Bugle 4006 – Zaltzman Showdown

This is the Bugle.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, Buglers, and welcome to issue 4006 of the world's last remaining outpost of truth.

Yes, I think that's fair.

In 2016, it's close enough.

It's the Bugle podcast, the show that according to recent scientific research, had it existed in the past, would have been the first download of the weekend on the MP3 players of, amongst others, Shakespeare, Marie Curie, Homer, Benjamin Franklin, Jane Austen, Marcus Aurelius, The Incredible Hulk, and both Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and in fact reports coming up later on those two incidentally.

after complaints that Disney's new realism drive at its theme parks has led to record customer complaints about Mickey and Minnie refusing to interact with people, scuttling into the nearest available inaccessible space and shitting everywhere.

This is Bugle Issue 4006 for the week beginning Monday the 28th of November 2016.

We're recording on Friday the 25th, which mathematically of course is almost twice as scary as Friday the 13th.

I am Andy Zoltzmann.

Star of the forthcoming Soho Theatre Show 2016, the certifiable history from 20th of December.

Roll up, roll up.

It's kind of a Christmas pantomime, only completely different with just me and it sticking 2016 under the microscope, my microscope, it might not work properly, and trying to work out what it died of.

And joining me today, it is a great pleasure to introduce Drum Roll Please.

Thank you.

That is a disappointing snack.

Did you not have anything other than the Timpani Bap?

Not even a snare drum hoagie or a bongo bagel?

Yes, I have started this introduction with a drum roll pun.

That's Brexit for you.

You can't stop me.

Joining me for this week's bugle.

It is the Pankhurst of Podcasting.

Can I call you that?

From the long-running, older even than the bugle, answer me this.

And Radiotopia's own The Illusionist.

It is Helen Zaltzmann.

Did I pronounce your name right?

Hello, Andy.

Hello.

It's nice to finally meet you.

It's great to have you on the bugle.

Thanks.

Welcome to yet another podcast.

Sorry, sorry, easily one of the top podcasts produced by someone currently living in this house.

I don't know.

Your kids are coming up strong.

We are recording live here in London, specifically in my shed.

And you are currently living with us, Helen.

You are a fugitive from what exam, the law?

Yeah, pretty much.

Our landlord moving back after 10 years.

Fate, cruelty.

Retaking what was rightfully mine.

For those of you who do not know, Helen and I share not only this edition and hopefully many future editions of the Bugle and for the moment, this house,

but also an entire complete set of of parents.

We are siblings.

For 36 years now, we've sibled.

Yep.

Is that how the word works?

You're the etymology specialist.

Sibled?

Yeah, we've been.

I am sibling.

Yeah, we've been sibling.

Or is sibling just a small sib?

But at what point do you grow into a full sib?

Well, I'm nearly middle-aged, so I think it should have happened by now.

So we're sibs now.

Sibs.

Sibling.

And then by the end of our lives, just be S, because we'll have withered that much.

Yes.

It's great to.

We've not worked very much together over.

No, well, mother was trying to keep us apart

for the sake of the family.

She didn't want it to be too dynastic.

Well, I mean,

that's gone right out of the window.

We're basically the Trumps of...

Oh, no.

The Trumps of the podcast world, Helen.

Well, Andy, one of the features of 2016 has been white men with ridiculous hair who spelt bullshit all the time doing very well in politics.

So why haven't you made a power grab?

Well, there's still quite a lot of the year left.

You know, still almost...

There's about 10% of the year left.

Shit, why not finish us all off?

This is your time.

So this is the bugle for the 28th of November, Monday the 28th.

On the 28th of November in 1660, a group of 12 prominent British scientists, including architecture celeb Christopher Wren, chemistry superstar Robert Boyle and the philosophy and linguistics pin-up boy John Wilkins set up the Royal Society, the full title being the Royal Society of London for improving natural knowledge.

A load of experts and elitists trying to tell everyone else how the universe works.

That looks pretty fing stupid now.

356 years on.

But out, Boffins.

It's not your business.

We will tell ourselves what we want to think is going on in science as in everything else.

And Ren, learn to build a proper fing roof.

Who needs a dome?

It's a nightmare to put a helipad on.

Also, on the 28th of November, this is the historic 124th anniversary of 1893.

when New Zealand on this day in that year became the first country in which women voted in a national election.

Also, the 97th anniversary of Lady Astor being elected as an MP in the UK.

She became the first woman to sit in the House of Commons, not the first elected, but the first to sit in the House of Commons.

And in 1990, Margaret Thatcher became the first ever British woman or female to become a former Prime Minister.

She magged out of 10 Downing Street for the last time 26 years ago.

On the same day that you broke your collarbone.

That's correct.

I don't think the home counties have ever fully recovered from either of those two traumatic blows.

So, what a historically appropriate day, Helen, for you to become the first woman to co-host the Bugle.

I mean, I see this as another major landmark in advance of feminism.

The first woman.

You are part of the problem.

This is Bugle 4006.

So I did 294 bugles with John Oliver before he had to retire.

First wave.

Yeah, he quit because apparently the reason he quit has just turned out, he's convinced the apocalypse is coming and he wants to devote the rest of his life to worshiping Zeus.

So this is the sixth edition of the Reboot Gold

era, which means this is the 300th full edition

of this show.

I appeared on the 300th episode of Answer Me This.

That's right, you did.

Which was ages ago because, as aforementioned, been in this game longer than you.

And you haven't had

people swanning off to do other stuff.

So, 300 episodes.

Enough episodes that if the ancient Greeks had played them all simultaneously out of a special giant amplifier, they would have beaten the entire Persian army with them.

And also, if you played all the podcasts we've done between us back to back, you'd be an idiot.

There you go.

Or dead, because I think you'd have to be awake now for more than two weeks solid.

I would.

I would say it must be up to close to a month, isn't it?

That would put everything in it.

That would be fatal.

I know that you've tried during times of a lot of sport.

Yes.

There are times when there's almost 24 hours a day of cricket around the world.

These things are sent to test us.

It's a hard life you chose.

Yeah.

Look at this.

You have a duty.

As always, a section of the bugle is going in the bin this week, a Black Friday section.

It is Black Friday today, one of the great commercial days in the commercial year.

which meant we have a special offer.

You can stop listening to this show 75% of the way through it, absolutely free.

and we will look back at the origins of the festival of black friday which began of course way back in the year 23 a d when joseph and son the middle east-based carpentry and woodworking firm had a 50 off sale to get rid of all their surplus stock where the fk of all these bookcases and chest of drawers come from jesus said joseph oh yeah joseph please call me dad uh sure um

look i'm not comfortable with it anyway i saw all that timber out the back and i miracled it into a load of home furnishings right and where exactly am i supposed to put all those 150 bloody bookcases?

You know, what am I going to do with them?

I don't know, flogged them off.

I'm off to shoot some hoops with my buddy Judas.

Okay, lad, let him win.

Why?

Just let him win.

I've got him tagged as a bit of a grudge holder.

Just my op, of course, lad.

He's not going to win, Joseph.

Dad, every time he gets the ball off me, I miracle the hoop into a conifer tree.

I was wondering what all those conifer trees were.

What am I going to do with them at this time of year?

Hmm, I'll think about it.

Anyway, that's where it all came from.

That was the most vivid biblical depiction since Mel Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ.

It's from the recently discovered gospel according to

St.

Greville.

And, well, in fact, we do have a genuine Black Friday offer.

The old Bugle merch.

The merch people,

having realised the

fool's gold mine they're sitting on, having a Black Friday sale.

And by Black Friday sale, I mean they are desperately trying to flog off now worthless and outdated material featuring the old logo with

what's his name?

British name, can't remember.

Anyway, so do follow the merch link on thebuglepodcast.com if you want to buy some cut-price obsolete stuff.

Also, one for the price of one tickets to my Christmas and New Year's Soho Theatre run

on the Soho Theatre website.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week, and we have a special revival section.

The Bugle being, you know, an example of a show that has revived from the

near death.

It's the Lazarus of podcasts, isn't it?

Absolutely.

It probably should have been left in the ground.

No, no, no, no, not like that at all.

And some amazing revivals.

This week, Tony Blair.

Yep.

Who'd have thought that kid would come back?

Yes, back in the public eye.

Him and the Gilmore Girls back the same week, having both ended in May 2007.

Wow.

Uncanny.

I mean, can you just fill in some of the gaps there for me?

The Gilmore Girls, I'm not entirely familiar with

the horrible.

It was a popular TV comedy drama that ran from 2000 to 2007 about a single mother and her daughter.

And the final season was quite controversial because she waged war in Iraq based on a sex-stop dossier about weapons of destruction.

And

this is coming back after the...

It's come back on Netflix

for 90-minute specials, erasing that part of history.

Right.

And also implementing a task force to try and put the brakes on Brexit.

That's what the Gilmore Carls is up to.

It's subtext.

Right.

Well, thanks for bringing that to my attention.

You're

the Bugle's new correspondent for the entirety of womankind.

Thanks.

But also for anything to do with

culture from less than from basically after I was born.

Yeah, I think that's when culture really kicked in.

Also, I'm self-employed and I work at at home, so I've seen a lot of television.

Blair is, as I said, back in the public eye, and the British public has responded by saying, oh, I think there's something in my eye.

Oh, it really stings.

I think it's some kind of aggressive conjunctivitis.

Maybe a wasp.

It feels like I've been stabbed in the.

Oh, no, it's Tony Blair.

It's just, I'm going to gouge my eye out and hope it will be fine.

He's back, Helen.

He is back here to save centrist politics.

Well,

this is his claim that the, I mean, the former European warmongering champion, which admittedly is not a title that has the cachet that it once did, is returning to life,

public life,

with a new organisation, as you said, aimed at coaxing the world away from the crazy extremes of politics that it seems to have embraced recently, both the crazy left wing and the crazy right wing, back to the ground that Blair made his own, the f ⁇ ing crazy middle ground.

He was very, you know, very much the consensus of crazy.

Are you pleased to see him back?

It shows shows how bad things have got that I kind of am.

That is terrifying.

Yes.

Could it be George W.

Bush next?

Maybe he could be a compromise.

I'm almost nostalgic for GWB.

Yeah.

I mean, he seems like such a benevolent idiot in comparison to what is about to happen.

Blair has admitted that if he does...

He's not aiming at a return to frontline politics.

He says, but he hasn't really made explicit what he is aiming for.

So he's got two plans.

He's got a new Twitter feed, I think, isn't he?

Is that it?

Is that the extent of it?

He's running the We Rate Dogs Twitter feed.

And that is a very clever campaign.

Right.

You rate dogs.

Oh, have you not seen that?

No, I mean, what do you rate them on?

I mean, is it just on their looks?

I mean, I hate

the objectification of dogs.

It's got to stop.

Well, then you're not going to like Tony Blair's new campaign.

He's got two plans, it seems.

One of them is solidifying the centre of politics again, and the other is to team up with Virgin to try and get a second referendum.

Right.

But that's led by Alan Milburn, the former health secretary.

Right, yes.

Another revival.

I mean, the Milburn revival was always bound to happen.

It's like Elvis, isn't it, in the 70s?

And Bob Geldof's involved, so maybe they're doing another Band-Aid single.

It's just they couldn't get any pop stars.

They've got Alan Milburn and Nick Clegg instead.

Can Alan Milburn sing?

Who knows?

Right.

I mean, in a musical sense rather than

confessing to Mafia Threats sense.

Didn't stop the the people who were in the late 80s uh bandaid single who are all stockach and watermelon

take take that they would admit it now and uh yeah so virgin has uh allegedly offered money and legal advice and some office space so do you think they just uh cleaned out their cupboard that had all the old ti vos in

this is an interesting one that i i mean i can't see a second brexit referendum happening partly because the situation we currently have uh is an unelected prime minister with an unelected cabinet.

That's democracy.

Putting policies at...

But despite that, no one, almost no one, wants another general election.

So I don't think as a nation we could face a second referendum unless it was a snap referendum held

four hours after the announcement, like the Indian currency story that we talked about last week.

when they announced the withdrawal of the banknotes at 8 p.m.

and they ceased to be legal tender at 12 p.m.

I think that's the only kind of democracy we would take in this country now because it was the campaigning that people, I think that that irritated people.

So, if you could remove that,

remove any of the arguments and talking from democracy.

So, people have to vote on instinct,

which is what is happening now anyway, because who needs expertise and facts?

Well, exactly.

Post-truth world, Andy.

That's why you're doing so well.

Yeah, well, or or do you do you mean have a second referendum four hours after the first referendum, so like a regret forendom?

A regret forendom, that's a nice term.

Is that a term that you've just made up?

It's only just become useful

when you introduce this concept.

But is this because you do the illusionist, you know, sort of linguistics etymology?

I mean, are you now just basically making up words that you can talk about in your own show?

Well, yeah, because I'll run out at some point because there are only a few hundred thousand in English.

Yeah, and

yeah, so I've got a plan for the future.

Right.

But I used to enjoy portmanteaus until Brexit happened.

And portmanteaus broke the country.

Well, it's a foreign word, isn't it?

Coming over here.

They're all foreign words in English.

Shut up.

You're not allowed to say that kind of thing these days.

But that's an interesting idea.

The idea that you should have an instant,

you know, second chance referendum.

Yeah.

It's like

the 28-day cooling off period when you buy something.

Yes.

Should this second referendum happen after the result of the first referendum is known?

Or should you just have to vote at an interval of, you know, you vote at 8 a.m.

and then at, say, 4 p.m.?

That's an eight-hour cooling-off period.

Well, 4pm, you're often in a bit of a post-lunch sleepy slump.

So, how is that going to affect your politics?

Right.

More right-wing, more left-wing?

I don't know.

Did the polling show any figures on that?

Or are the dangers of voting snoozy?

I don't think they have done the data analysis on that.

But they should.

They should.

I mean,

essentially, a coffee shortage could completely change the way people vote.

Is that what happened in America?

Was there...

Were the Republicans secretly stashing coffee supplies to make people slightly irritable on voting day?

We need to be told.

Well, they had to queue up for hours.

So if they weren't irritable before, they were going to be irritable after that.

Oh, so that's the conspiracies.

They were queuing up.

They made the queue so long that the caffeine would have worn off.

Yeah, there's, you know, this result is not going to stand, I'm telling you.

Blair did say that

he said he's not wanting to return to frontline politics politics because the media, he said, would go into, quote, destroy mode.

Now, go into is an interesting way of putting it.

They are in it.

They are stuck in it permanently.

There is about as much chance in 2016 of the media, or well, bits of the media, not being in destroy mode as there is of a shark going into vegetarian mode.

It is not.

It is not going to happen.

I don't know.

Lots of ridiculous things have happened this year they said couldn't happen.

So maybe sharks will just be all about tofu now.

Right.

Can't discount anything.

And John Major just made a comeback as well.

I haven't heard anything from him since about 1992, even though he was in power for five years.

Yes, well, I think that the electorate reflected that in 1997.

And then suddenly he's trending on Twitter now because he made up the phrase the tyranny of the majority to

it is a nice phrase, but he said the 48% of people that voted against Brexit shouldn't be dictated to by the tyranny of the majority.

And

the sun said, oh, tyranny of the majority.

a

um so I think the phrase

that was an excellent impression of a newspaper I was trying to get the size of font on the front page to express their fury um but um he's saying the tyranny of the majority has never applied in a democracy and it should not apply in this particular democracy does that make sense or does it just sound good it doesn't matter great but that's the world we live in you're the linguistics expert doesn't matter does it doesn't have to make sense what's john major been doing for the last 20 years uh well

watching a lot of cricket i think are you pals Have you ever met John?

I've never met John Major, no.

But I feel we have a spiritual connection unrelated to politics.

Huge, huge cricket fan.

And

I think that's why he won the 92 election.

Because English cricket was going through a tough phase.

We thought, we can't risk having a Welsh Prime Minister because

the English cricket team could suffer.

So we kept it in the safe hands of Major.

And sure enough, the

following year,

we lost to Pakistan 2-1.

It doesn't really stack up, Pakistan.

Things are are so clear in hindsight, aren't they?

Another politician who's been revived this week, Andy, Jill Stein, out of the limelight since the US election two weeks ago, now roaring back into the public consciousness, this time because she is demanding a recount of the vote in three closely contested states.

When you say limelight, I mean, was she in the limelight other than the fact that it was a slightly limy, greenish kind of for the Green Party.

I I thought she was a bit sickly, but it was just the light.

And she's raised millions of dollars in a couple of days for this to happen.

For the recount?

Yeah.

I think because she's a bit of a conspiracy theorist, which led to something.

Well, all green people are, aren't they?

I mean, look at it.

Everything's fine.

We just need to wait for a revival of the Arctic sea ice and everything will be fine.

But now her tendency to go for the conspiracy theory

has resulted in a vote recount, which is kind of exciting.

But it's not going to be enough of a vote recount to

change the ultimate 1-0 to Trump final score, is it?

No, but there was one county which published a spreadsheet of its results in which there were more votes cast for the president than there were votes cast.

Right.

Got a hint of the old Soviet Union about it, doesn't it?

That would get you a D in Maté level.

So for the election, it's probably worth checking that working.

I don't think anyone's kidding themselves they're going to get a different person in January.

I mean, I think also by now, everyone just wants to see what's going to happen from

the point of view of President Trump.

No one wanted it, but

we've had two weeks to get used to the idea now, or two weeks to come to terms with the fact that the planet's going to end at some point anyway.

So

why not see it in our lifetimes?

Why not see it?

We'll be blissfully oblivious.

It's an interesting, I mean, the whole drift to the right in politics that we've seen this year, a lot of people.

Yeah, I wouldn't say drift at that speed, Andy.

I mean, that suggests kind of continental pace rather than the rapid slide of like when you're tipping a dustpan and brush into a bin.

So a lot of people said this is, you know, a worrying, a worrying sign for humanity that, you know, Europe's drifting, drifting to the right.

I have a slightly more positive view of this.

I think it is just 1930s nostalgia.

Absolutely.

And loads of people wearing kind of tweed caps these days.

They've become kind of trendy in the hipster community.

A lot of films again where people are saying, now listen to me, Slim.

Art Deco all over the place.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Fur coats.

I don't know if they're on and there's probably some of them knocking around.

Massive unemployment.

People painting melting watches.

That's what the 1930s was all about for me.

People saying, goodness, me instead of for f ⁇ 's sake.

And sitting around the wireless waiting for death.

And long, thin fish with no clothes on.

A lot of those.

New deals.

All the rage.

Oh, no.

what

well you had to have at least one pun in this show congratulations i just didn't see that one coming right actually that was the second one wasn't it it does worry me the french right wing seems increasingly prominent um

uh even germany now i mean this is true across europe now europe europe europe europe yup are you are you listening europe Have you got a pencil and a piece of paper?

Write this down and do not forget it.

Europe!

Read a history book.

Read any history.

It doesn't have to be a complicated one.

Just a basic kids' history book will do with little cartoon pictures if you need them.

That should give you some tips about what might go wrong if we do shunt too far right as a continent.

You hit Russia.

Or left.

Well, yeah, yeah, well, exactly.

That's a very interesting interpretation of

German military strategy in the Second World War.

So just a few hints.

Maybe Europe's been watching LOLO and thinks that looks jolly.

Give that another try.

Right.

Now, for our non-British listeners, I don't know b big the global distribution of aloe aloe was.

It did seem a quintessentially British sitcom

set in the

in the in the French Resistance, wasn't it?

Yeah.

With people with funny accents and ladies with amusing amusingly sized decolotages.

Yeah, and you could see why

Europe would

want to go back to that time.

Yes, simpler times.

Simpler, simpler times.

When you could use the word boobies and no one thought anything of it, it wasn't considered a a shot across the bowels of feminism.

One thing that surprised me, Andy,

about

America taking back itself, because people are saying, take back our country.

No, one of the great strengths of America to me has always been its multiculturalism.

Didn't expect there to be this amount of German language in it.

Some rather worrying videos of political gatherings have shown thus far.

Yes.

I've also seen people criticise the spelling of Sieg Heil as as being incorrect.

Right.

And of swastika as being improperly drawn.

So standards are spelling.

Oh, I see, right.

So they're saying that people using it now are spelling it wrong, or Hitler used it wrong.

They uh all along.

They're not spelling it correctly.

Right.

Yeah.

So you don't even know.

That seems to be...

That should be low down the list of complaints for me.

Really?

Yes.

I mean, you using it at all, I guess, would be...

That'd be up there.

Because that is a phrase that is,

as I'm sure an etymology expert like you would would would agree tainted by history

at the very least ah who remembers andy it was ages ago tony blair can come back who's going to remember the 40s in other uh comebacks um brutal crackdowns on opposition politicians seem to be increasingly popular again uh particularly in turkey uh massive press crackdowns i was reading an article that said turkey has now outstripped china in terms of most journalists in jail.

Now, I don't know if this is total journalists or journalists per capita of population or journalists per

100,000 hacks, how many hacks are in the clink.

This is, according to figures compiled by the Committee to Protect

journalists, Recip Erdouan, the Turkish president, who seems to be an irritable man at the moment.

More than 3,000 Turks have faced charges of insulting the president,

which I can imagine that.

I can see how that can happen, because the guy is an absolute.

And it must be hard.

Watch out.

If you live in his nation, you're in someone's trouble.

Not to think he's a and given how much of a he is, to then call him a.

So I can see how people might just accidentally insult him just by...

It must be hard to talk about Erdogan without expressing some form of insult.

I imagine even he himself has...

probably punched himself in the face quite often and told himself where to stick himself.

Well, he's going to be in jail then soon.

Yeah.

Self-loathing, writ large.

If I was an American journalist, I'd be a bit worried now.

It's going to be interesting.

Well, we'll come on to Trump later in the new trumpet subsection of the

Bureau, which I'm very excited about.

Happy to be here for the inaugural trumpet.

In Turkey, a journalist encouraged readers to protest against Erdogan by lighting a cigarette and not putting it out.

And he was...

Well, apparently Erdogan does not like smoking.

So this was some.

And this journalist was arrested for terrorism, terrorism, which seems an excessive response.

He's one of 120 journalists who've been jailed since a failed coup

in July.

Others are in jail for

advocating resumption of the peace process with the Kurds.

Some journalists have been put in the stocks for not referring to Erdogan as a classically handsome dream boat in articles about him.

Others have been sentenced to 12 years in a government internment camp with nothing to do apart from watch recordings of 1980s Crown Green Bowls Championships commentated on by a screaming traffic policeman.

And their crime was simply to fail to describe Erdogan's crackdown on opposition parties, free speech and minorities as really cool, surprisingly cute, even, and above all, a surefire recipe to make Turkey the greatest nation in the world.

So, I mean, I've obviously made some of that up, but it's truer than it ought to be.

That's how the press works now.

And now, for the first time on the bugle.

Hello, Trumpeters, and welcome to issue one of the trumpets, the exclusive Donald Trump chronicling section of the bugle.

Oh, God, I can't believe it's true.

Anyway,

some amazing things have been happening, as I always do, as every day goes past.

Fantastic.

Keep giving.

He's taken to issuing YouTube videos rather than

getting himself in situations when people can respond.

He gave a Thanksgiving message.

Wow.

Is he making money off the ads on YouTube?

Well, that's what

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's fireside addresses are all about, wasn't it?

She had some massive great

commercial deal with a logs company.

I love Jimmy Carter's YouTube makeup tutorials.

Excellent at contouring.

Trump said, it is my prayer, and

I don't know if he has a hotline to the Almighty.

I would imagine, given the way he's behaved this year, the Almighty might be a little cross with him.

He said, it is my prayer that on this Thanksgiving, we begin to heal our divisions and move forward as one country.

We have just finished a long and bruising political campaign, he went on to say, emotions are raw and tensions don't just heal overnight.

Now,

it's...

There's an element of hypocrisy in this.

I don't think I'm out of line in saying this.

Given that throughout the campaign, he disported himself with the refinement, equanimity and statesmanlike air of a frustrated bull trying to have sex with a Kawasaki 350 in a motorcycle showroom.

He's behaved with the calm even-handedness and social grace of an inveterate farm animal hater on a sponsored speed slaying day at an unlicensed abattoir.

And yet now he's suddenly coming across all conciliatory.

I don't want this, Helen.

I've said this before on this show.

I want him to stay the c that got him elected.

Oh, he is.

Don't worry.

Don't pretend that he's not.

Well, he is, Andy, because he got very angry at the cast of the Broadway musical Hamilton for doing a measured speech to audience member Mike Pence.

Does not denounce all the people committing racial hate crimes in his name.

So that's kind of c ⁇ .

You just want more showboatness.

Right.

But this speech sounds like a kind of queen speech style speech, which would be fitting in that he's getting his children into government and thus making the presidency more like a monarchy.

And sitting on off great golden thrones.

This is it.

I've always known America regretted getting rid of the monarchy, and this is proof.

They've elected a monarch.

There was a bit of a disaster for the Trump family this week, though.

Trump's daughter Ivanka tweeted, don't cut in half a recipe's suggested amount of sugar when baking banana bread for your son's bake sale.

I did, and the result is not pretty.

I thought

everything else that's happened.

Now this.

Maybe we should rewrite it.

Don't normalise your father's misogyny, racism, and sociopathic disregard for the well-being of humanity so he can secure a government job for which he is no way qualified.

I did, and the result is not pretty if you're not a white, straight, cisgendered billionaire.

There was a man in Brunswick, Georgia, who found election day so stressful that he went to bed that night having not found out who won.

And then he woke up in the morning thinking, I feel so relaxed.

I'm going to carry on not finding out who won the election.

And so for two weeks after that, if he had to go out, he put on headphones and a sign on his chest saying, I don't know who won and I don't want to know.

Please don't tell me.

And

so he managed to stay in that blissful bubble of ignorance for a fortnight.

He's an inspiration for the world, surely.

I mean, this is...

Could just stay in there for four years.

It'd be fine.

Four years won't be enough.

I think really we needed the entirety of humanity to stay in a bubble like that forever.

Okay.

Because, I mean, that's what annoys people is knowing things that have happened.

It's a good point.

So you know total media blackouts just insulate in the in the in the bubble.

If I wasn't on Twitter and not exposed to a lot of think pieces about political events.

What 140 character think pieces?

Maybe I would think everything was fine.

And it effectively would be because I wouldn't know.

But anyway, a local radio station got him in to reveal who won through the medium of opening up a box and either red or blue balloons would rise out of it.

So that's a bit like when people have those parties to reveal the gender of their inutero child by cutting through the cake and it has pink or blue icing inside.

Well, they do the same, of course, when they get a new pope in, don't they?

That it's

it white smoke?

White smoke if it's a male pope and pink smoke if it's a female pope.

They must regret ever buying that pink smoke machine.

What a waste of money.

Trump in his video said,

it is time to restore the bonds of trust between citizens.

What bonds of trust would those be, Donald?

Are those the bonds of trust you have absolutely shat on all year?

Yeah, those ones.

Those ones.

Restore them.

Good.

Yeah.

So get on and restore them, Andy.

It's,

and he's actually appointed a woman to his cabinet now,

Betsy DeVos.

She will be the education secretary.

And don't worry, she is a billionaire.

So

she'll fit right in.

Her husband is the heir to the Amway fortune.

All right.

So used to conning people.

So it's nice that he's draining that swamp.

Getting some people in to represent the non-wealthy of the USA.

Story time now.

And as trailed last week,

the shortlist for the Bad Sex Awards was announced.

And the winner will be revealed in the coming week.

The Bad Sex Awards are for rubbish scenes of intergonadular throat mortaling and other forms of sexic interfragulations in contemporary friction.

And a number of big names on the shortlist including former Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis,

Tom Connolly as well, Gail Foreman Eric DeLuca and also

this from the prominent American novelist John Greesham from his long-awaited sequel

from a tom I believe we might have covered in previous Bugles.

The sequel is entitled The Reattachment

and this excerpt from the reattachment shortlisted for for the Bad Sex Awards, read for the Bugle exclusively by the Hollywood book reading star Darnell Capella.

Mickey Stantanio looked at Enid Trout.

He looked at her like he'd never looked at her before, like a surveyor surveying a building he'd been sent to survey.

Enid Trout looked at Stantanio as if he were a perfectly roasted turkey at a vegan's Thanksgiving.

He looked good, but he felt wrong.

Both of them, one a man, one a woman, were were as naked as the day they were born, in that they were wrapped in towels and covered in blood.

That was a crime scene, Mrs.

Trout, said Mickey.

Sure was, Mr.

Stantanio, she replied.

Stantanio, his arms stretching out from his shoulders like the branches of a well-mannered tree, offered her a pencil from a cigarette box.

I gave up last year, he explicated.

I sketched still lives instead now.

Want to join me?

Sure thing, Detective sultried Enid, running the pencil-led seductionly across her forehead in the shape of a nineteenth-century ship, leaving an indentation that to Mickey simply screamed.

Sex!

They sat down on the single double bed available in room 2819 of the Hotel Blowfly, and sketched the apple that had been left like a complimentary piece of fruit in their room.

I'm no good at drawing, bemoaned Enid, the thirty-three-year-old former 28-year-old junior detective inspector, who had worked the flugged Vicar cases with Mickey all those five years ago.

Yeah, you're real shit at drawing, Enid, said Mickey.

I've seen kids potato print with more emotional depth than that formless garbage.

That looks like a f ⁇ ing tennis ball, not an apple, he said, with the kind of honesty he always thought he would have applied had he been an art critic, a doctor, or a woman.

Enid screwed her picture up into a ball.

Let's have, she began.

Sex, Mickey guessed.

No, I was going to say, let's have some sex, Mickey guessed again, frustrated at having got it wrong the first time, but convinced he was probably on the right lines.

Let's have the newspaper, said Enid.

I want to check the snooker scores.

Oh, I was nowhere near, laughed Mickey, trying to make light of the fact that Enid's gambling problem had evidently resurfaced.

Suddenly, Mickey reminded Enid of the man she'd so resolutely not fallen for when they worked together on the Chokey Humstrolt case.

I was nowhere near, those exact words, she thought, the exact tone of voice that he had used when Juliana Humstrolt had walked free from the courtroom, when new evidence had emerged that Chokey, far from being stabbed to death with a pitchfork by his jealous wife, had in fact been hit by a golf ball when dicking around at a driving range, just like the Grandsman had said at the time.

You can't win them all, Mickey had said with a laugh as they left the courthouse with the invective of an angry Judge Poltenstenner ringing in their ears.

Can I kiss you?

he'd whispered to her.

No, Enid remembered saying quietly.

There are loads of press photographers taking pictures of us here on the courthouse steps, she said, and my husband is standing right here.

I'm standing right here, Eric Trout had said, before trying to punch Mickey in the face.

Two seconds later, Mickey had Eric pinned to the floor with two fingers held against his temple.

One move and I'll pretend to shoot, he'd said, regretting having left his forearm at the local school the previous day at a careers event so the kids could have a play with it.

But that was then, and this wasn't then, it was now.

And this was a different Enid, and and a different Mickey Stantanio.

This was now the world-famous detective who'd been all over the television like mustard on a Chicago hotdog when he'd solved the case of the congressman's missing penis.

And Eric had long since left the party.

He was living in Ecuador with a shouting instructor named Granita after Google Maps sent him the wrong way on a trip to the local swimming pool, and he ended up in South America with no more gas in the tank and no more stomach for the road.

And now Enid needed a man, and not just any man.

An adult man with a functioning Willian scrotum.

And it just so happened that Mickey took both of those boxes.

It didn't take long.

Mickey felt the primeval Prongleforce rise within him as he frondled Enid next to the hotel's complimentary waste bin, which cost $9 according to the unremoved label.

Enid wondered if Eve herself had ever felt such an elemental urging when she realized that Adam had only her to choose or a watermelon.

She felt her

impressive gloryaps crinkle under Mickey's insensitate grope.

This feels like a one-off, she said accidentally out loud.

Yes, said Mickey, swiping right on his mobile phone.

I'm seeing someone else now.

They disentangled their respective limbs, reclothed, and ran to the station where a new case had landed on the desk.

Stantanio, gurgled Detective Chief Expector Glouch.

Someone has replaced Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial with a similarly sized statue of the singer Garth Brooks.

Shit, said Mickey.

They must really love country music.

Or really hate Lincoln, said Glouch.

Either way, we need you to get to the bottom of it.

What's that?

Is that?

I don't know.

I don't know where

just inspiration dropped it into your mouth.

Right.

My mouth?

What do you mean?

But that was Daniel Kamal.

Yeah, sorry, yeah.

I don't know where he's from in America.

It's all over the place.

Yeah, north, north,

north, north somewhere.

Your emails now and the hello buglers at thebuglepodcast.com email address is now working.

This email came in from Peter in Chicago.

On the subject, is it working yet?

Dear Andy, if you're reading this, then the new email address presumably is working.

Yes, Peter, it is.

Thanks for that email.

So you can all send in your emails now to hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com.

Here's an email from Andrew who says, Hello, the Bugle.

Seeing as 2016, which was the UN-designated International Year of the Howling Moron, and everyone in the world celebrated it by collectively throwing democracy into the dumpster of destiny and setting it on fire, I wish to engage in some corrective percussion by striking each and every world leader in the head in alphabetical order.

Helen and Andy, answer me this.

Interesting.

Cross-fertilisation of podcasting.

What is the best implement for hitting leaders of nations with?

Should I use a cricket bat in celebration of empire, or a hockey stick because of the curved knob on the end, or perhaps a frying pan for comedic effect?

Thanking you in advance in a future prison cell as the greatest howling moron of them all.

Andrew.

Well, they talk about hockey stick graphs with regard to global warming, don't they?

Was the kind of a long bit of the stick and then it's suddenly going up.

Well, that would be a very effective way to make a point that world leaders need to pay attention to climate change.

Field hockey or ice hockey stick?

Well, I think we have to wait for the latest environmental figures to come out.

I mean, if if it's I think it's ice hockey stick, which which isn't curve, whereas a field hockey stick, that would show the graph going backwards in time, wouldn't it?

If it bends round

if if time is the X axis,

and the hockey stick is, you know, the the you know, carbon emissions or whatever or is is the y-axis.

Then a field hockey stick with its bent end is sending the...

Maybe that's what we need to aim for.

A field hockey graph.

Just bends the graph back so it sends all emissions backwards in time.

To a new ice age.

Yeah.

Yay!

That'll be a treat.

What about a snooker ball in a sock as a world leader kosh?

This email came in from Guy, who writes, dear Andy, Chris and Helen, I presume.

Oh no, because Rich Darman is here instead of Chris.

Yeah.

So you presume wrong.

As has been well documented in recent Bugles, the world has encountered many political clusters in 2016, including Brexit, the US election, and India's currency problems.

I would like to recommend another country for your crazy radar, South Africa.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

Where our father comes from.

In Bugle's past, you discussed how President Jacob Zuma had been at the centre of a scandal.

And well,

it's quite a long email with a lot of detail, and it might be quite an interesting story to go into in depth at a future stage.

We'll get our dad on to talk about it.

That would make for interesting listening.

The details of this are too numerous to explain in under 3,000 words, says Guy generously.

Some network of corrupt dealings in the South African government.

Sounds like an excellent plot film.

Zuma himself was recently the subject of a vote of no confidence in parliament,

but his majority part of of the ANC voted unanimously against the the motion.

He's gone four and oh in American parlance in no confidence votes since he was first elected.

So I mean that's good.

I mean obviously the people have huge confidence in him.

It's one thing to avoid no confidence votes but surely it's a greater achievement to keep on having them and still win.

It's a talent I don't comprehend because is that a sports parlance that someone used?

It is, yes.

That means nothing to me.

You're such a disappointment.

I don't don't know whether to be confident in Zuma or not.

Translate it into a language I understand.

Thank you, Guy in Cape Town.

We will return to the Zuma story at a future point, maybe when you're on the show again.

Okay.

Get in touch with our heritage.

Our African roots.

Thank you for your emails.

Do keep them coming in to hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com.

Do not use the old info address.

That is dead to me.

That brings us to the end of this bugle.

Helen, it's been an absolute delight to have you on the show.

Thank you so much.

It's been an absolute delight to live in your house for the past three and a half months.

That was an Airbnb booking that went horribly wrong.

I will give you a review of three stars or above, though.

Thanks very much.

That'll bump up my career average.

Do listen to The Illusionist on the wonderful Radiotopia network.

Answer me this as well.

Anything else you'd like to plug?

That's about it.

Right, good.

I learnt a new word.

Oh, yeah, let's have Helen's word of the week.

We'll have this every time you're on.

I think it's a word for the next four or more years.

It is cacistocracy.

Right.

Rule of the absolute worst.

That does not seem like an advance for humanity.

I had not heard this word until Trump appointed Steve Bannon to his cabinet.

See, I tried to invent the word cantankracy the other week.

Oh, yeah.

For the rule of the angry, which I think that's, I mean, I I guess the two are in some ways quite closely linked.

Yeah.

So let's try and get those words out there.

Cantancracy and cacocracy.

It's a satisfying word to say that.

Cacistocracy.

Kachistocracy.

Yeah, yeah, the word.

Thank you very much for listening, Bugles.

Don't forget to put your tickets to my Christmas run at Soho from the 20th of December.

I'm also doing a UK tour from February next year and going to the Melbourne Festival.

late March and April.

So look out for that.

That's not on sale yet.

But I'm not sure.

Start hyping yourself up now.

Sure.

Well, I always forget.

So usually I start plugging gigs that have already happened.

So I'm trying to get them ruthless Saltzman marketing machine out there.

Don't forget the Black Friday sale of all our old merch

as well.

That will come to be very valuable, like stamps with flaws.

Will it?

Sure, you should crank up the price.

Well, like my book, you can get that on Amazon for something like $9,000 due to the rogue algorithm.

Worth every penny.

Thinking it's become an object of rarity.

Thank you very much for listening

and I will be back next week with Wyatt Sanak.

Then on the 9th of December, Nish Kumar and on the 16th Anuvad Pal.

And then Helen and I doing a Christmas special the week after that.

So thanks for listening buglers.

Until next time, goodbye.

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.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.