Bugle 268 BrokeSadleBack Mountain

This is a podcast from thebuglepodcast.com.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 268 of The Bugle, audio newspaper for a mercilessly visual world for the week ending Friday the 9th of May 2014.

That's right, week ending.

We are now temporarily at least switching to a Thursday recording in an effort to make news happen one day sooner, thus giving the planet Earth a crucial competitive advantage on its rivals.

To help it maintain that number one ranking in the solar system, I'm Andy Zoltzmann live in London.

The city that has once again beaten its old Siberian rival Verkhoyansk in its annual head-to-head who can have the warmest winter contest, 150 wins in a row.

Barely even be bothered to celebrate anymore here in London.

And in New York City, a 21st century entertainer in a 20th century city using 19th century technology, a telephone, wearing an 18th century wig, as he always does for this recording, and with a 17th century attitude to America, just stop the Dutch getting hold of it, everything else will take care of itself.

It's John Oliver.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

Well,

the HBO show is up and running, or at the very least, up and walking.

The point is, it's up.

And thank you so much to buglers who are tuning in.

And to buglers who are not tuning in Let me simply say this what the f?

You're killing me.

I made it clear that I needed every single one of you.

What the f are you doing?

Now our first two shows have been based around the Indian elections food labelling the death penalty and Sharia law in Brunei.

Why?

Because I know what people want Andy and I'm not afraid to give it to them.

The people are crying out for a 12-minute piece on the death penalty while they're getting ready for bed on a Sunday night.

It's like a warm glass of milk at the end of the day, except it's heated up to boiling point and then thrown straight into your face.

The Indian election piece ended up going viral on YouTube in India.

I think today it has over one and a half million views, which is pretty incredible for something that does not involve a rapping kitten.

And some of the best pushback pointed out that we had potentially got the map of India over my shoulder wrong.

And to that, Andy, I simply say this.

I'm British.

It is impossible for me to get the borders of India wrong.

If I draw them in a certain way, even if they make no geographic sense whatsoever, then that's just the way it is.

What part of your own turbulent history are you struggling to understand?

So this is Bugle 268.

Coincidentally, the number of clauses in the prenup agreement made between Jesus and Mrs.

Christ, according to a recently unearthed biblical manuscript that is unquestionably authentic, found in a municipal waste dump in Minnesota, believed believed to be the first draft of the Gospel according to St.

Luke, entitled Geez, Did You See That?

That's before the agents and publishers neutered it, of course.

In this prenup, the future Mrs.

Belinda Christ apparently stipulated that Jesus was not allowed to metaphorically or literally bring any of his ex-girlfriends back from the dead, have more than 10 of his mates round for dinner at any one time, that's why they ended up going out for the Last Supper instead of calling in some falafel, or turn water into wine whilst she was in the bath.

Some Christian scholars have doubted the veracity of the script, saying there is no way a genuine first century AD manuscript would have been typed in the font Curls MT.

Far too teenagey, said the Archbishop of Canterbury.

They're also sceptical that the gospel would have been printed on recycled economy A4 paper or include the phrase quality us time.

This is Bugle, as I said, for the week ending Friday the 9th of May.

Lest we forget, John, this week has been International Composting Awareness Week.

Of course it has.

Yep.

And

how have you personally marked this photo?

Well, I've been finging aware of it, Andy.

That's how I've marked it.

And what I've done is all my rubbish bins, I've just emptied them all over the floor and I've waited.

That's what it's about, isn't it?

I'm not sure that is what it's about.

I think, I assume that basically it's aimed at eradicating composting,

as we have with diseases.

You know, any disease awareness week wants to stamp it out.

I assume it's the same with composting.

The goal is to stamp out all compost from around the world by the year 2075.

So if any of you buglers see a big pile of vegetation, please destroy it by whatever means possible before it slowly turns into nutritious mulch that can let plants cheat in growing races.

Composting, of course, is a scourge on this planet's long-term future.

It prevents carboniferous matter from being eventually compressed in the Earth's crust to create fossil fuels for future generations millions of years from now.

How are they going to get around if we've waited all our vegetable and plant matter making compost just so our daffodils will work next year or grow some giant libelias instead of making sure our giant 20-foot-high human robot hybrid descendants can still drive around in some sweet wheels like we do.

So do join the No Mate to Mulch campaign this week.

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

2014 marks the 40th anniversary of the invention of the Rubik's Cube by Ernie Rubick, the self-styled Hungarian hexahedron, who accidentally invented the celebrity puzzle whilst working on a prototype for a new rotatable 54-flavor apple.

The cube soon became the most popular thing in the universe and spawned spin-off products such as the Rubick Snake, the Rubick Newt, the Rubick Womb.

That was fiendishly complicated.

I could never work out how to get the placenta to stick, let alone get the baby out.

The you've either got it or you haven't with these things, the Rubick stick, brilliant if you have an easily distracted dog.

The Rubick Air, that never caught on, so the gases proved to be poisonous.

And of course, the Rubick Bickerstaff, modelled on the former British trade union leader, Rodney Bickerstoff.

And to mark the historic occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Cube, we are giving you a free side of an audio Rubik's Cube.

Collect all six sides, then see if you can complete the puzzle.

This week, side one, top row, left to right, red, blue, yellow, middle row, yellow, green, orange, and bottom row, white, orange, green.

Do collect the remaining

six sides.

We will be releasing one every anniversary of the cube that is a multiple of 40, so in just 200 years from now, you'll be able to impress your descendants from way beyond the grave with your amazing puzzle-solving skills.

That genuinely might be in the top five stupidest things that's ever happened on this podcast, actually.

And it's a high bar.

But that really is utterly ridiculous.

That has no point.

Top story this week.

Get rich quick with these unmissable opportunities.

This is not audio spam, buglers.

These are real wealth creation plans from this week that could make you, the listener, rich beyond your wildest dreams in a matter of days.

Matter of days is a figure of speech, not meant to relate to A or any number of days, weeks, months or years.

Riches are contingent of various economic economic fluctuations and details of wild streams may vary ask your accountant if financial problems persist or if your erection lasts longer than four hours back income results may vary the bugle accepts no responsibility for riches won or lost so

with the economy still in recovery mode Some people have gone off the grid this week to make some money outside the traditional methods of wealth creation of either a bit of sweat and elbow grease or the white collar fraud of the financial services industry.

Now, the first scheme only works to be honest if A you are an earl, B you own a mountain and C you are willing to sell it because that is what is currently happening.

A British aristocrat is attempting to sell off a mountain his family owns to pay off a large inheritance tax bill and when I read this Andy I wasn't sure if I was reading a news story or a movie pitch for a bad Hugh Grant comedy

By which I mean a movie pitch for any Hugh Grant comedy.

Boom Andy!

I've not lost my edge.

I'm not afraid to go after late 90s movie stars.

So don't say that I am.

Yeah, the mountain in question is in the lake district.

It's called Blen Cathra or a Saddleback.

I think you used to go out with a girl called Blencathra Saddleback, didn't you?

In your Cambridge days.

Lovely girl.

Mountainous.

And he's apparently the asking price, John, is 1.75 million.

for this mountain.

And as soon as the news of that valuation got out, the Nepalese economy went f ⁇ ing mental.

The Earl in question is the, as you say, the Earl of Lonsdale, Hugh Lowver,

and he has placed the 2,850-foot Lake District Mountain on the market for 1.75 million.

He said it was either that or break up the Lonsdale estate, which has been in his family for hundreds of years.

And this may be, Andy, one of the least sympathetic tales the recession has yet thrown up.

It's an absolute disaster.

We're barely making ends meet.

I can't believe I'm going to say this, family, but we may have to sell the mountain

if I owned a mountain Andy that would be the first thing I'd tell anyone

if when John when well you're right I have to think like an American when I own a mountain

when I own a mountain and Obama is trying to tax it away from me Andy punishing my success

If I own a mountain, Andy, whenever I got off a plane anywhere in the world and they said anything to declare, I would say yes, absolutely.

And they'd say, have you got any fruits, vegetables, or firearms in your possession?

And I'd say, no, that's not what I want to declare.

What I want to declare is that I own a fucking mountain.

Well, that's entirely justified.

And not only with this deal, do you get to own a mountain, you also get to call yourself the Lord of the Manor of Threlkeld.

Yes.

For an extra 300 grand, you can call yourself Alfrazor the Magnificent.

I like that title, Andrew.

It's got a ring to it.

And that ring is of a mid-level Game of of Thrones character.

It is I, Lord of the Manor of Threlkeld, son of my father, brother of my sister, daughter of my mother, and owner of a fing mountain.

That'll put your top back on.

What an email address that would be.

Lord of the Manor of Threlkeld at yahoo.com.

But also, not only do you get that, you also get the grazing rights for

5,471 ewes,

732 young sheep and 200 lambs or even younger sheep.

That is a very specific number of ewes.

5,470.

That could have been some haggling gone into that original deal, John.

I don't have any of those, Andy, but I do have a dog, and my dog is definitely in the market for a mounted to shit on me.

So that might still be useful.

I'm starting to wonder if buglers should find a way to go in on this together, Andy.

And part of the reason is that there is yet another detail that we haven't mentioned yet, and that is that the new owner will be be able to apply for an official coat of arms.

You know what that means, Andvy?

A coat of arms can and should mean a coat of penises.

Who among us can honestly say we have absolutely no interest in sharing the title Lord of the Manor of Fralkeld and scaling the near 3,000-foot peak of Mount Euchris?

The current Earl of Lonsdale, explaining the sale, said we don't want to have to evict tenanted farmers and other tenants and what have you from their houses so we can sell them.

Now, to put this in context for our American listeners, what have you is the traditional term used by the British lander gentry for women and children.

But it's just one of these conversations we've all had, John, isn't it?

You know, we've had to sit down in difficult times with our spouse and say, hey, darling, look, I don't know how to say this, but I'm afraid we are.

We're absolutely skint.

We're on our uppers.

We're going to have to sell the house.

We're going to have to downsize the car.

We're going to have to eat the horse and go on holiday to that bench in the park instead of Mauritius this year.

There is nothing else we can do.

That's it.

It's the good days.

A toast.

And that toast is being eaten by the tax man with our last jar of family jam.

We've still got each other.

That's the most important thing.

What do you mean, sell my mountain?

I'm not selling my mountain.

That is who I am.

I'm the guy who owns a mountain.

Non-negotiable.

If you make me sell that, you might as well make me sell my head, my penis, and my other mountain.

Sorry, did I not tell you I own two mountains?

Oh, no, I probably should have kept you in the loop on that one.

Well, you're saying we could sell one mountain.

I hadn't thought of it like that.

I guess we could, but then again, what is the point of only owning one mountain?

John Robson, the man who is managing the Sailor for Mountain, said it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy one of the jewels in the Lake District's crown.

And he told the BBC that selling the mountain was unlike anything he'd dealt with before.

Yeah, no shit, Andy, because it's a f ⁇ ing mountain.

Well, the uh the naming rights, as you uh hinted at uh earlier on, is uh a very very delicate issue in mountains these days and um there are suggestions that uh they could go the way of sports stadiums and uh we could soon have the world's great peaks such as the Virgin Everest uh and the Ak Akon Kokua and Mount McKinley in association with MasterCard down to minor local hills such as the Hoggins orthopedic Shoe Sierra and Mount Hungry Nigel's Tasty Eats.

Of course we already have Mount Fuji in Japan co-owned by the pop stars Red Fu and Warren G.

And

the way the housing market works, John, you know that, you know, it's going for 1.75 million now, but in 20 years' time, whoever buys this mountain is going to be flogging it for 20 million minimum.

And people will be complaining that it's really hard for young people to get on the mountain ladder.

And many of them having to camp out longer and longer on their parents' mountains, which just isn't really ideal in this day and age.

But also, if mountains are worth this much money, John, it is surely just a matter of time before they turn into the must-have accessory for today's image-conscious celebrity.

A status symbol to be obviously deliberately photographed with and flaunted around in the newspapers.

In fact, just picking up today's Daily Mail on their celebrity page, which is entitled Fing Pointless, there are rumours that the Hollywood heartthrob Ethan Hawke was seen going to a nightclub with Mount Humphreys, the beautiful 14,000-foot Sierra Nevada peak, whilst in India, the Bollywood starlet Katrina Caife has angrily denied reports linking her with Nanda Devi, India's 7,800-metre hunky Himalayan stud, after she was photographed by the paparazzi buying some oxygen tanks and crampons in a specialist mountaineering shop in the northern city of Srinagar.

We're just friends, claimed a blushing cafe, who recently split up from long-term partner Mount Kilimanjaro, claiming that, whilst she was still friends with the Tanzanian former volcano, long-distance relationships, quotes, were really difficult in their respective lines of work.

Shipwreck news now, and uh, look, not everyone has access to a pointy landmass in their profile.

For everyone else, there is only really one other option coming out of this week, and that is for diving for buried treasure on a shipwreck.

Classic Plan B.

A US deep ocean exploration firm recovered apparently nearly a thousand ounces of solid gold worth $1.3 million,

or as I now think of it, a pretty good down payment on a mountain.

And they did this on a dive to a historic Atlantic Ocean shipwreck dating back to 1857.

The success of this dive has added fuel to the fire of the rumors that there may be tens of millions of dollars still down there on the sunken ship.

Apparently, the SS Central America sank in 1857, killing 425 people, triggering one of the world's first financial crises.

It was caught in a hurricane 160 miles off South Carolina's coast and was carrying 21 tons of gold, which was intended to prop up the struggling banks of New York.

And as a result, its loss created a huge financial panic.

And you know what?

There is something quite charming about that disaster, Andy, because that is a refreshingly tangible way to cause a massive financial panic.

The world being brought to the brink of financial implosion due to credit default swaps and the subprime mortgage exposure is something that only really exists on balance sheets.

But the world being plunged into financial crisis because a ship full of gold sank to the bottom of an ocean is something that everyone can basically understand.

21 tons of gold, as you say,

in 1857.

So historically, I think that was when the Yankees started trying to get the money together for Alex Rodriguez's latest contract.

And as you say, that's a lot of gold to put in one single boat, John.

And what I like about this disaster, it is basically a physical metaphor for the history of human economics.

Trusting a notoriously sinkable vessel, a boat, and piling enough gold in it so that in the event that it did crash, it took the entire global economy with it.

Questions have arisen over what will happen if this gold is recovered.

There have already been legal disputes dating back to when some of it was recovered over 25 years ago.

And the problem is, John, this gold is from 1857, suggesting that it would probably be racist gold, misogynistic, and probably homophobic gold as well.

And I'm not sure we want that kind of gold infecting our international system.

From the 1988 recovery operation, 39 insurance companies filed a lawsuit claiming that because they paid damages in the 19th century for the lost gold, they had the right to get the gold that was dug up in 1988.

Now, they'd been sitting on that complaint for a very long time, and that is a dangerous legal precedent.

I mean, you think the Italian economy has never really fully recovered from the sack of Rome in 410 AD and all the insurance claims that flooded and after that for Visigoth damage.

And if they ever find all that secret loot we've got locked away in Britain that we harvested from around the world, we'll be absolutely done for economically, locked away, of course, in secret glass-fronted display cabinets in large public museums, hiding in plain sight.

It's always the best way.

And the Catholic Church, John, could be launching massive legal actions in the event that it does turn out that Jesus was wrongfully convicted.

That one's still going through the courts, even if it was only on a technicality.

Because in the crucial messianic in charge of a donkey charge, they actually named the wrong donkey on the charge sheet.

They named Jesus' old donkey Handsome, whereas, in fact, the offences were committed on his new donkey, Brownie.

He'd sold Handsome to Judas Iscariot with some dodgy paperwork that suggested it had clipped the clopped 5,000 fewer miles than it had.

Sure enough, the bloody thing conked out on Iscariot halfway through a long journey back from yet another disappointing surf weekend on the Sea of Galilee.

Well, disappointing for everyone apart from Jesus.

Look, guys, I haven't even got aboard.

Wee!

And Iscariot always found it hard to forgive his old mucker.

There you go.

Restaurant news now and celebrity chef Scluton Malvain has reacted with incandescent fury to being omitted from the recently published list of the world's 50 best restaurants.

The list is topped by Copenhagen's Noma once again and also features renowned notcheries such as Mugaritz in San Sebastian, The Ledbury in London, Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck on the M4 motorway, basically, and Bertie Beefcake's Big Burger Bonanza in Mogadishu, the world's first triple Michelin-starred burger van, owned by the former bodybuilder Bertrand Harpoon, whose burgers include his signature thrice-slap-shotted puck of ruthlessly executed guilt-free cow, served between two sesame-besieged mattresses of yeast-inflated and heat-metamorphed wheat-influenced dough, besourced with a deconstructed and reconstructed ketchupen rouged or tomato squeege, comfortingly blanketed with a rectangulant of time-ripened, coagulated, udder-originating lactotum of maternal bovoid, or to give it its nickname, the cheeseburger, also comes with a slight slice of gherkin.

Malvaine, however, slammed the judges for being, quote, afraid of the new after they overlooked his newly opened restaurants, the Cooperie in Gloucestershire, in which diners sit in giant coops and are served by waiters and pigeon outfits flying around the restaurant with jetpacks on and vomiting partially pre-digested dishes onto their customers' plates.

And they also overlooked his Parisian newbie, Le Concience de Mour, in which diners are played the dying thoughts of the creatures on their plates, as voiced by leading actors such as Gerald Depardieu, Isabelle Hupert, Sean Connery, who does a sensational haggis, Michel Platony, Joel Batts, John Oliver, and Jean-Baptiste Lagrange, or Monsieur Crevette, the self-styled Marlon Brando of prawn impersonators.

The sensational food is reported to be 12% tastier with a backstory, and diners found that any minor qualms about the mechanised slaughter of their dinner are, quote, swiftly dissipated by the succulent perfection of Malvain's cooking, and the comforting knowledge that most of the animals were only too pleased to take the trip to the abattoir, to bring a bit of variety to their numbingly repetitive daily schedule of eat shit, eat shit, eat shit, get put in a shed, snooze.

These fuckers don't know real food even when it comes straight out of their asses the next day, complained Malvain.

If any of these top 50 restaurants claim to be serving a dish better than my intensively cross-examined soul of long-suspected lamb, justifiably incarcerated in a confinement solitaire within a potato-padded cell of its own ribs, retributively punished with a gush of red current tears, they can go f themselves.

They are fing liars.

Malvane was also furious that his pioneering zero-gravity flotererants, CosmoChomp, was excluded from consideration due to it being located on the International Space Station.

If they're only going to consider restaurants on Earth, he said, they should fing say so on their entry form.

Your emails now, and we have an email here from Ben.

He says, Dear Chris, and Andy, and John, I've been a bugle listener for a couple of years now, and I've gradually noticed that it gives one a rather unique view of many of life's more awkward or difficult situations, often in some inappropriate way.

That's what we're here for, Andy.

Easily, the most inappropriate of these to date occurred last Saturday morning around 9am.

I work at a pretty expensive restaurant, which also has some private suites attached.

It's a fairly regular occurrence occurrence to get minor celebrities, footballers, etc., staying with us.

Serving them professionally and courteously is generally just a case of treating them like any other customer.

This became far more difficult last week when we hosted a guest who was more than your average soap star.

Alarm bells should have been ringing when I spotted the name P.

Middleton on the reservations sheet, but I didn't.

So I was taken completely off guard when her royal sisterness

walked in the door with her latest squeeze.

The temptation to shout, oh Pleva, was

very nearly overwhelming as I showed them to a table, took their order and served their breakfast.

Full English, post-eggs.

Oh, Pippa, good choice.

Unsurprisingly, the rest of the shift was a bit of a bro, as I'm not certain I didn't embarrass myself greatly.

In order to increase my career prospects, I've decided to stop listening to the bugle, particularly just before work, and I'm petitioning my MP to get all three of you fitted with a public health warning.

This podcast can severely impair your ability to act like a grown-up in public.

Yours sincerely, Ben.

Oh, Pippa.

Oh, post egg.

Oh,

English Rose.

Well, there were allegations surfacing in the press this week that

at the famous royal wedding, she actually was using a counterfeit backside.

An extraordinary allegations.

This could be the biggest, biggest

scandal in the royal family, well, since Edward and Wallace Simpson, maybe even since

Charles the First and his little allergy to axes, who knows?

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

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

And if you want to help raise the money for the Bugle Mountain at 1.75 million, then do take out your voluntary subscription at thebuglepodcast.com, where you can also find all the must-have or could-have bugle merch.

World Cup countdown now and it's just five weeks to go until the World Cup America of course have qualified alongside England.

I imagine the excitement is ratcheting up in America, John.

Can you just explain the scenes of mayhem on the streets?

Oh, it's huge, Andy.

If excitement for the World Cup, you mean excitement for the NBA basketball playoff?

Some that's kind of their World Cup in a way.

Some injury news: Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo tweaked a Hamsting for Real Madrid this week, but should be fit for the tournament despite also suffering a perforated quiff whilst trying on a new hat in a backstreet Milliner's in the Spanish capital.

Real Madrid boss Carlo Angelotti explained: I've told the players not to try hats on at this stage of the season.

Damage to their coiffurin could result in three or four hours repairing it at the local hairdressers.

Cristiano has his done by a lady called Pam, whom he flies over from Nantwich three times a week.

Meanwhile, Guatemala midfielder Sanchimiliano Guavacado is ruled out of the tournament after getting his finger stuck in a mousetrap whilst trying to explain the offside rule to his wife using captured rodents.

Russia's Vygor Chechikanichkin of the Russian champion Spartak Moscow out with a suspected lost boot.

He can't find it anywhere.

No nonsense.

Russia boss Fabio Capello will not let the midfielder play in his plimsols.

It's not 1950, said the stroppy Italian.

Brazilian goalkeeper Ternipinho won't be selected after FIFA ruled that his gloves, the fingers of which are made out of boiled turnips, are incompatible with their commercial sponsorship deals with McDonald's.

Turnips are not part of FIFA's core value, said Set Blatter, chowing down on a no-quo.

That's a nugget of questionable origin.

And USA squad player, I imagine this being big news in the States, John.

Johan Santana, ruled out due to being a Venezuelan baseball player.

The Baltimore Orioles star pitcher was expected to be a backup for Clint Dempsey, but despite his $20 million-plus-a-year pay packet, he is neither American nor a football player.

And now, first,

in our countdown of the World Cup's greatest goals, at number three, Argentina 1978.

What a goal!

Oh, a terrific goal.

That is a beautiful goal.

The frame of the goals at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina had a simple construction, posts and a crossbar, with just two short horizontal poles sticking out horizontally backwards from the top corners where the posts met the crossbar.

The goal net was strung extremely tautly, down from these prongs to be fixed on the ground about three meters behind the frame of the goal.

Thus, from the side, the goals had the elegant shape of a sail on a sailing boat.

The diagonal angle of the net and the tautness with which it was strung down to the ground meant that the balls entering the net for a goal high up were deflected swiftly, spectacularly downwards, with the ball often staying within the confines of the goal rather than bouncing out again as if they were afraid of being scored.

You really knew a goal had been scored in Argentina 78.

No side-netting confusion for these brilliantly designed masterpieces of goal chronicle.

The pile-driven 30-yarder was given a pleasingly unarguable aesthetic.

Whack, goal, no arguments, whilst low ground shots gave the net an abbreviated but sharp ripple effect, again decisively signalling goal.

Far removed from today's homogenized goals with their drab corporate uniformity of design and net bulge, the 1978 Argentina goals were classics of their time, unmistakably distinctive, and truly some of the greatest goals the World Cup has seen.

Next week on the World Cup's greatest goals, the sinuously, almost erotically curved goals of Chile 1962.

Oh yeah, like Jane Mansfield and a fishnet singlet.

Good god yeah, no wonder Gorincha kept banging them in.

And as the official broadcasters of the FIFA World Cup, we will tell you all the scores as they happen through the tournaments in June and July.

You will not be able to hear them anywhere else.

So that is it for this week's bugle.

Sorry about the telephone sound quality coming from the States.

We hope to rectify that for future recordings.

Until next week, 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 podcasts right now.