Bugle 4017 – Evolution special

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, Buglers, and welcome to issue 4017 of the Bugle audio newspaper for the most visual of all worlds for the week beginning Monday, the 20th of February, 2017.

I am Andy Zoltzmann.

I may be 42 years old, old, but I can bench 670.

I can run 10k in 17 minutes, all because my body is a fine-tuned machine.

We are in a shed, if I may quote someone else, we are in my shed in South London this week.

It's rectangular, in case you were wondering, and I'm joined by someone who is considerably more adept with words than when I first met her at the age of naught.

From our Radiotopia sister podcast, The Illusionist.

It's my actual sister down from the attic for one day only, Helen Zaltzman.

Hello, Andy.

Thanks for giving me outside privileges for one day only.

Yeah, no one is allowed in this shed.

This is my shed.

Yeah.

Get your own shed.

I can't.

I have nowhere to live.

I could put one in the attic.

Right.

At the end of the bed.

Yeah.

Next to the door.

You didn't specify what you were benching 670 of.

Oh, right.

Molecules.

Tons.

Is it tons?

What do you bench these days?

Yeah.

Dogs?

Do you bench a lot?

Plenty benching.

A door or a bench.

Maybe it's minutes.

A bench six, 17 minutes is spending 11 hours and 10 minutes on a bench for Mark.

Yeah, that seems like you.

Well done.

You've really improved your personal best.

Thank you very much.

This is the people for the week beginning Monday, the 20th of February, the 20th, which means, from a presidential point of view, one month down, 95 to go.

The end is in sight.

Or 47 to go.

Let's be realistic, Helen.

It's going to be 95 because I think,

judging by the way it's going, it is very unlikely that any opposition will be legally allowed to stand in the next general election.

Or indeed, anyone will be able to vote apart from

senior editors at Breitbart.

So, but you know, it's all written in the Constitution.

It's fine.

Some historic anniversaries, as always, 20th of February 1792, George Washington signed the Postal Service Act, establishing the U.S.

Post Office Department, latterly the U.S.

Postal Service, and on the 21st of February 1792, a US Post Office Department rider rode a donkey coast to coast in 26 hours, although there were then suspicions raised that the donkey and the rider were using illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

And of course, the U.S.

Postal Donkey Riding Team was disqualified from the 1793 tour of America.

And on this day, 140 years ago, Helen, 1877, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that that was the day that the world saw the world premiere of Pete Tchaikovsky's platinum-selling selling smash hit ballet Swan Lake.

Yeah, nothing to do with rocket science.

No, well exactly.

I mean you literally do not need to be.

I mean

I think rocket science and an interest in ballet are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they mutually dependent.

Explains a lot.

Yep.

When I went

I've not gotten into that sentence.

That is very unusual for you.

When you were a child you had an end to sentences that you began before falling asleep in the back of a car and completed after waking up about an hour and a half later.

Sometimes you just need to take a rest in the middle before you can come to the spectacular conclusion.

I've never known anyone else do that.

That was quite spectacular.

Fall asleep mid-sentence and then wake up.

And finish the sentence.

Well I get bored of myself.

I hope there was an hour and a half of internal monologue going on between them.

It's basically a Henry James sentence where it lasts for 4,000 words and there's no punctuation.

God, we're only at what, three minutes in?

We've already had Tchaikovsky and Henry James in this podcast.

Oh, brows, there are.

Cutting edge.

The world premiere of Swan Lake got some stinking reviews, to be fair, from the Moscow Literalist magazine.

One star, unrealistic, not enough swans.

I wanted a lake made of swans.

And today's Billiard Addict Monthly, one star, no games of billiards played in the entire performance.

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

This week, we look at all the the latest computer games releases including Frangs of Arvalia fantasy roleplay slash Thundergore Tea Time Cake Snack Swords and Saucers epic from the makers of Gliverard Slaughterhound of the Nephrain that game of course banned in France after it included a section where you had to metamorphose the eponymous Gliverard into a Bavarian sausage and using the special power surge button make him beat a baguette to death.

Thrangs of Arvalia very much in the same mode as that.

Also we review Hammer Shit vs.

the f ⁇ pranger.

That's pretty self-explanatory.

Finally, Helen, the two baddest badasses from the Grindwinder franchise, of which I know you're a huge fan, are paired in a classic deathmatch Grot Fire Torture Wrestle, Savage Out for Control of the High Magmatron.

It's been too long.

I mean, last year's Hammershit versus Bella the Butterfly was way too easy.

Flutter, Flutter, Ca Smash, no fun at all.

Sports games, as always.

I know you're big into your sports simulation games, Helen.

Better than the real thing.

How dare you say that?

In my shed.

I was very big into the Sega 1992 Olympics game were you yeah right what did you have to do in that you did olympian events did hurdling nothing i remember playing some forcing you to play some sports simulation games when we were children that's the benefits being five years older than you i didn't realize they were based on a real thing

uh new out this year ivor robson golf announcer 2017 exciting new game from the retired former european golf tour starter ivor robson who announced pro golfers to the waiting crowds on the first tee for over 40 years exciting game miss Helen.

Can you announce a golfer's country of origin and name in a Scottish accent whilst a giant albatross is trying to peck your eyes out?

Flocks of alien eagles are trying to rip your liver out, and zombie caddies are swinging at you with a pitching wedge and screaming fake yardages to the green.

All action.

The latest slew of Downton Abbey spin-off games are out this week as well.

Mrs.

Hughes's Pinafore Hell and Mild Flirtation with Lady Mary, those should be big sellers.

And Butler Mutiny 4, subtitled Make Your Own fing tea, schmuck.

And best of all, Michael.

Don't worry, this section of the minute is very nearly ended.

Best of all,

I think you've been playing this this week.

Maybe give us a full review.

Michael Gove's farmyard referendum.

Can you talk the turkeys into voting for Christmas?

Can you convince the cows that beef is best?

Can you persuade the pigs to back their own bacon?

Can you chivvy the chickens into nominating their own nuggets for nullification?

Can you just one more?

Can you shame the sheep into legislating against lambs?

Farmyard referendum tests your powers of political persuasion as you try to hoodwink the herds and flummox the flocks into voting against their own best interests.

Personally endorsed by Michael Gove, the former alleged Education and Justice Secretary, official saviour of all the Britannias, and part-time emissary of BLZ Bubb.

That, of course, is the latest offering from EA politics.

There is a lot of horseshit in that game.

Quite literally, yeah, appropriately enough.

That section, that section, regrettably in the pin.

Top story this week.

No, Donald, you are not getting first dibs this week.

You've had your turn.

It's someone else's go.

Ellen.

Top story.

The evolution of all life.

Which, ironically, is something that Donald Trump wants to stop as well.

Anyway, there's some great stories in terms of where life on Earth is going this week.

Yeah, if you're a retromaniac, then you'll be excited at the latest comeback of something that had fallen out of style, the woolly mammoth.

Oh, awesome.

Yeah, a Harvard team of scientists say that they reckon in a couple of years' time, they may have been able to create a hybrid of the Asian elephant, the woolly mammoth's closest living relative, and a woolly mammoth,

the mammophant.

The mammophant?

That was my wrestling name.

So, this is, but I mean, obviously, when it comes to evolution, the jury is still very much out on whether evolution has, on balance, been good or bad for this planet on the plus side uh it's made the planet much more famous than it used to be before there was life on the minus side it's been quite bad for the environment because species you know breathe out and then we develop cars so you know i don't know if it's been good or bad but it's a bit odd isn't it to

to bring back something rather than look after the stuff that's

already there.

You could say that, Andy, but I think the reason why they want to bring back the mammoth is so that they can make them extinct again with climate change.

Oh, right.

Double whammy.

Because the first time no one was there to see it.

Well, a few people were there, but those

early mankind just went on their way, didn't really.

Yeah, we want to get satisfaction out of extinctifying other species because we are locked in this evolutionary race.

Yeah, you don't want to waste that Instagrammable moment.

Particularly not an awesome species like the mammoth.

You see, I read this headline.

that we could have woolly mammoths roaming the countryside again within two years, great big, shaggy, tusk-wielding, proboscis-waggling hipster elephants, galumphiating all over the place.

Even by the time of the next Cricket World Cup, Helen, that shows how soon it is

within two years.

But these Harvard Boffins.

It's always young Boffins.

We're in the media.

We can call them Boffins.

Yeah, the bloody scientists with their research and experiments.

Well, they reckon they could have an embryo in two years' time.

I don't know how long it takes a woolly mammoth to reach maturity.

Right.

And be able to galumph all over the place.

Yeah.

But have you been to the La Brea Tarpits Pits in Los Angeles?

Oh, I have not.

La Bria Tar Pits ironically actually played for the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1960s.

It is an ancient pond of tar and they have some fairly well-preserved mammoths that wandered in and then got stuck and died because once you're in the tar, you're not getting out of the tar.

And then what they also have.

That sounds like you're one of the threat from your mafia days, Helen.

Once you're in the tar, you're not getting out of the tar.

But they also have about 5,000 bones from wolf dicks because

wolves would see the mammoths stuck in the tar, leaping there.

Leap in there.

Leap in there to.

Well, they were going to eat them, but also possibly them.

And then they also got stuck in the tar.

Oh, yeah.

So maybe this will make Wolf Dick Bones great again.

That is a tough subtext to make America great again.

Wolf Wolf Dick Bones, I'm a CNN newsreader who Trump has a bit of a beef with at the moment, of course.

I've seen a lot of conspiracy theories going around about what the government is up to in America, but none of them have mentioned this.

So this is an exclusive scoop.

Right, the Wolf Dick Bones or the Mammoths?

The Wolf Dick Bones.

Right.

I'm concerned about this.

To me, it seems a surefire stepping stone, these boffins in their laboratory messing around with mammoths, burm, whatever they're doing.

It is a surefire stepping stone to everyone having to swerve their cards all over the place on motorways because a mammoth has wandered onto it and the mammoth will be thinking oh well this didn't used to be here when my granny was around this place has really changed what do you mean honk you don't scare me we used to wrestle stegosauruses i think so um you know we are an identity i mean it's gonna be confusing isn't it if you're a mammoth to self-identify

was mixed mixed species mixed species but i mean

you say i'm a mammoth when what does that mean now they haven't been mammoths for 5 000 years So they're also going to have to reconfigure.

It's all identity politics now, isn't it?

Even if you're a woolly mammoth.

A woolly mammoth hybrid elephant embryo.

More pressingly, Andy, where are you going to live, given that you favour

ice age-style habitats and the world is quite warm?

Yeah.

Somewhere else?

Yes.

What about an air-conditioned mall in Dubai?

Yeah, I mean, that's, to be honest, I'm quite surprised they do not have already animatronic mammoths and dinosaurs in those malls in Dubai on the grounds that they've basically got everything else.

There, they've got an ice hockey rink there.

Yes, I think I've talked about this before on the beautiful ice hockey rink in the shopping mall in Dubai.

I'm going to adore that.

Exactly.

Dubai shows that anything can be done, no matter how pointless.

There can be miracles if you believe and no matter how many slaves have to die in the process.

So, um, you know, work for the pyramids.

Why change a winning formula?

So,

oh, anyway, um, the Professor George Church involved in this

project to bring back um the lethal flesh-eating mammoth from the dead.

He's the Dickie Attenborough of

this department of Buffins, right?

Um he said um our aim is, as you say, to create a hybrid mammoth uh elephant mammoth embryo.

Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits.

We're not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of this g gets less and less exciting, you know.

I know it's basically an elephant with a number of mammoth traits.

What you're going to do is dress up an elephant in a Viking outfit.

That is not science, Helen.

That's some kind of bizarre Rudyard Kipling-themed Safari Park stagdew gone too far.

That sounds all right.

Rodard Kipling-themed stack do gone too far.

That is an untapped economic market.

Or maybe it's been tapped as much as it's ever going to be tapped.

But basically, these are going to be elephants that are a bit hairier and have slightly smaller ears and more subcutaneous fat.

Yeah.

Well, I've often, there's so many times I've been looking at my elephant and thinking, oh,

it's I quite like you, but you could do it with more subcutaneous fat.

Yeah.

That's one of the elephants' great flaws as a species to me.

I'm not your body-shaving elephant.

Someone's got to tell them how it is, Helen.

I'm joining the outright and taking down the elephant.

They're just not beach body-ready.

They're not tar pit body-ready.

That's the point.

They will be once they've starved to death in the tarpit.

Then been eaten by a wolf.

By a Randy Wolfe.

There must have been a baseball player called Randy Wolfe.

Randy Wolf, born August 22nd, 1976, age 40,

major league baseball pitcher.

Batted left through left.

I knew that name rang a bell.

I thought you were bullshitting.

But it's real.

What if all the rest of it is real?

Played for the Phillies, the Dodgers, the San Diego Padres, Detroit Tigers.

The New York Forks, all the classics.

let's move on uh to the future of humans is it bleak well you say bleak but Elon Musk

very much the 21st century Jesus Christ

he has stated that we will have to become cyborgs if we are to survive and thrive in a future dominated by artificial intelligence I mean I'm worried about this.

I can barely get dressed unassisted.

Yeah.

And I'm going to have to put on a fully functioning robot suit every morning and wire myself up.

you're not gonna be able to compete in a world where things are expected to be useful zing that has been bubbling up for 36 years isn't it

uh i might uh i mean what a cyborg i'm not totally sure what a cyborg is we'll have a we'll have let's have a multiple choice quiz shall we okay what who or what is a cyborg is it a an ancient port city in denmark famous for being the hometown of Viking king Eric the Disoriented, who, although a fearsome warrior, never managed to get his fleet out of the harbour, and at one point rammed six successive ships directly into his next-door neighbour's house.

Is a cyborg B, a late 1970s animatronic robot tennis player, developed to be able to perfect the defensive baseline game and appeal to the ladies.

The SI bit, of course, stood for simulated intelligence.

So you had the side view on side view.

When you laugh in the middle of a lie, it seems more like a lie.

That is the one thing that's keeping me away from top-level politics.

Is a cyborg short for cyboretic organization, that's the leisure and entertainment arm of the Bilderberg Group.

Or is it a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts?

Or go tennis player.

Right, correct.

Well, in fact, it's both B and D.

Yeah, you know,

the Greek kybernet

from which cyborg comes, meant a helmsman or steersman.

So it should mean that you're good at steering things.

Right.

Cyborgs.

Well, Elon Musk is steering us towards

space hyperloops and now this.

I think

you technically are a cyborg already if you've got something like a pacemaker.

And I think, oh, right.

I think maybe our mother is a cyborg because she has two artificial hips.

Oh, awesome.

So

she's already highly evolved.

What does your mum do?

Doesn't matter, she's a cyborg.

It seems Elon Musk's attitude is: if you can't beat them, join them.

And make, you know, basically going to make blenders, or don't invent them, I guess.

Yeah, I'm not that worried yet.

I used to live in a flat with smart windows,

skylights that were meant to be so highly evolved, they could close when it rained.

And instead, they would close during bright sunshine, open and shut themselves at random, and occasionally got really distressed if there was a pigeon nearby.

They can have human traits, you see.

I'm very much the same with pigeons.

But once the skylights and other machines become more intelligent than humans, I think we kind of deserve to f off and let them have it.

We're fine with it.

Let them have it is a dangerous phrase to use.

It can be interpreted in a number of different ways.

As British legal history would testify,

Elon Musk, poor homme, poor fam, poor,

poor cyborg.

Is it true that he was born of the anal gland of a civet?

I believe of the Elon civet, yes.

Yeah.

Yes,

it's the rarest form of civet.

But you can get a knockoff at the body shop that's almost as good.

It's on his website.

He also said there will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot can't do better.

He said this at the World Government Summit, and that's, well, President of America for one.

I think we've crossed that boundary already, Elon.

Satire.

That is.

Well, you say satire.

I mean, you're safe.

You're not going to be taken over by the robots.

Well, podcasting is a very

human profession.

Yeah, you could probably program Siri to do my job.

Right, well, but I'm in fact I'm already developing my own automated satire robot.

I've got it here.

Let's give it a go.

The government.

Ooh, nice things for everyone.

Hooray!

There you go, it's nearly there, Helen.

Sophisticated.

Very, very nearly there.

That's pretty much on a level with some of the stuff you've been coming out with since Trump came into power.

Let's come down in the morning for breakfast, and you'll be going, Trump is a c.

Well, that's warming up for my evening gigs, Helen.

Really clever, Randy.

Do I have to be satirical at breakfast?

Yep.

24-7.

You need you now more than ever.

He also said, Musk, if humans want to continue to add value to the economy, which after all

is what we were put on earth to do as a species, that is our calling, to add value to the economy.

He said they must augment their capabilities through a merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence.

Basically, a non-horny version of Tinder.

That's what he's describing there.

And if you fail to to do this, we'll risk becoming house cats to artificial intelligence.

House cats have an amazing life.

Exactly.

I would take that.

Absolutely.

Who would take being a house cat?

That sounds a sweet deal.

As long as the artificial intelligence is give us a bowl of milk in the morning and let us lounge around on the sofa.

Yeah, cats are useless and they're also very arrogant about their own importance.

So I think most humans will fit in perfectly.

She's speaking truth to power.

I think probably most straight white men certainly are already right there.

What?

I'm sitting right here.

To prove quite how much we do, we cannot be trusted to evolute ourselves.

The police in Iceland have had trouble with arresting drivers who they thought were drunk, but it turned out were just driving erratically because they were looking at the northern lights.

Drunk on natural beauty.

Well, exactly.

This is, I mean, there's some, this could be quite exciting in some ways.

I mean, the health implications.

If you can just get, get replicates drunkenness

through the wonders of nature, I mean, stagdos are going to be completely different.

Oh, he got absolutely smashed.

You should have seen Mickey.

He was off his nuts on the beautiful Picos de Europa mountain range in northern Spain.

He looked awful at breakfast.

He'd gone back to bed to sleep it off.

And Barry's in a bad way.

He watched the sunset in the Masai Mara in Kenya and spent the next two hours of vomiting into a bin before passing out on a bench and waking up in a police cell.

It's going to be very different.

Very, very different indeed.

But if being distracted by natural beauty causes crashes, does that mean there has never been a car crash in the Russian city of Novozibirsk?

Notoriously, one of the ugliest cities known to humanity.

But then if you are a big fan of brutalism rather than magnetic

light twiddles, then maybe that's for you.

Takes all sorts.

The president of Iceland did something quite great this week on a schools visit.

He said he would pass a ban on pineapple as a pizza topping if he had the power to pass laws on his own.

I am strongly agreeing with that totalitarian anti-pineapple plan of his.

Well, Iceland has some quite, I mean, there's only about three names you're allowed to legally use for children in Iceland.

And

if they do that, they're going to take pineapple off pizzas as a nation.

Yeah, it's not a naturally pineapple-growing region, to be honest.

So maybe this is not that huge a problem.

How can you say that about the Icelandic?

If they want to grow pineapples, let them grow pineapples.

Yeah, but they can't.

All right.

Can't or won't.

Also can't.

Okay.

This is technology and nature clashing here.

Yeah.

When it wasn't a problem before cars when the Icelandics are all waddling to work on penguins,

it wasn't an issue.

What, Helen,

if this is what caused cars...

What distracted you when you smashed mum's car into a bollard in Tunbridge Wells?

I was distracted by the fact that the clutch on her car didn't work after you'd crashed it into a church wall several years earlier.

Well, Lib, I crashed it into a church wall for a good reason, that we are Jewish.

and you know it's you know the small bit I could do to balance the wrongs of history.

But I mean were you distracted by the Aurora Tunbridge Willsley Ensis?

What Queen Victoria used to go down there to watch, I think?

I saw Jesus in that bollard.

That's a old country music song, isn't it?

My husband and I got a speeding ticket in Iceland in 2014 because we were trying to see a lot of glaciers in a day.

So it is dangerous on the the roads in Iceland due to the

Lenny Bruce thing.

Or the injustice of being given a speeding ticket for looking at glaciers.

It's going to dominate your life.

It did precipitate my slide into addiction.

On a similar line, in the Netherlands, they've started putting lights on the pavement at road crossings, like red and green, lights at red and green.

Strips of LEDs.

For people who are too busy looking at their phones to check the actual traffic lights or look at the traffic.

What's more interesting, a phone or traffic to look at?

Oh.

WhatsApp or traffic?

Pokemon Go or traffic.

You can see why this happens.

And yeah, so the lights in the ground will change colour when the traffic lights change colour.

Maybe also this is for people who are naturally morose and are staring at the ground a lot.

Oh, I haven't thought of it from that point of view.

What's over the old light green to just like try and cheer people up?

No, it's just you're looking slumped down at the ground and

the lights.

Well, the problem is you've got pedestrians looking at the apps telling them where all the cars are, and then you've got drivers distracted because they're tracking the pedestrians on Google anti-prang.

It's going to be, you know, it's...

I'd say this is a one-in-the-eye for Darwin.

We are shitting in his mashed potatoes.

I mean, this is basically allowing the survival of the inattentive, which goes against pretty much everything you stood for.

Yeah, well, a spokesman of the Dutch Traffic Safety Association did say that this is rewarding bad behaviour.

So that person and Darwin very much on the same page.

Very much like the American electoral system.

It's good to have a distracting lights in transit section on the bugle this week.

When maybe Iceland could learn from the Netherlands and have like a special Batman style laser beam to aim at the sky and project the words, look at the road, you fucking numb skull.

Why don't both countries just put the light to eye level?

What?

And then it

get the northern lights to move.

Yeah.

Get the northern lights to move.

What can't we achieve nowadays if we put our minds to it, Andy?

Or can I interlink the lights so that they do or don't come on to protect these pedestrians, depending on what people are looking at on their phones?

So, if, for example, they're looking at something on Breitbart, it just ushers them into the oncoming traffic, that would work, wouldn't it?

It's a dangerous precedent that I think a lot of people would support.

Brexit, food naming news now, and Europe is in absolute terror at the implications of Brexit, Helen, after suggestions that there could be an influx of British champagne once we're

out of the European Union and able to call our food what we want to call it, regardless of whether or not that's what it is.

But do you think we would want to call it champagne a foreign word or something British like fizzy booze?

Right.

Yeah, no, well, this asks, I mean, we've got a great tradition in this country of naming food to seem like something it isn't.

For example, sweetbreads.

Oh, that sounds lovely.

Oh, what the f ⁇ is that on my plate?

Is that a pancreas?

I'm sick of this.

I'm going to the North American restaurant next door to have the Rocky Mountain oysters.

I love seafood.

Have you ever had a Rocky Mountain oyster?

I haven't.

Because that is

a fried testicle, essentially.

Yeah.

I've never seen them served, to be honest.

And I have been to the Rocky Mountains.

They haven't mentioned them.

Is it one of these things that only exists on the internet.

British wine, though, of course,

increasingly well regarded.

Yeah, well, because of climate change, we can make more of it because it's warm enough for the grapes not to die of frostbite.

Take that, you sceptics out there.

Not so long ago, British wine was,

well, it was beer, essentially, wasn't it?

It was tea.

But it does suggest that, I mean, I'm going to change my vote based on this.

This is very exciting, I think.

And we can read.

For British exports, if we can just label stuff to make it seem nicer than it is, we're going to earn a huge.

I mean, if we can just rebrand economy supermarket processed cheese slices as Parmigiano, Reggiano, Vintaggio, Maturato, Persentoani, and Magico Buccito, and rebrand British spam as Hamon Emberico, de Bellotte, Batanegro, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, then we are going to become the world's leading exporter of foods.

Yes, and we spread foie gras.

Why not?

In other Brexit news today, Helen, perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the Remain cause it's all over any remaining hope anyone had that we might stay in the EU, that we might somehow turn the referendums into best of three or best of five or best of seven or best of nine or whatever it takes.

And that final nail is that Tony Blair has said it is his mission to persuade Britain's to rise up and change their minds on Brexit.

The latest opinion poll says there is now a ninety-nine point eight per cent uh vote in favour of uh of Brexit.

That's the power of Blair these days.

Former Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith said the comments were arrogant and undemocratic, which is like Roger Federer telling you you've got a sweet backhand.

That is coming right from the top of the charts.

Blair also urged us to take a way out from the present rush over the cliff's edge, to which the Brexiteer's response is: Thelma and Louise is a happy ending.

Well, you don't know what happens to them, just because it looks like they might be on their way to the formidable death.

They just made a sequel where it was vultures pecking their corpses for two hours.

Bit arty.

Kind of French art house style.

Did it in one shot though?

In related news, this is a story that sounds upsetting at the start, Andy.

A Nottinghamshire man, Stephen Marriott, was one day trying to pour out some bram flakes for his nine-year-old son Oscar's breakfast and no bram flakes came out the box.

No brown flake exit.

No Brexit.

So he went to investigate the absence of Brexit and found that it was not down to some complex legislation that they couldn't possibly enact.

The box was blocked by one massive brown flake, 14 by 10 centimetres, closely followed by a 7 by 4 centimetre brown flake, but there's no glory being the second biggest brown flake in the box.

Did this massive brown brown flake have the face of Ken Clark imprinted on it or not?

Strongly implied.

More look like, I don't know, a skin condition Ken Clark might have.

And Stephen Marrot has not eaten the brown flake.

I think he is too busy worshiping it now.

Yes.

Well, that's understand.

I mean, it shows, it was just 14 by 10 centimetres.

Yeah.

That is huge for a brown flake.

Any breakfast cereal.

I mean, it shows what we can achieve, what we'll be able to achieve as an independent nation.

If we can produce 140 square centimeters of cereal flake while still in the EU, imagine how enormous our cereals are going to be when we're no longer tied down by Brussels, stipulating that the maximum size of a corn flake is 4.1327 square centimetres and that the wheat of mixes can't weigh more than the average Portuguese goat's left ventricle.

We're going to have bran flakes the size of surfboards, Helen.

You can surf your mammoth on a bran flake in few once we're out of Europe.

This is the new utopia we voted for.

After this

modern-day miracle of a God-given giant bran flake, surely a sign from the Almighty that he's about to send his

second biggest brown flake right out of the box.

And

he whacked it on eBay.

I was hoping to get £1,000 for it.

Might be slightly over its money there.

I mean, how much is a box of brown flakes?

Three quid?

I don't know.

That would take some of the charm out of the story.

Also, taking charm out of the story, he's called Steve Marriott, which is the name of my favourite singer of all time from Small Faces and subsequently Humble Pie.

Are you sure it's not the same Steve Marriott?

No, no, he sadly died in a house fire about 25 years ago.

When people look up Steve Marriott on the internet, they're now going to find a story about a man trying to profit from an unusually large, small thing.

Well, he did achieve more than

the music of a man whose lungs could have cracked the moon in half.

But it seems like a that seems like a lot of money.

Brown flake though, Andy.

A thousand pounds.

A big brown flake.

Music or a very, very big brown flake.

Do you think it's overpriced?

Yeah, well, if you calculate

the price of a brown flake per square centimetre, then I think it is butting boggles.

I think it goes up exponentially.

Evidently.

Well, it's like footballers, isn't it?

I mean, it's not

a million percent difference between Wayne Rooney and someone who plays for his local club side, but to get to the very top, you've got to pay them that much more, maybe for them with brown flakes.

Maybe.

The thing is, if you bought it for £1,000 on eBay, expecting to get the biggest brown flake and and then it snapped in the post.

Oh, God.

The value has just vanished.

Also, if Van Gogh's sunflowers are worth 30 million quid and they weren't even real, surely this has to be worth more than that.

An actual brown plate rather than

a picture of some non-existent sunflowers.

What about if you painted a sunflower on the brown plate?

Because there's the room.

Yeah, there is the room.

There are not many bland flakes that you could paint a...

a roughly life-sized sunflower on.

Imagine if this was a large piece of a cereal that actually tasted nice.

Well, exactly.

Five grand for Cheerio

the size of a rubber ring that a child could swim in.

For those of you who aren't familiar with brown flakes, they aren't the most exciting cereal.

Essentially, like

psoriasis in a box.

That was the V-side to Sting's message in a bottle.

Now it's time for the return of

The Trumpets,

in which we chronicle the thrummellings of the

presidency of Donald Trump.

The Trumpet station's been out of the show for a few weeks on the grounds that it has become the show, but

I'm determined to squeeze it back into a controllable-sized audio box.

You're a hero.

Thank you.

And I believe other comedic outlets are covering much of Trump's story, including

Sevis.

It's made very little impact.

I know John, John Oliver was back on

back on last week, Splitter, and

he just did an hour and a half about margarine, the difference between margarine and butter.

That's bullshit.

Yeah, so he had this bizarre press conference yesterday, the 77-minute.

I mean, it looked like there was, he just, someone had not screwed his...

his brain back in properly like it was he's out of way he's got out of west world i think it was a bit like the political speech equivalent equivalent of scat singing.

I've said I'm not comfortable with politics being riffed.

It just seems wrong.

Earlier in the week, he was on similarly riffy form when chatting with Benny Netanyahu,

his big buddy from Israel,

about, and he basically was saying two-state solution, one state solution.

That's 12 offenses also.

Why don't they go for one and a half states?

I have a problem with this term one state solution because

it's not a solution, is it?

I mean, that's that is a solution in the way that finding the corpse of an unidentified man in your living room and then solving that problem by rolling it under your sofa, that's is that level of solution.

Do they mean solution like when you pour salt into water and it becomes salty water and thus the salt is basically obliterated as a as a substance in its own right?

Yes.

I mean that as Palestinians are the salt.

Oh, thanks very much

for clarifying that.

Yeah, and also tears.

Right.

Yeah.

Yes.

Do you think he knows what,

even what country it's referring to?

Not sure, actually.

Yeah, I don't know if

he'd have heard of it.

I remember some years ago, you had a better solution for the problems of Israel.

Which was what?

Build a second floor.

Build, did I?

Yeah.

Because that had been my early stand-up.

I can't remember.

Yeah.

Second floor.

I think it's more and more workable.

It's been a bungalow for too long.

Look at all the trouble that's caused.

I remember John and I did a thing in radio series in the very earliest.

I think dragging the whole Middle East to Antarctica to cool it down.

That might help.

Won't help Antarctica to not melt.

Otherwise, great.

I said about three weeks ago I needed a week off, and I've had no weeks off from

Trump.

If only he could think of your well-being.

He's very inconsiderate about how stressful it is for comedians trying to write material that is at least very slightly different from material everyone else is writing.

Yeah, you're the ones that are really suffering.

There's a lot of campaigning for people affected by the travel bans and for women's health and stuff, but this is what people should be.

Where are the protests?

You can see the fear and the

fatigue in my eyes, Helen.

I can see the fatigue in your eyes, but that's because you watch sport in the night.

No one knew that.

Everyone knew that.

Everyone listened to this show for 10 years, didn't know.

Everyone knew that.

Your emails.

Here's one from Yubi Butt, who says, yes, that is my tragically real name.

It's a lovely name, Yubi Butt.

Don't be ashamed.

Is Yubi?

Do we know if it's short for anything?

Do we know?

I mean, it would be odd to shorten something to Yubi if your surname was butt.

Why?

Well.

Why would it be odd?

What could possibly odd when your surname's butt, like, no one really cares about the first part of your name?

I think Ubi Butt of all people would know this.

Yubi says,

Andy, I know you're not exactly the most, shall we say, orthodox Jewish person, but I'd like to come at it from a different angle.

But perhaps you could be tempted back into the faith by this, a festive bag of plagues.

This be a bit of Passover merch, I assume,

because Jews aren't naturally attracted by plagues just any old day of the year.

Yubi says, each one comes with a little rubber representative of the ten plagues of Egypt, including a fake fly to represent flies, an eye patch to simulate darkness, and boils, symbolized herein by a pink, glittery, bouncy ball.

It's time to put the pestilence back into Pesach.

I went to a Passover last year for the first time since 1987, and they had plague finger puppets and masks, so everyone got to dress as a different plague.

It was magnificent.

Where was that when we were kids?

I might have stayed in the faith.

Yes.

Stayed in?

I might have given it a shot.

I mean, I started getting a little bit sceptical about the faith at the age of eight days old for fairly obvious reasons.

But, yeah, I mean, this is quite spectacular, isn't it?

I guess it's good to, you know, introduce children to the concept of the wrath of God in an entertaining and accessible fashion.

Yeah, it just sweetens the pill, doesn't it?

And also, then they've got

three marbles and a bouncy ball, so that's useful.

Yeah.

This email came in.

We had some excellent emails in this week, but because Helen and I have banged on for so long, we're going to save most of them for next week.

Uh, do keep them coming into hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com.

This came in from Richard.

Uh hello, Andy, I enjoyed your Trump-themed two-clue cryptic crossword in the Bugle a few weeks back.

It seems that Donald Trump offers quite a few possible avenues for cruciverbal contumely.

Hello, me.

Um, he obviously knew you were coming on the show.

Fancy words.

My submission is this: no backtracking as dickhead is embraced by outright flinging shit around.

Six, five.

So,

yeah, that's that works, I think.

I assume no explanation is required.

Um,

with a smiley face, keep up the good work.

So, yeah, if you've got any cryptic crossword clues for Donald Trump, keep them flooding in.

Or, bright, I'm sure Breitbart you could get some real absolute gold out of.

Um, but they don't have any black squares in the Breitbar crossword,

Helen.

You're very naughty, You're part of the media, and that makes you naughty.

Keep those emails coming in to hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com.

Just time for a very quick sport section.

And

Helen, I've kept it short because I know you're not massively into sport because you are a failure as a human being.

Yep, but we are getting to.

If this is what it is to be a human being, I don't want a big one.

Cyborgs all the way.

Woolly mammoths all the way.

We are getting to the business end of the season in the tic-tac-toe major leagues in America.

The world's leading naughts and crosses competition, of course.

And we have the latest scores from this week's round of matches.

The Nantucket Nine Squares, nil, Tulsa Tic-Tacers, nil,

Miami Grid, nil, Nashville Nauticals, nil,

Sacramento Triple T's, nil, Montreal Exos, nil,

Houston three by threes, nil, Colorado Crisscrosses, nil.

And finally, Honolulu line-em-ups, nil.

Louisville Lunatics, nil.

And like them, we have all this.

Another valuable away point for the Hawaiians there.

The new one points for a draw system really benefiting this season.

Current standings after 72 rounds of the season.

All teams currently on 72 points.

Thanks very much for listening, Buglers.

It's been a pleasure talking to you.

Helen, I think you'll back on in March sometime, aren't you?

Great.

Yes.

It'll be nice to come out the attic again next month.

If you're allowed out and fed sometime in March.

Oh, I found half a walnut in my pocket.

Do listen to Helen's wonderful Illusionist podcast and

answer me this.

I haven't even heard my own podcast for about five years.

And oh, yeah, come and see my tour shows, which next week are in Nottingham, Wolverhampton, and Southampton.

All details at andydoltsom.co.uk website of the year, I believe,

in the international website awards.

I will see you all at all of those gigs, buglers.

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