There have been times when we've wanted to do something on holiday, but it's been sold out or too expensive or just logistically unworkable.

And and we've filled the gap with something else maybe that's what happened in this situation it you know could have been a simple oh no I've underestimated how much time it will take to go round Pompeii we're staying on the wrong side of Naples and we've got to have pizza for breakfast lunch and dinner so Pompeii is off never mind let's meet the Israeli prime minister instead there we go we're not having a wasted day kids I'm afraid Santa's magic grotto is not on today it's July and we're in Spain stop crying I know I promised it but I've got something even better come and watch daddy have clandestine talks with Benjamin Netanyahu.

This followed the resignation last week of Michael Fallon, the Secretary of State for Defence.

Defence.

Deep.

So I've been in America too long.

After he fell below the standards of not being weirdly creepy with women expected of government ministers in the post-Neanderthal age.

Boris Johnson, he's also blooped out another bloopster by basically shopping a British woman to Iran as a spy, whether or not she is a spy or not.

What is happening?

Anyway, it's all a bit ridiculous, given that what the government prides itself on, as we know, is being strong and stable.

Is this the first time that a British minister has been fired for working too much?

And is it because she's making her colleagues look bad?

And is there some of that going on?

Oh, that's an interesting angle that

I had not considered.

maybe maybe it is that

maybe uh i mean she's making uh really doing the job that two people could be doing um

so uh yeah i mean it could add to unemployment figures if we have to sack our ambassador to israel because he's no longer needed

in uh other more junior minister resignations the junior minister for benches and public seating clavicordia pertwin range has resigned because she thinks she might do something wrong at some point in the future uh in other other British news, we have a date, Anuvab.

We are going on a hot date with Destiny.

The official date for us firing ourselves into our new post-Brexit British orbit is the 29th of March 2019.

That is when it is going to officially happen in, what's that now?

That's, well, just under a year and a half time.

The 29th of March, coincidentally, or perhaps not coincidentally, is the anniversary of the Battle of Totem in 1461 during the Wars of the Roses, which sounds like a rather entertaining floristry-based reality TV show in which enthusiastic amateurs try to make the prettiest bouquet for a guest celebrity's birthday, wedding bar mitzvah, funeral apology, or court hearing.

But in fact, the Wars of the Roses was a long-running and rather bloodthirsty civil war.

And the Battle of Totem was the single most savage battle ever fought on British soil, resulting in a reported 28,000 dead out of around 60 to 70,000 combatants.

That is a high hit rate in a battle fought with 15th century weaponry.

So, and that is the day for us pulling the trigger on Brexit, the anniversary of a brutal struggle for power in a nation tearing itself apart.

What more appropriate day could there be?

Your Brexit vote, I think, was last year.

Actually, officially leaving the European Union in 2019.

And I don't know enough about your culture, so I'm just curious.

Is this the classic British tactic of letting enough time pass so you don't remember what you did or when you did it

uh it does yes it's it's it does sniff slightly of that um

i guess uh and i mean i think pretty much everyone in britain would like to forget it on both sides really as i said before the the solution is just to leave maybe just one day

Just leave the European Union for a day on the 29th of March, go back on the 30th.

Everyone gets what they want.

The remain gets to remain, and the leave get to complain.

In other major international economics news, the Paradise Papers were leaked this week, which I'd always assumed were my wife's secret diaries about her 21 years spent with me.

It turns out they're not that.

There were 13.4 million documents about tax aversion and related issues.

We have talked in greater depth than anticipated as solving the case on previous stories.

So we will save the Paradise Papers for a future bugle.

But don't worry if that's what you've tuned in for.

Talk about tax evasion.

You'll get it eventually.

Right, that brings us towards the end of this bugle.

Just a reminder, the live bugle next Thursday, the 16th of November at the Leicester Square Theatre.

Do come along to that.

It features Nish Kumar, Alice Fraser, and me talking about everything that's happened in the world between now and then.

A few emails have come in.

Well, quite a lot of emails on one particular subject.

Yes, I am now aware

of the giant wooden penis that has appeared in the Austrian Alps.

Thank you for those approximately 20,000 people who've emailed or tweeted me about that.

And this, Anivab, you might be interested in this.

This was in the build-up to the recent American local elections, which went very badly for Donald Trump.

There was a rather racist election poster in the small town of Edison entitled Make Edison Great Again.

And it says, Stop Jerry Shee and Falgooni Patel from taking over our school board.

And it had pictures of these two candidates for the local school board, one of whom was born in America and the other of whom has lived in America for decades.

Within a big red box with exclamation marks in big letters, the Chinese and Indians are taking over our town.

So far, just basic, classic, xenophobic fear-mongering.

Chinese school exclamation mark, Indian school exclamation mark, and here comes the kicker, cricket fields.

Yes, I read that, Andy.

And more than the entire populations of India and China, I think you were offended by the mention of the cricket fields.

Yes.

America, it's the sport you could have had had you been more sensible and open-minded when you had the chance.

Luckily, both of those candidates won because the voters of Edderton thought, oh, well, clearly cricket is the greatest thing humanity has ever invented.

Let's have more of that in our town.

Thanks to Matthew Barnes, who emailed me about that and various other people as well.

And this email came in from Alex Hodgson, who writes, I learnt in this week's Blue Planet 2, that's a BBC series all about

things that live in the sea.

I mean, do we really need them anymore?

In this day and age, everything's gone Wi-Fi.

That there's an underwater mountain race that runs the whole way around the globe.

Basically, the Earth has a seam like a cricket ball.

Given this revelation, right, Alex, why is space fot Professor Brian Cox still the go-to guy for planetary science?

Rather than the true king of seam and swing, Jimmy Anderson, the record-breaking England

swing bowler.

Or to put it this way, how do you think Anderson would fare given the blue and green cherry in interstellar conditions?

Dry, cold, unlikely to cloud over in the afternoon.

And how big a pair of trousers would Alistair Cook need to put a good shine on the Americas?

So that's a very nice

cricketing email.

Very nice to have a second reference to intergalactic cricket within just a couple of weeks

on the bugle.

Well, I think clearly the world does tend to swing in, I think.

If it starts swinging out, if it starts, I think when we get to being too old, a planet, the swing will reverse.

And when we start reverse swinging, that's going to be tricky.

We're going to fly away from the Sun and smash into Jupiter.

So we just want to try and keep that seam as just straight as possible.

If you want more cricket stuff, I will be starting the Unbelievable Ashes podcast

with ABC Radio in Australia, featuring Tom Wright, ex-bugle producer, and the very funny Australian comedian Felicity Wards, and Jared Kimber, cricket journalist extraordinaire.

That will begin in a couple of weeks, so do look out for that if you are a bugle fan and a cricket fan.

That is

a niche on the human Venn diagram that

I think should include at least six billion people, but doesn't.

Anyway, that's it.

Until next week, as I said, next week's Bugle will be live from the Leicester Square Theatre in London.

Tickets still available.

Do find them online.

In the meantime, Anuvab, thanks once again for your wits and wisdom on the bugle.

We will be speaking again soon.

And until next time, Buglers, goodbye.

Thank you, Andy.

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.