Bugle 4016 – Terrorists eat cauliflowers

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4016 of The Bugle, the unarguable news podcast that can, according to education lists, replace 97% of all school and university education whilst only having a 96% negative impact on your eventual life chances.

Pretty strong stats there.

I am Andy Zoltzman and I've taken refuge legally in London where I live.

And joining me for the fourth time, it is the star of India himself, the priceless jewel hewn from the living rock of India.

And what's more, like many priceless jewels from India, he's currently in London.

It is Anuva Pal.

Nice to be here, Andy.

Hello.

Nice to have you physically on the same continent.

Yeah, I feel like

a few few of us have come over over the years.

I feel like I'm fulfilling a tradition.

I'd say the majority, the 96% you refer to, didn't go back.

I'm only here for a week.

So this is the Bugle for the Week beginning Monday, the 13th of February, 2017.

On this day, in 1542, Henry VIII's fifth wife, Catherine Howard, was executed, beheaded for alleged adultery.

Her last words on the 13th of February 1542 were, Henry, you'd better give me some serious Valentine's Day bling to make up for this.

I may well be needing a new necklace by the looks of things.

And in 1931, the British Raj completed its transfer from Calcutta to New Delhi on the 13th of February.

Big money transfer.

That

was like the

Cristiano Ronaldo joining Real Madrid from Man United back in the day.

Big change, Andy.

Terrible decision.

So, Anubab, you've been in London.

It's not obviously your first trip here, but you've been in London a couple of days now.

How's the city treating you?

You know, Andy,

I'm always fascinated by, when I come to the Western world, by some of the stuff I see.

I was at Tesco's, which I think is

your big grocery store from the time of the Earl of Tesco.

Well, in fact, it's from the Latin word, tesco, the Latin verb tesco, tescare, technically, which means to means to buy mediocre food products and

unnecessarily cheap clothing.

It's a very specific Latin phrase.

And it hasn't involved much at that time.

But I was quite fascinated because there was a bakery section.

And there's a smell of fresh loaves of bread.

But they had little bits of the edges of the bread that they cut out and just leave for people to eat.

Right.

And I found that really wonderful.

You know, just the idea that, that, you know, it's, I found that philosophically very interesting.

That, well, we're not giving the whole thing, but here's a bit.

Right.

But there's hope.

You know, I found that to be such a wonderful British quality.

You know, there's hope, but there's also gloom because you're not getting the whole thing.

And I've, you know, in comparison, like, Like in India, if we ever did a thing like that, you'd have to have a special deal with the baker.

So there'd be the crumbs of available, but just not for everyone.

And there'd be a class system around that.

And then we'd talk secretly about who had access to the crumbs and stuff.

But here it's there, just for your public to enjoy.

Did you take some?

I did.

I just love the fairness of it.

I guess, I mean, we can't really complain about you as an Indian coming here and taking British food away.

We've got a bit of a track record for that, I believe.

Yeah, it's there was some.

I mean, in terms of, you know, the

kind of causing famines,

we've got a significant head start.

You're going to have to really up your game to balance out.

Correct, Churchill.

Churchill did have some ships that sailed by with a lot of food

when Indians were starving.

This is true.

Had he created some sort of a bread counter like Tesco's, that would have been enough.

Maybe that was the idea, but then I don't know, war broke out or something.

Yeah, and now 150 years later, in Earl's court

and home renovation TV shows.

Right.

I could watch that stuff all day because there's so much, there's so much pressure and tension you guys build around the drama of it.

I was watching one, there's some ballet couple, they live outside London, and it always starts with they have no money.

And one of them's dead.

He's going to come back to life and this couple are going to find money.

They'll do this house up.

And you're like, oh, great.

And they're going to rip out this wall.

And it's always big windows.

And there's no sun, but I guess there's always the hope.

It's like the breadcrumb.

Like in India, we do all that, but eventually, you know, you'd move in and you'd find there are three other families living in the house.

So that clear trajectory to some sort of success and residential bliss, we don't have that.

Right.

So there's so much red tape and stuff.

So that's really lovely to watch.

The sort of, there's a certain like murder action movie tension.

I mean,

I guess it could take off in India.

I'd like to see Mukesh Ambani

do a show like that where he's doing up his billion-dollar, billion-dollar buck of flats in Mumbai.

Yeah, the world's wealthiest home, right?

His is the India's.

The thing that looks like a giant stack of books.

Yeah.

It's called Antilla.

Right.

And it looks over people sleeping under tarpaulins in living metaphor for...

I had once seen a completely naked man under the world's wealthiest home selling you the Steve Jobs biography.

And I thought that it's the logical endpoint of global capitalism.

I feel like that summed up India very succinctly.

Billion-dollar home, fake forests inside it.

Man completely naked selling me this book.

In fact, the home has so many rooms that he actually had to, as you do in these circumstances, buy a hotel company to manage his home.

So he owns 15% of Oberoy Hotels, which is one of India's India's largest hotel companies just so that he can he can get people to rent his home right and I think any decent cozy home needs a room service button yes it does it doesn't necessarily need a room service hotel company but you know

section in the bin this week uh well it is valentine's day on tuesday romance uh very much in the air uh on tuesday uh replacing the current thing in the air around around the world, which is a stomach-churning sense of dread and fear for the future.

But for one day only, love will be in the air.

And Valentine's Day, of course, named after St.

Valentine, the patron saint of overpriced greetings, cards, unnecessarily pink merchandise, Chicago gangland slayings, and romantically camouflaged anonymous stalking.

And, of course, the origin of Valentine's Day, and is it a big thing in India?

Has it become...

It's become bigger because the protests around it have become bigger.

I mean, in the 80s, there were Valentine's Day would come and go.

People would hold hands, it was fine.

But then I think certain religious groups got involved and started harassing couples in nightclubs and so on.

That sounds unlike religious groups.

Yeah, yeah, they've never done that before.

And then suddenly, more people wanted to take part in Valentine's Day.

So it's become like the New York Times, you know, like after the Trump thing, the subscriptions have shot up.

So there are way more protests now in India, but way more people celebrating as well.

So it counterbalances.

So I think you have to thank the religious groups.

I guess St.

Valentine also had a religion.

So it all, I think, works well.

Well, I mean, he was the, you know, his religion was love.

Love.

Sorry, spelled L-R-L-U-R-V-E, I believe.

And the origin, interestingly, he was a professional monk.

on the

worshiping circuit back in the day.

And he fell in love with a local lass named Petula in Italy where he lived.

And he thought he'd try to woo her by coming to her in a vision, pretending to be the archangel Bartolomeo, the angel of love.

With a homemade set of wings, a rope and a pulley system he hovered outside her bedchamber in the middle of the night reciting corny little poems suggesting that Petula might be interested in a hunky young monk from the local monastery whilst spelling out the letters of the name Valentine with his arms and legs so she would subliminally know it was him.

The end result, Petula became a nun the next morning, convinced she'd been visited by God.

Or else this does conflict a little with previous explanations for the origin of Valentine's Day on the bugle.

But such is the age we live in, buglers.

I'm just a product of my bullshitian times.

Both versions are true, even if they are completely contradictory.

And we give also in the bin a quick guide to the ethical Valentine's Day gifts you can get this year, including Sluton Malvain.

The celebrity chef tells you how to make a romantic meal out of rotting windfall fruit from last autumn.

And also a full guide to roadkill jewelry and accessories, including badger brooches, a ferret necklace, a bunch of pheasants, and, of course, fox pelt lingerie.

That section in the bin.

Andy, the top story this week, like all top stories everywhere in any country of the world, including southern Suriname, is Donald Trump.

I have a question, Andy.

So a judge in Seattle, a Republican judge, blocked a nation, had a nationwide block on the travel ban.

And he said, you can't stop people just randomly from different countries coming in.

Fair enough.

And Trump called him a so-called judge.

Yeah.

And my question is:

does this now revolutionize judgments everywhere in the world from the Greek system of justice?

Like, for example, if a man in India has been tried for murder and is sentenced to death, could he just stand up and say, well, that's your judgment from a so-called judge in this so-called court, in your so-called justice system?

Right.

See, I see it a different way, actually.

I see this as an example of Trump being extremely respectful to both the American justice system and Judge Robart

himself.

He called him a so-called judge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is fair enough, because there is nothing about James Robart that intrinsically makes him a judge.

It's merely the fact that humans evolved language to communicate ideas.

and gradually form some concept of justice requiring people with expertise and authority to be given the jurisdiction jurisdiction to apply the concept of justice and call it justice and themselves be called judges and for James Robart to attain the elevated level that enables us to call him a judge.

So highlighting all the human evolution that has gone into him being appointed a judge and called a judge merely highlights what an amazing guy he must be.

I mean, this is Trump bowing the knee to the concept of justice.

I think you've heard about something great, Adam, because you could then extend the so-called to anything

till the person proves that he's that thing.

Like, you could go up to a person and say, so so-called human,

and the person then has to do human things.

It gets to the very heart of the philosophy of language, doesn't it?

What does it mean?

And also uniforms as well.

I think, I don't know whether it was you guys that invented the robe for the judge.

I think we realized quite early in our national existence quite how much you could get away with if you put on a smart uniform.

Yeah.

And

as would be testified by the history of India as well.

We were very smartly dressed when we turned up and it gives you an inbuilt authority.

When they were announcing in the 16th century, when they were announcing death sentences, that's when they'd put on the wig.

No, they put the black cap on top of the wig.

Oh, right.

Yeah, so you had the wig on and I put the black cap on, which is a bit of a spoiler alert if you're a good defendant.

Yeah, I was just thinking that.

Like, first of all, the moment he goes to the black cap, you know, you know, you're like, okay, game over.

Yeah.

And then if you're going to announce a death sentence, should you be more somber instead of looking totally ridiculous?

I mean, is the goal here a little bit of humor?

Because the British are known for their humor.

So is it because I'm now going to do a bit of cross-dressing?

Right.

Because the black cap kind of looks a bit like a picnic napkin.

So it just seems like, yeah, you're going to hang a man.

Yeah.

But let me do it in the most ridiculous way possible.

Let me do a bit of salsa while I'm at it.

So it's, so the so-called judge thing is, you know, I think you raise a really good point about jurisprudence because, you know, I'm reminded of a story of a court in Uttar Pradesh in India where a judge felt so unsafe because the area he was a judge of was filled with so many vandals and criminals that he sat on the judge's desk with a gun.

And I felt that that's, you're then one step away from then announcing the sentence and carrying it out yourself by shooting the guy in the face.

Right.

I do hope Donald Trump does not listen to this episode.

That will give him ideas that will be very hard to stop.

Correct.

But in but in that case, he wouldn't be a so-called judge because he'd been judge and judgment at the same time.

Yeah.

And I think this is, you're right.

Like, like courts in Minnesota, Wisconsin, you know, across the board, if judges started carrying some sort of firearm, you know, he wouldn't be a so-called judge anymore because he's actually passed the sentence.

And I think Homeland Security is now being told that given that they don't really have any legal backing to stop people, that they're encouraged to do extreme vetting.

And

like, how do you extremely vet just people from different nationalities?

So I think they're asking what Donald Trump is asking on Twitter.

He's asking Iranian families, are you bad people?

And then some Iranians are saying, no, we're not.

And they're saying, okay, go to baggage reclaim.

I mean, that could be Trump's way of simplifying and streamlining the process.

If you see it through his worldview, you won't have all these complicated immigration forms to fill in, you know, all these visa applications of thirty pages of questions to answer.

You just have to tick a simple goodie or baddie box.

And that will I mean you'll get you'll fly through immigration in America.

It's quick.

You know, when I filled out my job application, when my first job was in the US, one of the forms they make you fill out, question number two is, are you currently or have you ever been a terrorist?

And then the options were yes, no and don't know.

Yeah, but but w well, don't know is an increasing that is an increasingly likely option because uh I mean what Trump has essentially he he issued a uh they issued a list, didn't they, of all the terrorist attacks that have been committed, including a number of attacks which had nothing to do with terrorism.

And obviously we had the Bowling Green massacre

last week that we we talked about on the show lot the the fictitious ma massacre and we've we've had an email actually, a rather

rather a moving email come to you later in the show from uh someone who only just found out that they lost someone in the Bowling Green Massacres.

Our thoughts are with you.

And

I mean, so you could, I think, I mean, yeah, you just don't know now.

You just don't know.

When you do something like, I mean, I might just go to the shop and buy

a cauliflower.

I don't know now whether I've committed terrorism or not.

You just don't know.

It is such a vague and malleable concept.

But don't know.

I think everyone will have have to take, even terrorists, might actually find out that

they weren't.

We just don't know anymore.

Yeah.

In fact, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the master planner of 9-11, who's currently in Guantanamo Bay,

gave a statement yesterday or day before.

This is a fact.

And he said, I'm confused.

And when he's saying it, you know, he's like, he's confused by what's going on.

He doesn't.

He now has, having been previously a self-confessed

al-Qaeda bigwig.

Yeah.

He now doesn't eat.

Oh, what world do we live in?

He's not sure what it means anymore.

He's, you know,

he's caught in Karachi in a raid, sent to Guantanamo, did all the right things.

He just doesn't know anymore.

It's quite confusing.

And also, Andy, you know, the English language, you know, you gave us the English language.

I mean, you personally.

You're welcome.

Gave us the English language.

I like what you guys have done with it.

1757.

You came over yourself.

Give it to us.

And, you know, words like massacre.

You know, it meant a certain thing when we went through your education system in our schools.

But now if the massacre extends to just normal things, like I got delayed on my way over on the tube at Green Park Station, so I had a Green Park massacre.

Yeah, but we can't argue the facts anymore.

That's, you know, that's your fact.

That's just happened.

I don't have the authority.

So I'm not, you know, unless you're a printed encyclopedia now, and they basically don't exist anymore.

Anything can be a fact.

Anything.

Trump,

I mean, he basically has taken one look at the concepts of justice, respect for the law, and the accumulated wisdom and progress of generations.

He sniffed disdainfully, unbuttoned his trousers, removed his penis, and then vomited all over the concept of justice before saying, you thought I was going to piss on it, didn't you?

And then urinating all over his own vomit.

That is quite literally what he has done to American justice in his own mind anyway.

A decisive vomit and then a stubbornly patriotic WAS.

Exactly.

You're just one step away from him doing that on the Constitution and then calling it this so-called book.

Yes.

Well, I mean, a lot of people say we've got to give Trump time.

You know, that we

can't judge him on the things he's said and done.

As the old saying goes, Anavab, you can't judge a book by its cover or by its contents.

You should judge a book by how much it hurts when someone smashes you repeatedly on the head with a hardback copy.

And you should also judge a book by its Twitter account.

And when that book is My Presidency, Volume 1, Ponking It on the Table and Seeing What Happens by President Donald Trump, then that Twitter account is essentially, it's a series of weird free verse, 140 character maximum catapults from the planet crank.

It's essentially a minute by minute post-haiku series of billiograms charting a mental map of a planet and species that were it to actually exist

rather than just being fictional trompania, it would be even more terrifying than planet earth already is i oh i can't i said two weeks ago i had to take a week off trump yeah i've now not taken a week off trump for two weeks in a row i've and my sister's on the show next week and i think she's had enough of i think we'll just talk about our childhoods i i love the way his mind works because it goes from terrible terrorists coming in from syria yeah My daughter Ivanka has been badly treated by Nordstrom.

It's so specific, right?

It goes from the grand to the tiny.

It's very godlike, you know?

These shoelaces, and then right after that, the trouble with bin Laden.

Donald Trump can get angry at every grain of sand.

Yeah.

He tweeted this.

When a country is no longer able to say who can and who cannot come in and out, especially for reasons of safety and security, big trouble.

Explanation, Mark.

Big trouble indeed.

I mean, it's slightly less big trouble.

given that safety and security are not really the reasons and political grandstanding is.

But I mean, his point stands.

But just imagine, imagine if he's worried about desperate refugees coming into the country.

Imagine how nuts he'll go if someone ever tells him how many Americans are killed every year by guns or cars or burgers or beer or cigarettes or pollution or playing American football, falling off horses, falling off bicycles, falling off unicycles, falling off branches, falling off sofas, or falling off erotic, sado-masochistic, mechanical rodeo donkeys.

Imagine that.

Imagine how angry he'll be then.

I mean, he's already angry at stuff that he doesn't need to be angry about.

The man is he is a ticking volcano.

That last means of death is a fantastic means of death.

I think if you're going to die with a rodeo f donkey, you've done well.

I think never has a truer word been spoken on this podcast, ever.

You can buy your f donkeys at f dungeons.com, by the way.

Where you can also buy tickets to my UK tour shows.

Now, um,

Sean Spicer, his press secretary, found himself denying that Donald Trump owns a bathrobe

after press allegations that

he might wear a bathrobe.

I mean, that is an odd thing to deny, particularly from a man whose chain of hotel, Trump Hotels, there are 14 hotels listed on the Trump Hotels website.

Presumably, he must have stayed in quite a lot of...

I mean, the chances are he's stolen his own bathrobes off himself.

He must have a collection of, I reckon, at least 50 bathrobes that he's nicked out of his own hotel rooms.

What a strange thing.

That's a strange thing to deny.

It's almost like now, it's like a child just denying absolutely everything.

It would be interesting if it was a specific kind of robe, you know?

Like if Sean Spicer said, we'd like to clarify, it definitely wasn't a kimono.

Right.

You know, if it was something like that.

But it's just, I think the original news story said that most evenings he's alone there because his wife and child are not there in Washington.

And he goes up and he just watches TV wearing a bathrobe.

Right.

And I was surprised that that's the part they chose to deny.

Yeah.

Not the fact that he doesn't work past six o'clock.

You know,

they just focused on the petty detail of.

No, he wasn't wearing glass slippers from Vietnam.

He was.

He was watching TV in an Eddie Bauer TV.

Whatever.

So I was quite surprised.

And also, can you imagine this happening in history?

Like, can you imagine someone saying, no, President Harry Truman was not in a grass skirt?

No, I mean,

I mean, that's a very, very relevant point.

I mean, I guess in a way, it's good that we now know

because we still, you know, we don't know if James K.

Polk owned a bathrobe or not, or if Grover Cleveland used to relax in a onesie or a...

Warren G.

Harding chilled that evening wearing his wife's silk neglige.

We don't know that, but we now know for a fact because it was a response to alleged faked, alleged news.

Sean, if that is indeed his real name, Spicer.

That must be the first time an official spokesman has denied that a president owns a bath.

But it's interesting to deny.

Like I said, Sean Spicer,

SS, I don't know if that's an appropriate shortening for it.

Anyway, Spice Master did not deny that Trump wears or owns any of the following.

He did deny the bath, but but he did not deny that Trump owns one, a diamond-encrusted gimp mask given to him as an inauguration gift by Vladimir Putin.

He didn't deny that.

So that must be a fact.

He did not deny that Trump owns two, a skin-tight superhero suit made out of the hide of Fartu, one of only three remaining white rhinoceroses in existence.

He did not deny that Trump owns all the costumes worn by the pop group The Village People in the video to the hit anthem YMCA.

Or four, a team jersey from the Sudanese national ice hockey team signed personally by all the players.

And he also did not deny that Trump has a Kalashnikov and a subscription to basketsfullofpuppies.com so that every morning he gets delivered a fresh basket full of puppies to release into the White House strop room and shoot.

The strop room, by the way, is a special room set aside in the White House for presidents to go and let off steam.

They instituted it.

Soon after James Madison went nuts in 1814 after losing a game of spanking turtles against his his VP Elbridge Gerry.

He fired a pistol at his favourite teddy bear which caught fire leading to the White House burning down.

They managed to spin the story and blame it on the British.

But anyway, they've had the strop room ever since.

Now I'm not saying Donald Trump does or doesn't shoot a basket full of puppies every morning, but Spicer's frankly deafening silence on the matter says more than a thousand facts.

ever could.

I mean, why wouldn't he deny it?

Why would he not just come out and deny that Trump shoots puppies?

And even if he did deny it,

why should we believe him?

I'm confused.

I think it is such a weird thing to deny that the only conclusion is that he does own a bathrobe.

But more than that, it is the bathrobe of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the notorious 16th and 17th century Hungarian noblewoman, famous for being allegedly one of history's most prolific serial killers and bathing in the blood of virgins.

So we have to assume that Donald Trump sits there every night watching news channels on his own in nothing but the blood-stained bathrobe of a 300-plus victim slayer.

Otherwise, why not just deny it?

Andy, how much do you know about Elbridge Gerry?

Not a great deal, but he died later that year in 1814.

He is gerrymandering is a bastardisation of his name.

Right.

Gerrymandering because, well, because he gerrymandered.

There we go.

Before it was a word.

Do not bring facts to the show.

Now it's up to you to choose.

You can choose whether or not to to believe that.

Wow.

Well, I think it's pronounced Gary.

It was Gary.

Right.

But because people are thick,

it changed.

Okay.

Or other reasons.

So gerrymandering doesn't sound like that.

In other, from possibly Trump-related news, Bolivia has declared a state of emergency due to a plague of locusts.

There, I guess the signs were there.

It's all going to happen.

There's one, there's going to be a million, you know.

Andy, in other news, I have a question.

Vladimir Putin,

the fair,

left-leaning democratic leader of

the former Soviet Union that he's brought before.

Former and future Soviet Union.

Yeah.

The mild-mannered,

music-loving.

Vladimir Putin just passed a law that decriminalizes petty domestic violence, small domestic violence.

And my question is, Andy, is it because in the middle of the night, Vladimir Putin is racked with guilt?

At some point, he told himself, I'm bombing all these countries, I'm spying on all these countries, I'm killing all these people.

Is it fair for me?

to pass laws and expect my people not to beat each other up

wow i hadn't thought of it from those

from those terms i mean it is

not

a surprising piece of legislation from putin's russia um

you might think that russia is a country where according to some estimates around 10 000 women a year are killed by domestic violence that it should be a country that's clamping down on domestic abuse rather than clamping up on it or releasing the clamp entirely and saying here have the clamp you do it what you want russia needs a more tolerant attitude towards domestic violence anuvab in the same way that ancient roman celebrity emperor nero needed a more tolerant attitude towards his own lavish excess or even in the same way that russia needs a more tolerant attitude towards vodka drinking dodgy oil plutocrats and megalomaniac leaders um it's it is bizarre the those in favour said it's defending tradition um which does not say a lot for russian traditions.

I don't know if they're going to stand up for other Russian traditions, like millions of people being given a one-way ticket to a non-voluntary staycation at She Gulag.

Don't forget to pack your factor minus 50 sun cream.

It's

yeah, I mean, it's a tough time for the concept of human progress at the moment.

And also, I don't know what other traditions will come back.

You know, if the Romans in their election, if the Italians decided man versus bear, it's perfectly legitimate back in the Colosseum.

Or the Mongolians decided it's perfectly legitimate for us to get on horses and start cutting off heads all across Eurasia.

Well,

that would be an interesting one because, I mean, Mongolia is quite a sparsely populated country these days.

Yeah.

I mean, it'll be interesting to see how far they got.

Yeah.

They couldn't even get to the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar.

You know that the great days of Chengis Khan are behind them.

It does seem that way.

But if they start outlawing stuff like this, I think it's a slippery slope to, you know,

us back in the caves chopping off each other's heads.

Well, I mean, maybe we should just...

I I mean that does seem to be the way we're clearly headed.

So I mean I've certainly been practicing drawing pictures of mammoths on walls because I want to

be right at the cutting edge of modern art when we get back to the

back to the caves.

And maybe we should just go back into the sea and start evoluting.

There was another interesting piece of

government legislation in Romania where the government attempted to legalize low-level corruption on the grounds that essentially there was so much of it it was impossible to do anything about it so you might as well rather than sweeping it under the carpet sweep it over the carpet and just say oh this is the carpet

it's uh but the Romanian people smelt have been protesting in vast numbers the biggest protests since the overthrow of communism back in

1989 and they clearly smelt a bit of a rat on this piece of legislation partly because it was so nakedly wrong and I mean basically, corruption is supposed to be underhanded.

I mean, you can't legislate corruption into law.

That is cheating, isn't it?

And they smelled a rat partly because essentially the government said, we're going to dump a load of dead rats through all your letterboxes.

There you go.

If it smells, let us know.

And they did.

They let them know in enormous numbers.

The government's rode back on it, which is slightly disappointing for me.

I think they should have...

They've caved in.

to the Romanian snowflakes who are refusing to acknowledge that legalised corruption is the way forward for humanity.

Yeah, I mean, just because a few million people showed up in Bucharest and their population is a few million, that doesn't mean that the government has to listen.

That's weak leadership for me.

They should have raised the bar and legalized all corruption.

That would have been strong leadership.

Yeah, this is where you miss Cheausetsku and people like that.

This is the time.

That is not a sentence you hear very often.

But speaking of which, Andy, corruption always brings me back to India, a country you're very familiar with.

And

I think if they pass pass laws like that, I don't know what we'd do with our time.

Like, I don't know what Indian courts are.

Yeah, the unemployment rate would rock it, wouldn't it?

Yeah.

I mean, would people like have to learn skydive?

Because all the cases in our courts are corruption.

I like the way that you've just...

That is, it's either corruption or skydive.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Isn't President Obama jet skiing?

It's like that.

It's either the presidency or jet skiing with Richard Branson.

There's no middle ground.

They can't be, right?

They're just.

And it's like all our courts courts cover corruption.

All that's in the media is corruption.

If they did away with, like, we'd actually have to have skills and like build things.

Like the Western way would be too much for us.

Andy, a very big Bollywood star today tweeted a little bit from an environmental science textbook in India

teaching third-form kids.

about

what it means to breathe.

And it says, how do we learn that breathing is important?

And they have a little experiment that they've got there.

It says, take three kittens and put them in three jars and then close the jars.

And after a while, when you open the jars, you would realize the kittens have died.

And that's when you realize the importance of breathing.

Right.

And this big Bollywood star, Faran Akhtar, he tweeted this and he says, What is this?

Is this a thing in a real textbook?

And so this is causing a bit of furor in India.

So just wanted to know that that is a good way to teach environmental science because unless you die, you won't really know the meaning of breathing.

It brings me back to a show of yours, Andy, I'd seen some years ago when the subpine mortgage crisis had happened.

Oh, happy days.

Good days.

And you had talked about giving loans to people who cannot repay them.

Yes.

Fundamentally, it seems logical.

Yes.

But yeah, I mean, you've got got to test these things out.

Well, I think, if I remember the aging piece of stand-up correctly, probably did it on a very early bugle.

It was

like slamming your testicles in a car door.

Correct.

You cannot know whether or not it will genuinely hurt until you've actually done it.

Correct.

It seems like it would.

Yes, but you've got to have proof.

Are you so basically this is, I've just pulled it up here.

Yeah.

Take two wooden boxes, make holes on the lid of one box, put a small kitten in each box, close the boxes, after some time open the boxes, what do you see?

The kitten inside the box without holes has died.

So basically,

the Black Hole of Calcutta, 1756, was in fact an early piece of environmental research.

That is correct.

That is a very interesting alternative.

Emperor Sir Rajadola said, if we take a bunch of British women and children, and that led to obviously a real army with weapons showing up and killing everyone.

Um, but at the time, it was good, it's good tactic.

At the time, he said, you know, if you keep them in a hole where there's no oxygen, they may not live, but I will not know for sure unless I put them there.

He did when he won the 1757 Nobel Prize for Physics.

There we go.

Here's another story you sent me, and it's from sort of broke in the news a few weeks ago.

Robert Mugabe taking a winter holiday for basically two months at a cost of six million dollars, Yeah.

Basically stolen from his own people, essentially.

So all Zimbabweans have essentially paid between them $6 million for Robert Mugabe to take his entire family on a two-month holiday.

Yeah.

At a time when, from the sound of it, most Zimbabweans don't have an awful lot of money to spare.

Right.

And that's...

Or food.

Although he's 92.

I mean, really,

you need to go on a fancy holiday at that age.

So here's the thing about Robert Robert Mugabe.

Yeah, for a week.

He loves British things, Robert Mugabe.

He loves like downtown Abbey-ish, aristocratic British things.

Except, I think he's not allowed to come here.

Apparently, some little thing about war crimes and genocide or something.

Yeah.

There's a few little glitches on his CV.

A few tiny things.

I think in one of the forms, you guys asked him, have you committed genocide?

And he clicked on, I don't know.

So he's had that problem.

So he goes to the nearest alternative, Singapore.

So he stays two months in Singapore, loves it there.

And there's a direct bank transfer from the treasury to his bank account for the hotel bills, which I think is

a fair thing.

And the whole country shuts down.

Everybody knows this.

Inflation shoots up and he's just out for two months.

And I think that's a good way to govern.

Well, yeah, I mean, if you offered the American people Donald Trump going on holiday and doing nothing for two months,

it would get, you know, at least 53% of the vote.

I mean, obviously that would lose against the 47% majority.

But anyway, the point is,

yeah, so maybe it's just it's this is confus.

This is currency-based confusion.

Because clearly, not that long ago in Zimbabwean history, six million units of a currency,

the Zimbabwean dollar at its glorious height,

was basically enough to buy half a slice of bread if you were lucky.

So, maybe Mugabe thinks my holiday only costs $6 million.

What a hero I am, cutting about having this bargain basement holiday, roughly the same cost as a potato.

Correct.

I was actually trying to figure out how much cash that is, because, as you know, I've been obsessed with cash for the last few months.

And were he to take 6 million US dollars in Zimbabwean cash, that would be about the size of all of southern India.

That's how much cash Zimbabwean money he would need.

We've not had, we used to do a lot of Zimbabwean currency jokes on this show back in the glory days before they put a cap on it and started using US dollars instead.

Damn it.

But it's good to have him back.

I'm feeling nostalgic now, whatever.

Thanks for bringing that story to my attention.

A spokesperson for the Zimbabwean People First organization called Jealousy Moarira said that we pray that during Mr.

Mugabe's holidays, it would dawn upon him that he has reached a stage in his life where even old ceases to be the prefix of man.

We hope he will reckon he now belongs to the other world, and it's only fair for him to leave the job of running this country to those who are on this side of the world.

That's great.

That's great.

Because after fact.

That is a very polite way of saying f off and die.

Because the only thing missing after post-fact is post-human.

I think that's the gap.

And another Zimbabwean story,

the youth and indigenization minister, and that is one of the most sinister job titles I have heard since 1945.

The youth and indigenization minister, Patrick Zhuwao, called for thousands of unemployed university and college graduates to be exorcised.

Because they've been selling mobile airtime tokens on the street because they got no jobs because their government is

full of f ⁇ ing lunatics, led by an even more lunatic lunatic.

And he's said, government minister says what we need is exorcisms.

I mean, is a lack of exorcisms preventing these graduates getting.

I mean, I guess it must be difficult if you're in a job interview.

Are you?

Or have you ever been possessed by the devil?

No, I haven't.

Are you sure?

I'm pretty sure.

Are you completely sure?

Well, I'm as sure as you can ever be.

That's a no, then.

Have you ever had an exorcism just to be on the safe side?

To be honest, no, I haven't.

Sorry, we can't offer you the job.

It is just too much of a risk.

And well, unexorcised Zimbabwean graduates

pose as much a threat to the safety of the American people as desperate refugees aged six from Syria.

So that puts it all in context.

Same level.

I mean, you know, some countries, Israel has a year of military service, right?

Zimbabwe has a year of exorcism.

So

fair deal.

In other news, Andy, a number of global news agencies have been talking about how Bollywood box office numbers are inflated.

Right.

And in some cases, the difference between what two websites or newspapers are reporting could be upwards of a tiny hundred million dollars.

That seems quite a lot.

Yeah.

And in our denomination, you know, they count the amount of money a Bollywood movie makes in crores.

Right.

And crores for the world audience is 100 million billion trillion of something.

Well, no, no, now you're confusing things because I've been to India, what, I think, four times now.

Correct.

And the way lakhs and crores

always confuses me.

A lakh is 10,000?

100,000.

Or we used to be till November.

All right.

And a crore is.

10 million.

10 million?

10 million.

Yeah.

I mean, this.

Yeah,

I'd never...

I'll raise you one, Andy.

After demonetization right the Reserve Bank of India claims that they have now collected from the public 12 lakh crore.

Why?

All right.

They just combine those.

So it's a hundred thousand ten million thousand.

Right.

Which is sounding like a Monty Python sketch instead of a currency.

And you can contribute to those takings by coming to this weekend's Tour Gigs.

Well, Richmond will is Friday night if you happen to be listening to this as soon as it's released.

Saturday in Peterborough at the Quay.

Then next week, uh colchester on thursday caucham on friday milton keynes saturday and salford uh on sunday oh milton keynes is full i think um

salford on sunday but milton i mean it is when i say full milton keynes is a tiny tiny room um a delightful room but a tiny room and um and then uh more date the following week nottingham and wolverhampton and southampton uh and then canterbury on tuesday the 28th and then a bit of a break till march in between those my Melbourne Festival show is now on sale.

I'm also doing two live bugles the first ever live bugles in April the 16th and 23rd so check the Melbourne International Comedy Festival website and then I have four nights in Sydney the 24th to the 27th of April and then a couple of gigs in Auckland and Wellington in New Zealand after that and then back home for part two of the UK tour unless All of the world's problems are fine by then, in which case I will replace my tour show with a set of acoustic hard grunge, funk trap, slime jazz fusion covers of the hits of Perry Como using a kazoo and a tub of raisins.

And I seriously mean that, if all the world's problems are solved by May.

Your emails now, Anna Vab, as I mentioned earlier in the show, we had this very, very moving email, came in from Bradley Morgan,

who writes, I just listened to Bugle 4015.

And it brought tears to my eyes when you discussed the Bowling Green massacre.

My alma mater, Western Kentucky University, is in Bowling Green and I'm therefore heartbroken over the thousands, potentially millions of lives lost during that massacre.

I met some of my closest friends in Bowling Green and have fond memories of walking to class with them.

Now they're gone.

Not in any real sense.

I can still call them up or send them a message on Facebook.

Facebook was still we no longer walk to class together.

I've since moved to Chicago hoping to quiet the haunting memories of the Bowling Green massacre.

I felt living in a city where Trump threatens to send in troops to deal with gun crime made me feel safer than the quiet streets of a small Kentucky town.

So, and never remember.

It's a big loss.

I think one of the things about new massacres is you can also observe silence.

And

I think now

I think it's time that various parliaments have an hour's silence

for fake massacres, or at least 20 minutes.

That would be so popular around the world, wouldn't it?

Just invent massacres.

24 hour silence.

You need more and more invented massacres.

You getting all parliaments having a 24-hour silence.

The world would be so happy.

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

That brings us towards the end of this show.

Thanks very much for listening.

Anneva, it's been an absolute delight to have you.

On this continent.

It's so nice to be in a part of the world where there's polites and laws and so on.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that is really a very flimsy facade.

Politesse.

I I like the way you put that.

You know, I've stopped saying please and excuse me and so on.

So it's just quite shocking for me that

those words have come back in my vocabulary.

Do you have any forthcoming performances or things?

Well, you know,

thank you for asking.

We recorded a special for Amazon.

So 12 Indian comedians have recorded different specials.

This one's called Alive at 40 and it's playing now on Amazon Prime Video.

I checked with the good people that do these things and they said it's specifically not available in the United Kingdom right now.

That's my announcement.

You're too dangerous, we can't handle the tricks.

It's too much, too much.

So, they've put up firewalls instead of walls,

they've put something up, but uh, soon, they say, right, and so I will, I guess, find out soon.

Yes, my DVD is available at gofasterstripe.com.

You can also download it for a fraction of the price, but I'll also be hawking it around at my gigs, um,

uh, shifting some, I mean, literally one or two a show, some serious units.

I'll see you all at all the geeks, Buglers.

Thanks very much for listening.

Next week, my sister, Helen,

is the guest.

And, oh, yes.

We'll try and talk about something that isn't going to make us scream on the inside for an entire hour.

Until then, thanks again, Anuvab, and thanks for listening, Buglers.

Goodbye.

Thank you, Andy.

The Bugle is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, made possible with great support from our founding sponsors, the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity chaos and teamwork

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.

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