Bugle 4024 – Fart jokes for the Taliban

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4024 of The Bugle, the world's leading resource of objectively undisprovable truthishness for the week ending Friday the 14th of April 2017.

Yes, another week in the bank without Armageddon, as we record.

We are recording on Wednesday this week, so that may have changed.

If you are listening to this whilst floating through the universe amidst the wreckage of a once great planet, then well, enjoy the show.

I'm Andy Zoltzmann, holder of the world record for most appearances ever on a podcast beginning with the but and ending with Yugle.

Records are made to be broken though, and setting out on the path to try to catch me up are two more newcomers to the Bugle roster.

Firstly, the first Bugle co-host who fulfills all of the following criteria.

One, not a man.

Two, not a blood relative of me.

Three, not on the run from the International War Crimes Tribunal.

And four, not a covert member of the Bolivian Secret Services.

Most previous co-hosts have maxed out at two from four.

Some, only one.

Previous record, three.

But hitting the full house from A, Australia, B, the Tea with Alice podcast, and see comedy festivals all across the known universe.

It's Alice Fraser.

Hello, Andy.

How are you?

I'm very well, thanks, Alice.

It's great to have you on the bugle.

Thanks.

I'm excited.

I'm excited to be the first lady.

When I heard I was on with Sammy Shah, I thought you might be Mike pensing me.

But

then I heard last week and I was like, ah, it's a new custom.

Right, yes.

And you were just said while we were chatting off air in a glamour of show this way, that you have in your venue here at the Melbourne Festival a terracotta warrior.

I do.

I'm in the Chinese Museum.

Yes.

Is that in your rider?

Like your requirements at all your shows?

Yeah, I want some like 15th century jade statuary and really bad acoustics.

That's

my requirements.

Also, on Bugle Debut, whose voice you may just have heard, let's play Spot the Lie again, as we did with last week's Bugle Debutants.

One lie from this list.

Comedian, radio presenter, author, nominee for the coveted Taliban's Least Favorite Comedian Award, and the world's highest-grossing Miley Cyrus impersonator.

It's Sammy Shah.

I do a wicked Miley Cyrus.

That's a clue that I'm going to give people right now.

My wrecking ball wrecks places.

Yes.

Sammy, you are originally from Pakistan.

That's right.

How long have you been in Australia?

In Australia, I moved here in 2012.

So, yeah, a little over five years.

Yes.

Survived it so far.

Right.

And the story of how you came to Australia

is, well, not something that any previous Bugle co-host has

experienced.

We don't know for sure.

I mean, we don't know where Nish started off in, but

yeah, I I was in Pakistan I was a comedian and doing my joki jokes and some of them rubbed members of the Taliban the wrong way and like a joke.

It's an actual interaction I had once.

I was on Twitter and the Taliban had just threatened the Pakistani television channels because they were criticizing them.

And I went on Twitter like an idiot and said, oh, the Taliban complaining about Pakistani TV is like my grandfather saying there's nothing good on TV anymore.

Dumb joke, whatever.

The spokesperson for the Taliban, his name is Ehhsanullah Ehsan.

He's a real guy on Twitter.

His Twitter profile used to be him on a horse,

which is the same as my Tinder profile, interestingly.

Him on a horse.

Him on a horse.

And

he tweets at me and goes, yes, but our old people have exothermic reactions.

which is a suicide bomber reference.

I tweeted back at him and said, you haven't been around my grandfather after he has beans for breakfast.

And then he tweets, Why don't you come over and do that joke in person?

And I realize I'm about to trade fart jokes with the Taliban,

which is a sentence no one should ever have to say in their life.

Yeah, wow, I didn't know death threats were so like middle school.

But at the same time, I like this.

What was scary is a lot of my friends were like, He's kind of funny.

I'm like, No, no, let's not humanize him.

Let's not.

Also joining us, once again,

ex and interim producer Tom.

I kind of feel a bit shame-faced that the best we could come up with was hotties from history and Sam is trading fart jokes with the Taliban.

Let's take a commitments to Saturn.

105 years ago, this coming Friday, the 14th, the Titanic inflicted minor damage on a rather cocky-looking iceberg with its trademark berg shunter move, which declined in popularity in shipping circles shortly afterwards this week apparently hundreds of icebergs are once again flooding the shipping lanes off Newfoundland the little shit

take a look at the global warming stats losers you are going down we're going to melt the shit out of you sip-shinking bandits it's taken a while but vengeance for the titanic is a dish best served not quite as cold as it used to be

also on 1865 the 14th of April is the day that celebrity American Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth rather scuppered his own chances of being cast in many more blockbuster smash hit stage productions by casting himself as himself in the man who assassinates Abraham Lincoln.

Got to feel a bit sorry for Booth's agent.

John, this really is not doing anything for your career.

I wonder if his agent took 15% of the jail sentence.

On the 12th of April, as we're recording today, Wednesday the 12th of April 1992, Euro Disney opened.

That was, of course, one of the lesser-known clauses of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, allowing Americans to send people to Europe in giant mouse outfits whenever they wanted.

Woodrow Wilson insisted on it.

One of the non-negotiables in his 14 points.

He thought it might help Americans steal European cheese secrets and improve the quality of American cheese.

We are recording early this week on a Wednesday, possibly, I think, the first ever Wednesday bugle record in history.

Old Wodin, of course, the ancient Germanico-Norse godhunk who invented the third day of the week, pivotal third day back in the year Saxon or Viking AD or whatever, filled what had been a very awkward 24-hour hiatus between Tuesday night and Thursday morning.

And Wednesday is on average, is a fact, the naughtiest day of the week, being as it is the furthest from the likelihood of divine Sabbath-based retribution.

Is that why it's got humped in?

I like how you said that was a fact.

Yeah, well, you I mean, is it?

How can anyone no one can disprove it these days?

The only truthful thing is Andy's said is his name.

Ever.

Don't give away my secrets um as always a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin uh this week because tom you are heading off camping tomorrow don't taunt me i've done a special uh section in the bin camping section including we talk to 10 of the world's leading architects about why human beings invented the solid roof

flushing toilets in a heated building versus hole in the ground filled with straw during a rainstorm you decide which provides the better cryptic crossword solving possibilities we ask is it time to accept that the Industrial Revolution happened and stop spending weekends in a field basically trying to de-evolute back into Neanderthals?

And also, we look at how to have quality family time whilst hammering surprisingly bendable metal pegs into the cruel, cruel, unyielding earth, swearing at the vagaries of physics and being assaulted by an absolute visigothic maraudment of wasps.

That section, have a lovely weekend, Tom.

I'll get back to you next week on how it goes, but I agree with all of that.

Top story this week: coral bleaching is catching on, it seems.

It turns out that basically two-thirds of the unbleached portion of the Great Barrier Reef can now consider itself bleached.

That's basically been a change in its status.

Look, scientists are saying this is a disaster and it's deplorable and it means the death of the Great Barrier Reef, but we have to consider another aspect of this.

I'm from Pakistan and in India and Pakistan, skin bleaching is a very popular thing.

We've got products called called Fair and Lovely for women and fair and handsome for men.

And they exist because

the British colonized that part of the world ages ago and enforced a very different beauty standard.

My grandmother used to love me more than my sister because I was slightly fairer,

like seven percent fairer than my sister.

It sounds like you have that measured.

Oh, it's very carefully measured.

Your job requirements involve that.

And the thing to remember is that the Great Barrier Reef is off the coast of Queensland.

It's close enough to the Gold Gold Coast that it's subject to the same kind of intense body pressures, you know, bleaching of teeth, anuses, a whole lot.

There's nothing that coastal housewives won't bleach.

You've gone with the anal bleaching very early on.

It's kind of like all in garbage.

But yeah, I think that's just all it comes down to.

It comes down to the coral part of the Great Barrier Reef, succumbing to Western standards of idealized beauty.

So you're essentially saying that the scientists are shade-shaming the corals.

Absolutely.

We should, you know, in fact, CO2 rights activist Gerton Flech,

who is the biodediversification spoke skeptic of the anti-environment pressure group Splutter World, he said, let the corals go for that trendy, faded look if they want.

Who the f are we to tell the corals that they have to look the way society expects them to look?

If us humans are allowed to bleach our hair, skin, clothes, toilets, or anuses, let's throw it into the list, then we can't tell the reef it's not allowed to do the same.

So there we go.

To be frank, I'm glad the Great Barrier Reef is dying because I think there's too many awe-inspiring natural wonders in the world.

I mean, I don't have time to be struck with the incredible beauty of our biological environment.

I can't even keep up with natural energy.

So it's going to make Australia a more efficient economic nation if people are spending less time face down in the sea, snorkeling, going, wow, look at that.

Yeah, exactly.

So, this is a great boost for the Australian economy.

You lose a bit from tourism, but everyone's going to work along with it.

Yeah, where's the entertainment value in coral?

Right.

There's no kind of heart-pounding serial narrative there.

Yeah.

It's old school.

Coral, please.

Bring something more.

Bring a plot element at least.

Coral.

There is one plot element.

We keep blaming the humans.

And it turns out it's not our fault entirely.

Starfish deserve a certain portion of the blame.

They call the crown of thorns starfish, and they've ravaged the Great Barrier Reef by smothering and eating coral tissue.

And now scientists have found, and this is a real thing, that you can use the pheromones responsible for drawing starfish together to kind of push the starfish away from the Great Barrier Reef.

Right.

because that would work as a repulsive aspect or and pull them away to other areas.

Oh, I see.

So horny starfish

can save the planet.

Which I feel like this is a modern take on the ancient Greek play Lysistrata,

where basically it's about denying sex to starfish to prove that the starfish V coral war needs to end.

I mean, they're luring starfish into massive orgies for science.

I don't believe it's for science.

I'll believe that.

That's just a Burby scientist who's watching starfish.

I cannot erase the afternoon when my brother's teenage friends decided to introduce me to Japanese tentacle hentai.

I know how weird people get about sea life.

Yeah,

I can't believe that it's for science.

I mean, from an outsider's perspective, I've got to admire Australia on this

bareface balls.

Basically, Australia famously stands on the shore of what is basically the biggest island island in the world, a land with the lowest density of population per square kilometre of arable land of any nation in the world, let's stretch it, any nation in the known universe, and that is according to no lesser source than Wikipedia, so it's a fact.

And they say, despite all this land, to people desperately clinging to the precipice of existence and a boat, that there is no room.

And at the same time, it can mark the release of the latest report on the environmental devastation wrought upon one of the world's greatest jewels of nature by flogging what can only be described as an inflatable grandmother load of coal to India and claiming that is going to be good for the environment.

Well done Australia.

I admire that level of bareface balls.

We don't do things by half measures here.

One of the important things that you learn when you become an Australian.

I'm a new Australian.

I've had to learn the culture and tradition here and one of the big parts of the culture and tradition is you bullshit just unblinkingly.

Just without like you just basically like no man has existed in Australia before the British came here.

And then you hold eye contact until the other person leaves.

That's how it works.

It's beautiful.

They've got a plan to pump cold water on to slow down the bleaching, which is basically like standing in a house fire, pouring a cup of water onto your wallet.

Make sure you're preserving some of the values, but the whole house is on fire.

What the fuck are you doing?

There has been a backlash against the Great Barrier Reef.

Some are claiming that the reef is a hoax.

Donald Trump has just tweeted that he's read on InfoWars that that the Great Barrier Reef is made of Lego bricks.

There are kind of a range of reactions as to how big an issue this is, ranging from, holy shit, this is the harbinger of a global mass extinction that's going to make the dinosaurs look like they're alive and well, via this is an irreversible destruction of one of the greatest and most beautiful mega treasures of nature, to oh, my snorkeling holiday is going to be slightly compromised.

The thing to remember is people don't kill coral, people kill coral

and starfish, horny starfish.

But yeah, we just need an election campaign.

We need to make the barrier reef great again to trend on Twitter, and we'll be fine.

Alice, I was going to ask, is there any hope for the reef?

Can we, I mean, because some scientists have said that, you know, it's now too late to fix it.

Well, I think what we need to do is put a positive spin on this situation, because I think a lot of people are too worried about the, you know, other nationalities coming in and mixing up our beautiful white Australia.

At least we're somewhere where we're increasing the white population of Australia.

One way to solve it would be the invention of a a time machine, but we're still some way from being able to turn back time despite the best efforts of the British and American electorates.

Even if we did manage to get back in time, we'd still run into the same problems that have held back environmental efforts over the past few decades, which is essentially people saying, oh, yeah, yeah,

whatever.

I think the important thing is that we are taking back Australia one delicate microclimate at a time.

Right.

Some people are claiming that it's just a natural thing that coral lives, coral dies.

And I think it is natural if you consider human predation natural.

Yes.

But that's like saying when you murder someone that it's a natural thing because they live and they die.

Yeah, it's just accelerating the process and saving everyone time.

Yeah.

Eventually everything dies.

You're just helping entropy along.

That's all.

Well, thanks for lightening the mood, Sam.

Eventually we're all going to die.

Happy listening, pupils.

That's my next fringe show.

Some time travel news is breaking.

The obviously fictitious sci-fi entrepreneur Elon Musk recently, in the search for time travel, apparently accidentally turned his new prototype frictionless Hope-powered car into a donkey.

Whilst his lesser-known rival Pilau Snork, CEO of Inovax, who we've reported on on Bugle previously, Innovax, of course, the high-tech startup that's

set to launch life-changing products such as the Wi-Fi, the first 4G-enabled campfire, you might know that on your weekend, a literal analogistical hotspot which gives you internet above 250 degrees Celsius, and and the hologran the first holographic elderly relative with mass market functionality snorke claims that a breakthrough in time travel technology is imminent possibly even as soon as 150 years ago oh exciting

The trumpet section now and there is at large currently, and I'm sure you would agree the general sense that a tinderbox world in an age of cantanker field politics needs a Trump administration in the same way that a clogged artery needs a series of wins in a win-a-decade supply of deep-fried whale blubber sausages competitions.

And that's been exacerbated just today, well this week, by Sean Spicer, the President's chosen conduit of verbal pandemonium, policy befuddlements, malinformative flobules of propagandic clod and assorted world shivering pseudo-presidential horseshit.

And he managed to break rules one to one hundred of the beginner's guide to when not to make comparisons to Hitler.

Rule one is, of course, ever.

Don't ever make comparisons to Hitler.

Rule two is, seriously, ever.

It is, at best, flamboyantly inadvisable and at worst, blatantly unnecessary.

I don't need to go, I can't go through the full hundred, but others in the list are Rule 12,

do not make comparisons to Hitler whenever there's a microphone near your face.

Rule 27, whenever you're talking out loud, Rule 32, if the year is any time after, say, 1933.

Rule 46, when thinking about something Hitler, quotes, didn't do that someone not very nice is now doing.

Because A, if Hitler didn't do it, that's probably because he was too busy doing stuff that was equally or more horrific.

B, because if you suggested it to him and he hadn't done it yet, he would probably have said, yeah, that sounds right in my tone, I'm going to give it a spin.

And because C, he probably did fing do it.

Rules 52 to 100, C, Rule 1.

Ever.

Don't do it ever.

And supplementary rule number 101, when your own initials are, well, what Sean Spicer's own initials are.

Extraordinary.

Yeah, horrific events in Syria.

He said even Hitler did not use chemical weapons.

It was kind of Hitler's fang.

You know, it's kind of what he's kind of bit like saying Elvis Prezi wasn't really that much into music.

Yeah, if you ask people what are the two things you know Hitler for, one of them is obviously hotel room paintings, and the other one is using chemical weapons.

What is he going to do?

Like back off it by saying, well, at least, you know, Hitler had the good grace to put him in a box first?

Like, what is he doing with his mouth?

It's not allowed.

Oh, well.

At least, I mean, he's not in an important job, like, for example, a mouthpiece for the leader of the free world.

Well, thank you, Mr.

Spicer, for saving me four years of coffee expenditure, because I will not be able to sleep whilst you or your boss are in your current jobs.

At the time,

he did try to defend the statement by saying it had been written in part by a Jewish staff member whose family members had survived the Holocaust.

And as somebody who is half Jewish, all of me is offended by that.

Yes.

I mean, you would have hoped that even as the verbal sulfur were still warm on his tongue, Spicer was thinking, oh, whoops,

I've just clunked rule one, at least.

He didn't let go of that either.

There was a follow-up statement.

You know, obviously, as we know in the world of PR, when you make a gaffe, you correct it.

That man must have an amazing gag reflex.

He put his foot that far into his throat.

Well, he took that foot from his throat and then pushed it further down into his solar plexus.

He's got a career in pornography after this.

What kind of pornography do you watch?

Look tentacles, go places.

He said, and I quote here, I think when you come to

saringas, there was no...

He was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Ashad was.

He bought them into the Holocaust centers and understand that.

Of course, Holocaust centers are where you go to buy your affordable Holocausts.

It's Easter right now, so we have a 24-1 special going on for Holocaust.

He wasn't using his own people.

Oh my god.

He's a Holocaust.

That's a whole new form of Holocaust denialism where they're not denying that it happened.

Now they're denying the wording of how to describe it.

Not concentration camps, Holocaust centers.

And he called, of course,

as is a Sean Spicer tradition, he called Asad Ash'ad.

The only name he's gotten right to date is Hitler.

Right, actually.

Well,

it's actually just early publicity for his new spin-off fast food restaurant, Arbeit Macht Freis.

Top marks.

There you go.

I thought you've come in with anal bleaching and a Nazi pun.

Strong take away.

I just made that on just then out of my own head a vocalist of myself.

If I were you, I would drop that mic right now.

For those who don't know him, Spicer is essentially a carrot chunk chundered into public consciousness by the violent reverse peristalsis that gripped America's democracy last year.

A lot of people don't know much about what Spicer was doing before he sprang into

global awareness in the Trump administration.

So to fill in those backstory gaps, here is the official life story of Sean Spicer up until the election of Trump.

8th of November 2016, vomited directly from the guts of Satan.

There you go.

That's

I haven't fact-checked it, but in that regard, he started it and it feels right.

So in New Australia breaking racism news, our famous comeback politician Pauline Hanson, like the boy band Hansen, but worse, genuinely worse, has.

When you say comeback politician, where exactly did she come back from?

From politics, and then she went to jail, and then she came out and is now back in politics.

Sort of replaying her old hits, just changing out the word Asians for the word Muslims for the most part.

Do they not mean the same?

No.

Well, it depends on what part of Asia you're from.

The thing about Pauline Hanson is, you have to know is that firstly, she's basically Australia's version of Trump and or Nigel Farage, but less successful, yet somehow more racist.

And her phrasing was,

back in the day, Australia is being swamped by Asians.

Yes, so that was

her early hit when she exploded into the public consciousness like a ball of jizz into your eye.

And just when you were finally blinking it out, she came in the other eye with

we are now to be swamped by Muslims.

Yeah, so it was swamped by Asians, now swamped by Muslims.

On the bright side, it shows that she does believe in recycling, even if she doesn't believe in climate change.

But she's taken the next step in an ongoing quest to be the cartoon version of a bigot dreamed up by someone writing a children's book about the little racist who could.

She's been recommending that people buy non-halal Easter eggs.

Which, you know, I think is a good start.

I think we should all avoid all foods that are unintentionally or intentionally halal, like bread, apples, hummus, and water.

But did you know, Easter eggs are actually a fraught topic in the division between Christianity and Islam, with Islam diverging violently from Christianity on the topic of whether Jesus could be divine and do a poo at the same time.

So Easter eggs represent the role of Jesus as a man doing poo, but divine in that the poo was chocolate.

Oh, right.

That isn't the Easter egg that I, I mean, I had heard that there was a big argument within Christianity over whether or not the Easter egg represents the actual testicles of Christ or merely a pair of symbolic messiah balls.

But, you know, there's always different ways of reading the scriptures.

I mean, we can get into like Bible class later if you want to have a theological argument.

One of the biggest controversies I've I've heard is that Jews and Muslims don't like Easter largely because the Easter bunny isn't circumcised, is our problem with it.

But all blasphemy aside, it is important to preserve this country's Christian traditions of stealing other people's traditions and then refusing to let other people have them back.

You're half Jewish?

I'm a halfy.

So my family history is my dad's side was Jewish, my mom's side was Catholic.

They met in the late 70s, so I was born and brought up Buddhist.

Well, that's African.

Oppressed, repressed, and depressed.

I have all of the things, I have all of the neuroses of the Jews and the guilt of the Catholics, but I am at one with it.

As

Bugles will know, I'm an extremely devout second generation lapse Jew and at Easter.

I don't like to eat the Easter egg.

I like to eat a chocolate guilty verdict.

What's cool is Pauline Hansen has gone on to then endorse us, like she so she said, do not eat Cadbury chocolate because cadbury is halal uh but lint however is non-halal right on easter and so eat lint which now makes lint sound like it's anti-muslim um which i don't know if you guys know this but the the in one of the big things that happened in australia in 2014 was an isis inspired madman took over the lint cafe in sydney and i was wondering whether maybe Lint thought that the attack was because he hated lint as opposed to you know other things about Australia and therefore now they're anti-halal so that couldn't be how do you make chocolate non-halal do you just rub a pig on it

I don't know a better way do you

oh my dad's gonna listen to this

X-Men in Indonesia news now that is a headline we've not had on this show that's right see here's the thing

The bugle is very sports heavy, but as a geek, I've always felt it was missing the comic book news update.

Right, okay.

And so I bring you that now.

Okay, thanks.

All right.

So if you thought X-Men Apocalypse was bad, this is generating more controversy than the Cyclops and Wolverine War.

Shout out to my comic fans.

An Indonesian comic book artist, Ardian Seaf, who's the artist for the new comic book X-Men Gold, has been criticized for having hidden some political references in the background of several panels of the comic, most of which are against Jews and Christians.

And he's even got one of the panels where a Jewish character, Kitty Pride, is standing with the word Jew next to her head.

There's a quotation from the Quran, which has been

the symbol for that quotation is on someone's t-shirt.

And that's the portion where they criticize Jews and Christians.

And he refused to apologize and said that, you know, he was inspired by these protests happening in Indonesia right now.

And here's what we have to understand: as comic book fans: that I read comic books to get to escape from the world of politics and all those things.

And in Indonesia, there's been a lot of controversy.

There's been a massive corruption scandal creating a veritable fog of war, a true missed

sinister implications.

Mr.

Sinister and X-Men villain war.

Yellow card.

Yellow card.

It turns out that two civil war servants tried pulling the wool over anyone's eyes.

You're coming.

You're in my house.

You're wearing my clothes.

I just have

one or two more and then

I have to.

All right.

By embezzling money from the identity card system, they stole over $170 million

in their rogue scheme.

Rogue, obviously, that was an easy one.

I apologize.

I didn't even try there.

I would have gone Rogue Gambit, but

I'm funnier than you are.

That is fair.

That is absolutely fair.

It was described by newspapers and even in one mag as Nito.

Mag Nito.

I'll stop now.

Right.

But we start a crossword, and then you're literally angry.

My comic book reference is pretty much maxed out at Roy of the Rovers,

the 1980s British football-based comic strip.

That's because I had a sport in it.

Yeah, exactly.

But if you do read it backwards, it contains coded messages calling for a far-right armed revolution.

whilst the hit girls comic character Bunty, the eponymous heroine of the magazine Bunty, called for the overthrow of the patriarchy and the phased extermination of all men if you read it upside down in a strong Mexican accent.

I mean other secret f off messages in art include the secret warnings about the Illuminati riddled through Playboy, some

pretty dire warnings about the Japanese in the shadows created by Warhol's soup cans, and a rude message to Michelangelo's ex-wife just behind where God's finger touches man's in the Sistine chapel.

Not to mention the gay subtext of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

In this instance, I mean Frankenstein the Doctor, not Frankenstein's monster.

Though I think you'll find the real monster is actually the doctor.

Does he fade in the monster?

No, the real monster is the person who gets annoyed about that kind of pedantic semantics.

It's got very high falute, hasn't it?

We can go back to octoporn if you like.

In other fictional conflict news, there's a a computer game that has become a bit of a hit in Bangladesh, which is a computer game based on Bangladesh's extremely horrific 1971 war against Pakistan.

Well, the war of independence, you should point out.

So, yeah, the independence war, which it still basically shapes Bangladeshi politics

today.

In some ways, you look at this and think, well, this seems too recent to be making computer games out of.

I'm sure there are, well, there's Vietnam and Iraq war games as well.

But let's look on the positive side.

I think computer games can help people stop holding these centuries-long grudges.

Because I look at Grand Theft Auto, for example,

which was launched in 1997, the first Grand Theft Auto.

A game in which fundamentally you have to drive cars as recklessly as possible and commit violent crime.

And in the 20 years since Grand Theft Auto has existed, road deaths in Britain have halved and violent crime has come down.

So basically, these computer games are giving people people an outlet for their fury or in this case historical resentments that then no longer spills out.

I mean, if only the BBC had invented a computer game in the 1970s that look, it doesn't matter.

And also, look at it this way: Space Invaders, huge in the 1980s, Space Invaders games, and not one single alien invasion of Earth since.

Clearly,

they are fearful of a generation of warriors honed to perfection.

But I think you're right.

The concern is the gap between the war and the video game of the war is shrunk too much because now we have Iraq war games and everything.

And I'm just wondering whether the current wars are actually being created by big video games.

I mean,

how do we know Syria isn't happening?

Because Mrs.

Pac-Man wants a comeback.

How do you know that your Xbox isn't linked up to an actual drone?

Well, now that just got real.

It just got real.

I feel like we're one step away from that glorious future I saw in a bad teen post-apocalypse episode of 90s adventure serial Sliders.

That where everyone does all their fighting online and it leads to the extinction of the human race because people are too busy playing video games to bang.

Right.

Oh no wait, that's real life.

That's

one other war-related computer game just out this week.

You trekked.

Big hit this, selling several million copies in all countries.

The year is 1713.

Britain, Spain, France, Portugal, the Dutch Republic and Prussia have been at war for more than a decade.

Can you negotiate a treaty that will secure peace in Europe for all time?

What a game this is.

Unbelievable.

I mean, this is my beef with war games.

It's all about the fighting and never about the aftermath.

And Utrecht is starting to rectify that balance.

Next year, Versailles is coming out.

That is going to be awesome.

Sports news now.

Two extremely old cricketers from Pakistan are retiring, including Pakistan captain Mizbar-ul-Haq, who has led Pakistan through one of the most testing periods of its cricketing history following a match-fixing scandal, and a period where they've not been able to play at home.

To be fair, that's most of Pakistan's captains have led them through the most testing periods of Pakistani cricketing history.

But my particular disappointment with this is that Ms.

Bar-ul-Haq is basically the only top-level sportsman still active who is not a golfer who is older than me.

So, your dreams are becoming a top-level cricketer.

I mean, you're looking at me, the Bondi Waverly under-12's most improved player.

Right.

In what, in cricket?

Yeah, in cricket.

Right.

Why would I?

Well, I mean,

it could be

what could have been any, could have been, I don't know.

Pick up artistry.

I don't consider that necessarily a sport, but you haven't read the game.

I've been out of the game for a while today.

Well, that's it.

Your straight, everything is even your immigration system.

You have a points-based immigration system.

Everything is making it like a sport.

So, I mean, and how has your cricket career gone since then, Alice since you were?

Oh, you know, so far, I sort of kept it up with regular practices, regular,

we just say every Christmas, I'll play a bit of backyard cricket badly.

Right.

With Santa Claus or with Sat.

Oh, we didn't, we didn't.

My Santa Claus was my Jewish granny.

Oh, right.

That was an old Dolly Palms.

Sammy, as a.

You're quite a cricket fan?

I'm a cricket fan.

A cricket fan.

Yes.

You're never enough of a cricket fan when you're in Pakistani.

There's always someone more cricketer fan than you.

And you're never enough of a cricket fan when you're on this podcast.

That's right.

But

Eunice Khan, one of Pakistan's best ever players.

The big tragedy here is that Eunice and Misbah together have always been this great kind of batting duo and we're going to lose that.

Now we're going to lose this great pairing.

Together they've been like a pairing as iconic as, for example, wickets with bales or curried eggs with lettuce or

joint pain and tiger bomb or

pants and legs.

So yeah, I think we're going to lose out on a great pairing now.

I reckon they have a great future ahead of them as a commentary team, the Statler and Waldolf of Pakistani cricket.

Your emails, and this comes in from Dylan, who writes, merch, question mark, since the Bugle Reformation,

which I'm having to put

the relaunch of the bugle up there with the Reformation that changed the face of Europe in the mid-second century.

But that was just Europe.

But does that mean you're now going to embrace logic?

I've spent most of my life avoiding that, Alice.

Do not even make me think about it.

We did have to nail a baseball cap with you and John and the logo on it to Wittenberg's church door.

Since the Bugle Reformation, right, Dylan, I am having trouble finding merchandise and I'm getting desperate.

Well, yeah, I mean, just learn to live with it, Dylan.

That's my suggestion.

I'm booked to see Andy in Auckland.

Oh, thank you for mentioning that, Dylan.

That gives me a chance to crowbar in my weekly plug.

All my shows have got another,

well, week and a half by the time I'm listening to this at the Melbourne Festival.

Do come along.

The two live bugle shows.

Two Sundays, the 16th and 23rd of April, then Sydney, 24th to the 27th, then Auckland for two nights, 28th and 29th, and two nights in Wellington on the 30th and 1st of May.

So consider those gigs all plugged.

Anyway, Tylen says, I'm putting to the Andy in Auckland.

And if I don't have merchandise, then he might have to sign my moobs.

And no one wants to do that.

Moobs being

a gentleman's.

No, it's a New Zealand bird.

It's a very rare bird.

Oh, it's a New Zealand, yes, yes.

Sammy's pulling a chain.

He means

boobs.

The man, the mad, the male

boobs.

So then boobs are the

what does the B stand for?

Blady.

Oh, of course.

Silly me.

If you were a ruthless commercial operator, this would be where you'd plug the Beagles' website where they presumably can get merch.

You can get merch, but it's all old merch with some other guy's face on it.

I forget his name.

No Christmas jumpers on.

That's alright, you replaced him with a rotating cast of, yeah.

It just needs

a rotating thing of Misha's face.

If you put all the guests who've been on the Bugle so far, put all their faces in one, like overlay them and then take an average, it's exactly like John Oliver's face.

That's all right.

I add the feminine edge.

No, I'm on the Bugle website right now.

There's no merch button there.

Oh, right.

Really?

Oh, we must have run out.

Anyway, it'll come at some point.

You know, I always get around to these very important commercial things within a decade.

We have to wrap this up.

Alex, Sammy, please

let the boys and girls know where they can see your shows or listen to your other works.

I am performing at the Melbourne Fringe Festival, Melbourne Comedy Festival as well.

I have, by the time this comes out, one week of shows left at the Malthouse Theatre.

It's called Punching Down, and it is an hour of comedic stuffs.

I have a show, it's called Empire, and it is in Melbourne until the end of the festival at the Chinese Museum at 9.30.

And then I will be in Sydney and then in Perth and then in Edinburgh at various appropriate times.

There you go.

Consider those plugs plugged.

Tom, enjoy your camping.

I won't, but thanks.

I will see you on Sunday for the live recording, which Alice will also be at.

Unless I drown camping.

Yumby, let's not rule it out.

I mean, that's one of the reasons people go, isn't it just for that thrill of the raised possibility of catastrophe?

Aim high.

Aim for the trifecta.

Drowning, bushfire, and a spider.

That's what you want.

Drowning and bushfire is an impressive

in Australia.

It's been done.

Thank you for all your thoughts.

Thank you for listening, buglers.

Until next time, goodbye.

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.