Bugle 4017 – Evolution special

I will be in Australia for the next few weeks, hoping that the cricket can provide the distraction for everyone that it has so successfully provided for me since I was six years old.

If you want to come to my shows, there is a Bugle Live in Melbourne on the 22nd of December, where I'll be joined by Sammy Shar and Lloyd Langford.

I'm doing the Zoltgeist, my stand-up show in Melbourne on the 23rd of December.

And we've just added a possibly optimistic extra show in Sydney on the 3rd of January. The 2nd of January show is sold out, but please, please, please come on the 3rd.

My UK tour extension begins begins at the end of january all details and ticket links at andyzaltzman.co.uk

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 Zaltzmann. I may be 42 years 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 Saltzman. 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.
You can 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. Ador a bench.

Maybe it's minutes. A bench six, 17 minutes.
It's spending 11 hours and 10 minutes on a bench and a fucking hour.

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 U.S.

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, 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 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 hadn't entered 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

finish the sentence. Well, I get bored of myself.

I hope there was an hour and a half of internal monologue going on between us. It was basically a Henry James sentence where it lasts for 4,000 words and there's no punctuation.

Oh, we're only at what three minutes in? We've already had Tchaikovsky and Henry James in this podcast. Oh, brows there.

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

This week, we look at all the latest computer games releases, including Thrangs of Arveia, fantasy roleplay/slash Thundergore Tea Time Cake Snack, Swords and Saucers epic from the makers of Gliverard, Slaughterhound of the Nifroin.

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 Arvellia, very much in the same mode as that. Also, we review Hammer Shit versus 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 the classic deathmatch Grot Fire, Torture Wrestle, Savage Alpha Control of the High Magmatron.

It's been too long. I mean, last year's Hammer Shit versus Bella the Butterfly was way too easy.
Flutter, Flutter, Ka 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? As she was In my shed. Very big into the Sega 1992 Olympics game.
Were you? Yeah. Right.
What did you have to do in that? You did Olympian events, hurdling.

I think I remember playing some, forcing you to play some sports simulation games when we were children. That's the benefits of being five years older than you.

I didn't realise they were based on a real thing.

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

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 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,

and I think you've been playing this this week. Maybe you can 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 Beelzebub.

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.
Helen. 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 mammoth.

The mammoth.

That was my wrestling name.

So listen, but

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, 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 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

bring back something rather than look after the stuff that's already there.

You could say that, Andy, but I think the reason 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. Not 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 like the mammoth. You see, I read this headline that we could have woolly mammoths roaming the countryside 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... Boffins.
It's always Boffins. We're in the media.
They have intelligence. They have the Boffins.
Yeah, these 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 and be able to galumph all over the place.
Yeah.

But have you been to the La Bria tar pits in Los Angeles? I have not. It's a

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. They're horny.

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 the tough subtext to make America great again.

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 these boffins in the laboratory messing around with mammoth sperm, 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, you know, people are an identifier.
I mean, it's going to be confusing, isn't it? The flora who 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?

What about an air-conditioned mall in Dubai?

Well, 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. Really? Yes, I think I've talked about this before on the build.
Another ice hockey rink in the shopping mall in Dubai. Mammoth's going to adore that.

Yeah, well, exactly. Dubai shows that anything can be done no matter how pointless.
There can be miracles if you believe no matter how many slaves have to die in the process.

So, um, yeah, work for the pyramids. Why change a winning formula? So

anyway, um, the Professor George Church involved in this

project to bring back the lethal flesh-eating mammoth from the dead. He's the Dickie Attenborough of

this department of Buffins, right?

He said,

our aim is, as you say, to create a hybrid 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 years. Now, this gets less and less exciting.

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 to 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,

I'll 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.

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 tarpet body ready. That's the point.

They will be once they've starved to death in the tarpaulin and been eaten by a wolf.

By a Randy Wolf.

There must have been a baseball player called Randy Wolfe.

Randy Wolfe, 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.

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.
That's going to be...

You're not going to 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?

Is that what a cyborg... I'm not totally sure what a cyborg is.

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 cyborg 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 organisation, that's the laser 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. Right.
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 maybe our mother is a cyborg because she has two artificial hips. Oh, awesome.
So she's not throwing this around. She's already highly evolved.
What does your mum do?

Doesn't matter, she's a cyborg.

It seems that 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 but yeah i'm not that worried yet i used to 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 hom, poor famm, 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 a

well, you say satire. I mean, you're you're safe.
You're not going to be taken over by the robots. Well, pod podcasting is a very human

human profession.

Yeah, you could probably program Siri to do my 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. Sophicated.
Very, very nearly there. That's pretty much on a level with some of the stuff you've been coming up with since Trump came into power.

Let's come down in the morning for breakfast, and you'll be going, Trump! He's a

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 your 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 do this, we'll risk becoming house cats to artificial intelligence. House cats have an amazing life.
Exactly. I would take that.
Absolutely. It 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 would 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 could be quite exciting in some ways.
I mean, the health implications.

If you can just get, replicate drunkenness by 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 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 vomiting into a bin before passing out on a bench and waking up in a 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 strongly agree. Yes.
I'm 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.
Oh, right.

Can't or won't. Also can't.
Okay. This is technology and nature clashing here.
Yeah. But 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, Leah, but I crashed it into a church wall for a good reason, that we are Jewish.

And, you know, it's

the small bit I could do

to balance the wrongs of history. But I mean, were you distracted by the Aurora Tunbridge Willsiensis? 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 roads in Iceland due to 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 hadn't thought of it from that point of view.

Whatsoever

light green to just like try and cheer people up. No, it's just you're looking looking slumped down at the ground and

the light.

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-prank.

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. All right, very much like the American electoral system.
It's good to have a distracting lights in transit section on the bugle this week.

Well, 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're fucking numb skull.

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

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?

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, I mean, 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...
That's the testicle, isn't it? A fried testicle, essentially.

Yeah. I've never seen them served, to be honest.
And I have 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 because it's very exciting, I think.

And we can re-for British exports, if we can just label stuff to make it seem nicer than it is, we're going to own a huge.

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

Yeah, sandwich 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 to rise up and change their minds on Brexit.

The latest opinion poll says there is now a 99.8%

vote in favour 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 Brexiteers response is Thelma and Louise is a happy ending.

There we go.

Well, you don't know what happens to them, just because it looks like they might be on their way to the inevitable death. There's a sequel where that alien spaceship swoops down and catches them.

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 7x4 centimetre brown flake, but there's no glory being the second biggest brown flake in the box.

Did this massive 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 Maritt has not eaten the brown flake. I think he is too busy worshiping it now.

Yes, well, that's understood. 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 Weetabixis can't weigh more than the average Portuguese goat's left ventricle.

We're going to have brown 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

his second biggest brown flake right out of the box

and he gets he he he whacked it on eBay

and was hoping to get a thousand pounds 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

rather 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 button bottom. It seems 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 it's the same with brown flakes.
Maybe.

The thing is, if you bought it for a thousand pounds on eBay, expecting to get the biggest brown flake and then it snapped in the post,

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 flake rather than

a picture of some non-existent sunflower. 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 brown flakes that you could paint 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 thrummelings of the presidency of Donald Trump. The Trumpet section has 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 his his...

I know

John Oliver was

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 brain back in properly.

Like, it was, he's out of west he's got out of west world i think it was a bit like the political speech equivalent of scat singing

i've said but i'm not comfortable with politics being riffed it just seems wrong um earlier in the week uh he was on similarly riffy form when chatting with uh benny netanyahu um his uh big buddy from israel uh about and he basically was saying two state solution one state solution put in a total opportunity

why don't they go for one and a half states i have a problem with this term one one-state solution because

it's not a solution, is it? I mean, 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

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 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.

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.

Did I? Yeah. Because that bit of 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 a radio series in the very early. I think

dragging the whole Middle East to Antarctica to cool it down. That might help.

Working up 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.

So he's very inconsiderate about how stressful it is for comedians trying to write material that is at least very slightly different from the 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.
You've only listened to the show for 10 years, didn't know. Everyone knew that.

your emails here's one from Ubie 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 be odd when your surname's butt, like, no one really cares about the first part of your name?

I think Yubi 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 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 skeptical about the faith at the age of eight days old for fairly obvious reasons.

But

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.

Do keep them coming in to hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com. This came in from Richard.
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.

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? 6, 5.

So,

yeah,

that works, I think. I assume no explanation is required.

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.

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

But they don't have any black squares in the Breitbart 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.

But we are getting to. If this is what it is to be a human being, I don't want to be 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 noughts 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-Tackers, nil, Miami Grid, nil, Nashville Nauticals, nil, Sacramento Triple T's, nil, Montreal Exos, nil, Houston three by threes nil Colorado crisscrossers 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 uh the uh 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 hello I think you're 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 Cole, yeah, come and see my tour shows, which next week are in Nottingham, Wolverhampton, and Southampton. All details at andydaltsom.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.