Bugle 276 – Calypso bad

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The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 276 of the universe's largest covert operation to reinstitute the worship of the Greek Olympian gods into mainstream politics and society.

I'm Andy Zoltzmann, four decades of successfully avoiding reality and still going strong.

And joining me from the silly side of the big pond, it's the comedy Titanic himself in that he gets right to the very bottom of things and has become considerably better known for what he's done on the other side of the Atlantic after leaving Britain and leaves some people completely cold.

It's John Oliver.

Oh boy, that is devastatingly fair, Andy.

Well, uh, hello, Andy, hello, buglers.

Uh, quick update with me, Andy.

Liverpool lost 3-0 to Real Madrid last night, so I have nothing to say.

Nothing.

My team was humiliated by a bunch of Spaniards.

Not even Spaniards, Andy.

A Portuguese guy, a Colombian, a Mexican, another Portuguese guy, a couple of Frenchmen, and a Welsh man who didn't even play.

It's a disaster, Andy.

Well, you have my sincerest, sincerest sympathies.

Tough, Tough times.

Yeah,

very tough times.

Has there been a mass protest on the streets of New York by

irritated by the indifference here?

All right.

Maybe you should raise the issue on your show, John.

I have a little model Philip Coutinho in my office, and I can't even look at him today.

So this is Bugle 276 for the week, ending Friday, the 24th of October, 2014.

We're recording on the 23rd of October.

On this day in the year 425 AD, Valentinian III became Roman Emperor at the age of six, which seems that's quite a young age to be promoting a kid to be emperor.

I mean, maybe he was a...

If you're good enough, you're old enough, aren't you?

I guess there is that.

It turned out that he probably wasn't

either of those two things.

Also,

275 years to the day since the start of the War of Jenkins ear,

which was provoked by the Spanish lopping off the ear of an English sailor called Jenkins, ended up with 25,000 people dead and a treaty agreeing to restore things to exactly how they were before it all started.

Classic war.

Apart from obviously restoring the side of Jenkins' head, which remained considerably damaged.

Nominated for the stupidest named conflict of the second millennium.

by International War magazine, alongside the Wiggly Waggly War.

That was an early 17th century conflict between Britain and Romania, in which both sides agreed to use flaccid swords made from string in order to minimize casualties on both sides.

The Battle of Colin the Terrapin in 1903, that was between Mexico and Russia, prompted by Tsar Nicholas II accidentally eating the prized terrapin belonging to the Mexican President Porfirio Diaz, thinking it was a novelty ice cream pudding at a World Heads of State cocktail on blackjack evening in Vegas.

A grief-stricken Diaz, who'd named his favourite reptilian pet after the ancient Aztec god of minor sporting injuries, Kualinthwahaga Mohammed Totok, sent a telegram home ordering the Mexican army to invade Moscow the next morning.

They reached as far as the Mexican Pacific coast, opened fire in a vague northwesterly direction, whilst the Russian army stayed in their barracks several thousand miles away, muttering see you in the winter losers.

The fighting raged for two and a half minutes, resulting in no casualties.

Before Tsar Nicholas had a tank full of new terrapins, all named Colin, delivered to Diaz's hotel room, and a peace treaty was agreed.

And also the bird shit war.

That was Bolivian Peru versus Chile in the the 19th century over access to massive piles of bird shit.

And that one did actually happen.

I will admit that the other two

might not entirely have happened.

But the bird shit war, also known as the Guano War, was a genuine war.

Over, because bird shit was quite useful in making gunpowder, I believe, for explosives.

And on the subject of massive piles of shit, on this day in 1958, the world was treated as the first appearance of the Smurfs in a magazine.

And on Friday, the 24th of October 1947,

so that's just 67 short years ago, Walt Disney testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming Disney employees that he believed to be communists.

These included Donald Duck, basically what Lenin would have been if he'd been a duck, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, that's an obvious parody of Mao Zedong, three of the seven dwarves, Grumpy, riling against the privileged oligarchy, dopey, hadn't thought through the logistics of a Marxist superstate, and Sneezy obviously spent the winter in Russia.

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

You and your pyramids, we tell you how to prepare a fitting memorial for future civilizations to remember you by.

Get your kids to decorate the inside with some funny little pictures to trick archaeologists of the future into trying to decipher a supposedly complex written language.

We give you advice on DIY budget pyramids.

Not everyone can afford a full Egyptian big and pointy effort, and the enslaved workforce required to construct it.

So we tell you how to construct a mausoleum visible from miles around and set to last at least 3,000 years using just ordinary household cardboard boxes, some instant porridge oats, white wine vinegar or other replacement embalming fluids such as ketchup, mayonnaise or peanut butter, and 3 million tons of limestone blocks.

And we give you a free audio curse that plays automatically on your mummified remains being uncovered.

Ah, loser, you have made a big mistake.

I, the great, insert name here, ruler of, insert home address with postal or zip code, curse you to be hounded by.

Insert agents of eternal vengeance here.

For the next insert duration of curse up to a maximum of three generations.

For longer curses, please see the website for our Platinum Super Pharaoh package.

Top story this week, Great Britain update.

And Andy, as we know, I am from Great Britain.

I am Great British, I believe the term is.

But I was driven from those past years by what I can only describe as understandable indifference.

So let's take the temperature of Blighty and see how it's doing at the moment.

You could have stuck it out.

I have stuck it out in the face of the same understandable indifference for eight more years.

I'm just clearly made of tougher stuff than you, Quitter.

You could take more of an indifferent punch than I could.

I guess you've got a better chin than I have.

So a major new report has warned that Britain is on the verge of becoming a permanently divided nation, with the poorest in society being left behind.

And some will hear that as a warning, Andy, but others will take that as a sign that Britain is returning back to its glorious roots.

Because that's the problem with dire-sounding reports.

Their reception is predicated entirely on people's point of view.

So when, for instance, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission says that Britain is likely to see an unprecedented rise in child poverty over the next decade due to the effect of welfare cuts, they're probably assuming that people will be utterly horrified by that.

But that does not take into account that some people will be hoping that this means the return of child chimney sweeps.

Oh, they were so charismatic, Andy.

Always breaking into song with their dusty, dusty faces and doing that cute thing where they cough up soot, which, you know, had filled their little lungs.

Plus, their tiny little hands meant one could truly expect a sparklingly clean chimney.

In fact, a statement from the Conservative-led government in response to this claim hailed the reports as, quote, further proof that our economic reforms are truly working, and added that there is still much to do over the rest of the course of this government and the next to ensure that permanent divisions become even more permanently permanent.

Before Labour hit back, saying a Labour government would leave the poorest parts of society up to 2% less far behind than the current coalition government.

A claim that was immediately rubbished by the government's Minister for Social Immobility, Redwyn Strafe, who said, and who's going to pay for that?

Corporate taxation or Basil the Magic Foal?

Good luck with either of those, Lenin.

And a spokesman for the right-wing social think tank, R.

Diddams, said, this is a further sign that Britain is returning to the dynamic levels of inequality that were present when we rose to the very top of the world imperialism rankings.

It is a historical fact that the spoor, poor spluttering themselves to death in squalid conditions and being ruthlessly exploited by the wealthy and powerful coincided with Britain conquering at least 95% of the known world.

And that cannot possibly be coincidence.

Go, Team GB.

Britain's current class divide does seem to suggest that the UK government has looked at the popularity of Down Abbey overseas and thought well why don't we just do that again for real this time?

People will love it.

Lord Norman Tebbit has also been back in action this week.

You may remember him

from previous bugles as a man who, for a start, looks exactly like what you think a man called Norman Tebbit would look like, but who was also absolutely terrified about the concept of a lesbian queen.

Now, in the past, he's responded to unemployment by saying that people should just get on their bike and look for work, presumably in some form of velodrome.

Well, it was only 25 years from when he said that.

We had Cavendish and Bradley Wiggins dominating the tour of France on.

You've got to give Tebbit some credit for that.

He was either 25 years ahead of his time or 300 years behind it.

Those two are not mutually exclusive in British politics.

Well, this week, Tebbit sent a letter suggesting an idea that he feels would kill two birds with one stone, which is true if those two birds represent civilised society and one stone represents a crotchety old man's stupid f ⁇ ing idea.

He suggested that young unemployed people should be forced to pick up weeds in exchange for unemployment benefits, which is either, Andy, the opinion of an arsehole or the opinion of someone who has a lot of weeds in his garden and who is is also an arsehole.

His exact letter read, Landowners who wish to control ragwart, which I believe is a weed, face an impossible task when roadside virtues are dominated by it to an extent that I cannot remember in the past.

There would be little cost to bring that under control if neats and low-level criminals were required as part of their contribution to the society which finances them or which they have abused if they were used to uproot this weed.

Now, you probably think a lot of things there, but chief amongst them might well be, what the fk is a neat?

And that's a valid question.

Because a neat,

as he refers to them, apparently stands for a person who is not in employment, education or training.

And you really get the sense that Tebbit has learned that acronym to try and desperately wean himself off saying the word peasant, which I think rolls much cleaner off Tebbit's tongue.

Ragwall is a real problem, though.

Is that

makes animals sick?

Really?

How much do they have to eat to make them sick?

Not much.

Right.

Just a field's worth.

So Tebbit is camouflaging an understandable love of animals

under right-wing political rhetoric.

That's a curious way to go about things.

In UKIP news, the UK Independence Party, the political party which has managed to reduce the British psyche down to a jus source of its worst qualities, has a new song from former Radio 1 DJ Mike Reid.

It's called the UKIP Calypso and it features lines such as leaders committed a cardinal sin.

Open the borders, let them all come in.

Illegal immigrants in every town, stand up and be counted, Blair and Brown.

And I have to say, Andy, it's a little ironic that the musical style of choice was Calypso, which is, of course, sonically a bit of an immigrant.

Coming over to Britain, Andy, taking over from all our good, hard-working lute music.

It's not right.

It's a truly extraordinary song.

Let's just hear some of the mellifluous.

Leaders committed a cardinal sin.

Open the borders, let them all come in.

Illegal immigrants in every town.

Tones that that have seen the song reviewed as the greatest piece of British music

since Bodicea sang karaoke on a hen night.

So there you go.

I mean it's very hard to argue with creative output like that.

Some of the reviews of this song

from the music press

described it as quotes like staring into the arsehole of Satan.

The lyrical equivalent of smashing yourself in the nuts with a garden shovel.

The NME I believe described it as the logical end point of all Western civilization.

It's hard to see what further creative carrot chunks can be vomited into the cultural sick bag after this.

It makes one regret that cavemen ever discovered that if you line up dinosaurs with different sized skulls and whack them on the heads with a big stick, you can get a half-decent tune out of them before they eat you.

Admittedly, that wasn't actually published, but it's just surely

a matter of time.

Has it had a lot of airtime states?

I don't know

how hard British musicians work to make the break on

inside

and clearly Mike Reid has got one eye on the US market here.

The only review here has been from Kirk Obain, who released a statement saying, I'm so glad I'm dead.

I'm so, so glad.

As if the song wasn't conceptually fundamentally flawed enough, Mike Reid opts to sing the Calypso, of course, in a mock Caribbean accent, which...

Which he defended, apparently, by saying, it's a satire and a bit of fun.

It's not terribly serious.

It wouldn't have sounded very good sung in a Surrey accent.

But the problem with that is it seems to imply that it sounded anything other than horrific being sung in a Surrey accent pretending to be a Caribbean accent.

Yeah, he did say it was an old-fashioned political satire, pretty old-fashioned, I'd say at least 150 years old-fashioned.

And those words he said, you cannot sing a calypso with a surrey accent.

I think that's quite a reliable guide.

So if you do have a Surrey accent and you are thinking of singing Calypso, either A, don't sing Calypso, B, check the lyrics first just to make 100% sure there aren't any words, verses or entire songs that might sound just a little bit on the racist side of the seesaw if being sung, for example, with a Surrey accent, or a lot on the racist side of the seesaw if being sung with a Caribbean accent by someone who usually has a Surrey accent.

Alternatively, C, ask a professional Caribbean Calypso singer to sing it for you.

If he reads the lyrics and calls you a it's probably time for a rewrite

it's it's racism is not even perhaps its worst flaw Andy.

It's the fact it's an artistic abomination that is even worse.

It has a catastrophic couplet like this.

It says with the EU we must be on our metal want to change our lawnmowers and our kettles.

And

I read that line again and again and again this morning, Andy, and I'm not sure I've ever been happier to have left the country than after reading those words.

Well, I don't, I mean, they do.

And that's what the EU has been all about.

I mean, it might have started under the rather obvious cover of trying to stop Europe slaughtering itself every 25 years in an avoidable mechanised conflict.

But it was all really about making us get confused between lawn mowers and kettles, which, because as a nation, one of our greatest traits is that we're very good at tea and very good at gardening.

And Europe resented that and wanted us basically to

mow our tea leaves and boil our lawns.

So thank God for people who speak the truth to power like Mike Reid.

John.

Reid defended himself by saying, I do not have a racist bone in my body.

But bones tend not to be the major problem with racists.

Brains and larynx is traditionally more of an issue.

In other UKIP news, the party have announced that if they win next year's general election, they will use Britain's as-yet-untouched nuclear deterrent to blast cracks into the Earth's crust up the whole length of the English Channel and the North Sea to leave the UK on its own personal tectonic plate, finally embracing our destiny as not part of Europe.

And as an extra bonus bugle treat this week, recently it was the 300th episode of Answer Me This, the podcast featuring Ollie Mann, to who I am not related in any way, and Helen Zoltzmann, to who I am completely related in a very much brother-to-sister relationship.

And

in their 300th episode, they had interviews with various

global mega celebrities such as myself and

expats such as John.

And this is what John and I recorded for their 300th episode.

Hello, Answer Me This listeners.

I am Andy Zoltzman, the elder brother of Helen Zoltzman, who you may know from the show, Answer Me This.

With me from Stateside is Mr.

John Oliver.

Hello, John.

Yes.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Helen.

Hello.

What do they call their listeners, Andy?

Answer me this das.

I don't know.

Answer me vipstas.

Okay.

Answer me, answer me this.

Answer me this, nerd.

We have a few answers for you that from the questions you've set in brian from windsor wrote andy stroke john answer me this why in football is a nutmeg called a nutmeg

ah that is well that is a genuinely interesting question andy and the answer is of course that uh uh the smell of shame uh is is a has a nutmeg hue to it oh really and when the ball is placed through your legs uh you're humiliated and uh you will from your glands behind your ears you will excrete a spice,

a shamey spice, which, yeah, the nose naturally identifies as nutmeg.

There is a cinnamon hue to it, but nutmeg is the dominating characteristic.

Also, there's another link in that footballers who are particularly good at nutmegs, like nutmeg itself historically, are ridiculously overvalued and traded around the world.

Charlotte asks, different recipes call for garlic to be chopped, others say to crush it or to slice it thinly.

Andy stroke, John, answer me this.

Does this make any difference to the flavor?

No, you don't, you just want to throw the whole thing in and hope for the best.

Really?

Just the whole

heads of God.

I say you want to crush it, but you don't want to crush it physically.

You want to crush the garlic spiritually because then it sweats out its despair.

And the taste of a despairing garlic is, I think, 18% more tasty than the taste of an optimistic piece of garlic.

So I'd say crush it.

That's why French food is so garlicky.

Managed to imbue it with a sense of ennui.

That's right.

It's all those arty films with no real ending.

This one came from Callum.

I've recently entered into a long-term relationship.

Do you have any tips for making a long-term relationship work?

Well,

I would say, Andy, that it's not a great sign that he is Skyping questions to a podcast

about this.

Well,

I don't...

That is,

if you have questions, they should be for a trained professional.

This is not the way.

Asking Andy and I this is basically pronouncing your current relationship dead.

Well, I mean, I think I'm quite a good person to ask because I've just celebrated my 10th wedding anniversary to Helen Zoltzmann's sister-in-law, coincidentally.

And I would say the secret of our relationship is...

My wife being superior to me at almost everything that we do together.

Right.

Just the knowledge that I am batting way above average, I think is absolutely key.

And don't tell her that, otherwise she might start to ask some questions that have no real answer.

Also, you know, our own working relationship, John, and we've been working together on and off, what, so about almost 15 years, 14, 13, 14 years now.

Is that true?

Yeah.

Since my first enemy shows 2001, so that's yeah,

13 and a bit years ago.

That's when we first, I guess, started doing stuff on and so I guess the key to a long-lasting relationship is for one of the people in it to relocate to a different continent after about five years.

That's right.

Yeah, that's clearly the absolute key.

And that really puts the spice in the relationship.

And to basically maintain that relationship through only audio memes and only actually see

once a year.

It's good advice.

That's very good advice.

Very good advice.

This is from Jenny from up north.

We've been invited to a christening for what we thought was a nine-month-old child.

Today, on checking the child's age, we were told that the christening wasn't just for the baby, but also for its three other siblings aged from nine months to 11 years in total.

So, four children.

John, Andy, answer me this: What do we buy for a christening of four children we don't really know, especially with such an age gap between the youngest and the oldest?

We only really know the oldest child.

Can we just buy for her, or should our mere presence be enough of a gift?

So, I mean, I don't know.

That's

well, I think absolutely for a four-child christening that is objectively ridiculous unless you I would at the very least hope they do them all at once.

That's just a quadruple dunk.

That's how synchronized swimming began wasn't it was mass christening

gigantic falling or just or just line them up put the holy water in a bucket and just smash it across them like the ice bucket challenge.

I prefer to think of it as like a power hose.

I would say to an event

as ridiculous as that, especially for kids you don't know, turn up with a fing bow on yourself.

Say, take this bow off me.

They'll take the bow off and just scream in their face, you're fing welcome.

Where do I sit and where's the buffet?

Oh, yes, you don't really need to give them anything because what they're getting out of it is a lifetime of fear of the Lord.

So what more do they need?

That's right.

What more could they possibly need?

And finally, this one be particularly opposite for you, John.

This is from Phil in Triorky.

Answer me this.

Why is the toilet called a restroom in America?

The toilet is the last place that I would consider taking a power nap.

Well, that's because you don't belong here, Phil.

That's right.

If you have to ask that question, you'll never understand the answer.

It's the perfect place for a nap, Andy.

Particularly New York, John.

Body rest.

New York, famously the city that never sleeps.

Not true, it's just people don't see it sleeping because everyone sleeps on the John.

Clearly.

Exactly.

Bugle anniversary section.

And, well, we had a week off last week.

And sadly, that meant that we missed the official seventh birthday of the bugle.

Seven years of pure, unadulterated fact

blasted into the world's

grateful face.

Can you believe it, John?

Seven years.

70% of a decade, Andy.

Yep.

That is a chilling, chilling thought.

It's amazing to think how the world has changed in those seven years.

I mean, you think seven years ago, the internet was still a pipe dream in Tim Berners-Lee's pipe, and he was still trying to light that pipe and smoke the hallucinatory tobacco of progress.

And the first issues of the bugle, of course, were broadcast via a network of yoghurt pots connected by tautly pulled string across the Atlantic.

And every year on our anniversary day, I burn a candle made from the wax cylinders we recorded that historic first episode on.

Who have thought, given John, that our longest-running previous show had lasted 14 episodes spread almost imperceptibly across three years of late-night radio scheduling, that we would have done a show that has now lasted nearly 500 years.

Sorry, almost half a millennium.

Sorry, almost half of this millennium so far.

Seven years ago, Barack Obama was still a humble small-town lawyer dealing with cases about who owned a hedge and whether a dog barking on Saturday constitutes anti-Semitism.

Dreaming of one day struggling to marry the infinite complexities of global politics with the dunderheaded binary dick dangling of the US political scene.

Seven years ago, Berlin was still divided in two.

By the wall, a very long physical metaphor, Australia was just a theoretical landmass that people thought might or might not exist.

Bob Dylan had just won Chorister of the Year for the 12th consecutive year, and sex was illegal in 85% of the known world.

And above all, Colonel Gaddafi was still Libya's undisputable number one, although on the day of the very first bugle, he did write in his diary, I do hope that, if ever, one day I'm filmed being aggressively manhandled to death after hiding hiding inside a sewage pipe in a not even slightly heroic last stand, I do have the decency to think, yeah, I probably did have this coming.

But some things of course never change despite the passage of time.

The stun sun still rises most mornings and gets pissed and falls over most evenings.

Lions are still risking their own lives.

with an unhealthy meat-only diet.

God is still looking on with a ride-at-tached smile about how wound up he steams have made some people.

And you can still buy tickets for my shows on the door of not very big arts centres, even all this time time on New Greenham Arts Centre, specifically this Friday.

You will be able to buy quite a lot of tickets on the door and Canterbury on Saturday.

Then Nottingham Glee, Durham Guller and Stavisher Gatehouse, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, next week details at satiristforhire.com.

Which is quite a long-winded way of getting in a plug for my forthcoming shows.

Thanks to all buglers who've been to the

shows so far.

They've been a hoot for me and hopefully at least a partial hoot for you.

Your emails now, and we have an email here from Fabio Reali with the subject line Germany 7 Brazil 1.

Hello, John, Andy, and Chris, in order of whose name I heard first.

My name is Fabio Reali.

I'm from Brazil.

I'm a fan, but not a huge one, as I'm only 170 centimeters tall.

In Bugle 275, you carelessly accused our President Dilmarusev of being at least partly responsible for this hilarious result again referring to of course when Germany humiliated Brazil 7-1 well the game was held in Belo Horizonte in the province of Neves the other candidate who is senator and former governor of said province and that that means he is as much responsible for that result as our president you need to get your facts right and our reality here in Brazil is that no matter the winner Brazilian football is utterly screwed.

Keep up the good work, Faffio Reali.

I mean he definitely is plausibly Brazilian, Andy, in that he's furious about certainly that joke, but even more, the fact underpinning that joke.

Yes, and sadly, even as the fury with the joke will dissipate, the facts underpinning the joke, I'm afraid he's there for all eternity, Brazil.

It's very hard to see where he goes on nation from here.

Also, I had a number of emails and tweets

in response to my suggestion that there might be a computer game developed in which you play the role of the Ebola virus.

And apparently, that game basically already existed.

So

pandemic is free to play online, informs Rebecca Johnson.

And basically, you are a virus-stroke parasite, stroke bacteria with a goal to kill everyone on the planet.

Now, I mean, that, to me, doesn't seem like the most productive use of gaming technology, John.

I mean,

it's hard to see how civilization can really look itself in the face and say, I've done as well as I could with what I've got.

That is it for Bugle 276.

We will hopefully be back next week with another full bugle.

I realize I did promise you some excerpts from Satyrist for Hire, but unfortunately,

it turned out that editing sound together whilst sitting on trains between gigs and trying to write jokes were not entirely mutually compatible activities.

So, but we will have something for you next week.

Do keep your emails coming into info at thebuglepodcast.com.

Keep your satire requests coming in to satirize this at satiristforhire.com.

I will be doing some specific bugle satire.

recorded at shows over the next couple of weeks for putting out on an impending bugle.

And don't forget to check out our SoundCloud page, soundcloud.com/slash the hyphen bugle.

In the meantime, best of luck to Mike Reid for getting to the top of the charts with his

UKIP Calypso.

I think it would probably be probably the high point in British cultural history.

Until next time, buglers, goodbye.

Bye.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast Mildly Informed which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

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