Bugle 262 – Insane in the Ukraine

This is a podcast from thebuglepodcast.com.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 262 of the Bugle for the week beginning Monday, the 10th of March, 2014.

That calendar just cannot stop itself.

I am Andy Zaltzman, the Quintin Tarantino of the Carbonora.

And joining me from New York City, USA, it's the man who could have been William Shatner if things had panned out very differently indeed on a number of levels.

Small world is the satirical Slap Hammer himself, John Oliver.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

Andy, on Wednesday night, I did a charity event where I had to interview Quest Love, the drummer from the roots, the musical director of the tonight's show, the writer, DJ, restaurateur, lecturer, and current occupant of literally 12 separate jobs.

He is single-handedly keeping the unemployment rate in America high.

I believe he sleeps for 20 minutes a day hanging upside down like a bat.

That is the only fathomable way he can get so much work done.

But the most notable part of the interview was that he had just had some pretty major dental surgery, which had involved him taking gas.

And it is the first time I've ever interviewed someone who is still visibly in a dental gas haze.

He had quite an experience during his surgery.

You know how some people like to take acid and then listen to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon?

Well he decided to load it onto his iPod and listen to it while under dental gas, but have mistakenly put it on repeat and left it on the track which has demonic laughter on it.

And by the time he realized what had happened, the gas has rendered him unable to move and press skip.

And he was stuck in a gas haze listening to an incessant loop of demonic laughter.

That is the definition of a f ⁇ ing nightmare, Andy.

Fully aware of your surroundings, unable to move while your head echoes with the sound of cackling and a man drills into your face.

Sounds like one of my gigs, John.

Apparently, he was trying to summon the strength just to pull the earphones out of the iPod, but he couldn't do it.

And the fact that he could tell that story the same day without harrowingly reliving the appalling experience shows that he's either an incredibly well-adjusted person or he was still high on dental gas.

As a couple of side notes, the teaser to my new HBO show is going to be on HBO this Sunday night after the final episode of True Detective.

I'll tweet out a link to it once it's available.

But the teaser is a fascinating sneak peek into a show that it is in no way reflective of.

And that's just solid marketing right there, isn't it, Andy?

That's what you're supposed to do.

Absolutely, John.

Absolutely.

Draw Nike trying to sell you some shoes by showing you a piece of broccoli.

That's how it works.

finally, there were a number of buglers this week who felt the need to alert me to the Onion, apparently doing a version of my Oscar De La Hoya dress joke for their Oscar coverage last weekend.

People seem to

want to see me take some legal action over it, but that's not going to happen.

And I'll tell you why.

One, I'm sure there's nothing epheres going on.

It's entirely possible that two people simply came up with the same profoundly stupid idea.

And two,

you can't sue over a joke that is literally worthless.

It's almost worth me suing just so, and then, and winning, just so I can have a judge say, I hereby find that your intellectual property rights have been infringed, and the court awards damages of zero dollars to the plaintiff.

The reason being this is the single dumbest joke the court has ever been exposed to.

And the only thing worse than one person telling it is two people telling it.

I hereby sentence both of you to death.

So

as always, a section of the Bugle is going straight in the bin.

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The Holodrone is much more expensive than actually going on holiday and therefore significantly better.

Top story this week, insane in the Ukraine.

Crazy insane, got no brain.

Well, to be honest,

it's very notable

the more you get to the stage where you are in charge of TV shows in America, that

your innate punning is coming to the surface.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, quite a dangerous way.

yeah there's a lot of wordplay fight even that Oscar de la Joya joke I didn't realize at the time that is it was that was that a pun on a fashion designer

it was I think look again Annie I can't overstress the little amount of thought that went into that that happened faster than my brain was working well that just shows that

that is your true comedic soul coming out there's someone that's there's someone called Oscar de Laurenta and I don't know if he or she makes shoes or dresses or both I don't know but I know that people like him or her Right.

And I do know Oscar De La Hoya.

Yeah, because I just...

I know that those two names are similar.

Right.

And I could have said the normal one, but instead, for no reason, not even a particularly comedic one, I decided to say the wrong one.

See, I just, I thought, I think it not knowing that that was a pun made it a better joke.

I think you're right.

I think you're right.

I think that's a fair point.

Well, the point is, Andy,

what a week.

If last week was about Ukraine, this week has emphatically been about Russia and I guess to a lesser extent also about the trouble in Ukraine.

That was quite a white-knuckle diplomatic roller coaster the world has been on.

At one point on Monday, it seemed like the US and Russia, two nuclear-armed nations, were headed for all-out war.

The matchup the world has been waiting to see for a century.

They shock-teased the world for 24 hours.

But once again, in an act of almost tantric warmongering, both sides pulled back from the brink just before a gigantic explosion.

Monday was a tense, tense day with one of the most low-key invasions the world has ever seen.

In fact, it wasn't even clear if it was an invasion by Russian troops at one point during the day or just a misplaced stroll.

Apparently, suspected Russian troops, I say suspected because

they weren't wearing Russian army uniforms, turned up in the Crimea on Monday morning and just started standing around.

Locals were seen going up to them and chatting, trying to work out what exactly was going on, whether this was an invasion or an impromptu birthday party.

If it was a military maneuver, Andy, it was a fing casual one.

Although, it is worth remembering that that's basically how the British Empire conquered two-thirds of the world's landscape.

Exactly.

Essentially, just turning up and saying, Do you mind if I put my bag down here?

Thanks ever so much.

That was a long trip.

I'll just sit down in your house over there for a moment.

Would you mind picking my bag up and taking it inside?

Thanks ever so kindly.

Now, I don't suppose you'd be an absolute doll and build a railway line between here and Delhi.

If you need me, I'll be over there pointing a shotgun at you while you're doing it.

Be quiet.

Just hearing some breaking news now in a tit-for-tat move, responding to Russian presence in the Crimea, America has announced that it has occupied Nova Scotia.

The Dangley Canadian Peninsula has been taken over without a bullet being fired, and the US troops have hoisted the flags of their favourite football teams up.

So this is, I mean, this is spreading, John, as all wars do.

Very dangerous.

Here in the US, there was hope earlier in the week that even if Putin would not listen to reason, he might instead listen to the stock market.

There was instability all day on Monday, and a journalist on CNN actually hoped that, and I quote, the market could react as a diplomat.

And here's the problem with that concept, Andy.

Russia seemed to back down.

in a way.

By Tuesday, the market had bounced back completely.

And the worst lesson we could possibly take away from this is that the market engineered an impressive feat of diplomacy and should henceforth function as our moral compass.

Because the market, let's be clear, Andy, the market is not a diplomat.

It is a f ⁇ ing sociopath.

Sure.

Sure, the market might not want a military occupation in Ukraine, but it very much does want factories full of Indonesian 12-year-olds trying not to let their fingers bleed over the low-grade t-shirts they're making.

It'll be a new low for humanity if one of the nominees nominees for this year's Nobel Peace Prize is the market, especially seeing as, and this is true, one of the nominees it would be going up against is Vladimir Putin.

His name was actually put forward as a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize this year for reasons that are not 100% clear.

One, it could have been for his assistance in getting chemical weapons out of Syria last year.

Two, it could have been as a joke.

Three, it could have been as a bet.

And four, it could have been a filing error.

And the person in question was trying to nominate him for the award for old man whose chest most resembles an overstuffed leather couch.

That's right.

Vlav Vlad Putin, the self-styled Rusky Rapscallian, the St.

Petersburg scaliwag, Mickey Mischief from Moscow, the Kremlin gremlin, is not budging an inch.

Well, I mean, that's not strictly true.

The top of his middle finger is budging by about two inches upwards towards the rest of the world.

He said on Tuesday, this was amazing, that Russia was, quote, not considering annexing Crimea.

Very much like I am not considering whether to come into the recording studio for the recording that I'm now already doing.

And there's been further spanners thrown in the works by the Crimean MPs in the local Crimean government who voted in favour of a law declaring Crimea part of the Russian Federation by 78 votes to nil.

78 nil, John, 100%.

That is a suspiciously Russian-sounding margin of victory in a vote.

That is the kind of margin of victory that Vladimir Putin himself would consider a little bit of a disappointment and vow to work harder to bounce back from.

It really would be incredible, Andy, if he won the Nobel Peace Prize this year after getting up to this level of border and fragting

shenanigans.

There have been some ludicrous nominees and indeed recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in the past, but Vladimir Putin winning it this year of all years would really be something.

If he won, Putin, I think, would have been the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to strap the award to the front of a tank and drive it straight into central Kiev before doing doughnuts in Independence Square, saying it's not an invasion, how can it be?

I'm the king of peace.

The financial side of it has had some

quite a lot of attention here.

There was a government document that was photographed being carried into Downing Streets for a meeting of senior ministers that said that London's financial centre should not be closed to Russians, basically saying we'd like to do a bit more, but it is economically inconvenient.

And it shows that we in Britain, we will stand steadfast in defence of our principles.

The document also suggested that Britain should push Ban Ki-moon to take the lead in calling and creating a forum for engaging Russia on Ukraine.

So there is nothing more that we can do, John.

No sacrifice is too great for maintaining the sanctity of national self-government where it is threatened.

And we will take the strongest action conceivable.

We will urge someone else to create a forum for engaging engaging in discussions.

For we are Britain, John.

We may have lost some things that define us as a nation with the pitiless passage of that unstoppable uberbitch time.

We may have lost, for example, our willingness to fork out for a functioning justice system, our sacred principles of personal freedom, our military's ability to do anything beyond being mentioned earnestly in politicians' speeches, our economic dignity and self-determination.

But whatever else we may lose as a nation, and by lose I mean willfully abandoned for short-term economic and ideological pettiness, we will always steadfastly retain our innate British ability to urge someone else to create a forum for engaging in discussions.

No giggling.

That was so rousing, Andy.

You're a downbeat church.

That's right.

The last thing you lose is a one-time political heavyweight.

And just before you thought Putin could not make this situation any more tense, he even conducted a long-range missile test on Tuesday in one of the least subtle pieces of gigantic metal dick swinging imaginable.

I wouldn't have been in the least bit surprised if the Russians had constructed a gigantic pair of trousers around the missile, unzipped the front of them,

just poked the missile out, waggled it around a bit and then and only then fired it before zipping the trousers triumphantly back up.

The Russians were at pains to point out that they had informed the international community when they were about to fire it in full compliance with international law.

But of course they did, Andy.

That's the whole point.

They will have loved making that call.

Oh, hello, America.

I just wanted you to know that we're testing a long-range missile.

We're about to fire it.

What's that?

Is this test connected to us arguing right now?

No, no, no, no, no.

Hadn't even crossed our mind.

What a funny thought.

I just wanted to let you know it was happening, that we were testing a long-range missile.

Long-range missile.

Was that?

Could it reach you?

I hadn't even crossed my mind.

Probably, maybe.

I don't know.

Definitely.

I don't know.

Who knows?

Anyway, better go fire it now.

Stay away from your windows.

Just kidding.

Or not.

Bye.

Putin, of of course, the man who puts the na into international law, had a bit of a chin wag on the blower last night with Obama.

A one-hour call.

Now, one hour, John, that must have been quite a lot of small talk, because presumably the main gist of the conversation was

presumably, so, regarding niet.

We really should.

Poshol na hoi.

Either side of that, bit of sport chat, probably.

They both like a bit of sport.

Maybe talked about girls and motorbikes, whatever young guys like these two cats like to chat about these days.

I will quote in the words of the great historian, AJP Taylor from his influential 1978 disco hits, Rara Rasputin, the final decline of Tsarist monarchy 1906 to 1918.

Oh, those Russians.

Well, if you're looking for a positive, that's the good point, though.

If you're looking for a positive from all of this mess, it might be that it seems like the Russia-US Cold War might be back on, at least a version of it.

And that might not be entirely a terrible thing.

Because the beauty is that however much they want to, Russia and the United States can't actually fight each other.

Because if they do, everybody dies.

The world basically ends.

So instead they have to take all that pent-up energy and apply it to something else.

Last time their relationship got this tense, America ended up putting a man on the moon basically out of pure spite.

They just did it because they had a sense that Russia probably wanted to do it first.

So game on again, now I guess, because they either fire nuclear missiles at each other and end life on Earth as we know it, or they start their engines and race to something that there's no point going to brace yourself Mars you might be about to get a flag shoved in you and I'll tell you what John there are going to be some unbelievably fast women 400 meter runners over the next 10 years if it pans out as it could do

that's right David Cameron has I mean he's really stepped up to the plate on this one he has threatened consequences If Russia does not

do the situation, and if things get even worse than they currently are, he threatened more consequences.

consequences.

Those were his exact words.

Nicely vague.

The thing with consequences, John, could be anything from

full-blown nuclear war

to the UK deploying former Olympic javelin champion Tessa Sanderson to the Ukrainian border to throw a javelin onto Russian soil to Cameron urinating on a voodoo Vladimir Putin live on television.

It's a great problem for any British Prime Minister, John, that saying there will be consequences in a posh British accent just does not carry the same weight as saying there will be consequences in a Russian accent.

That is just the fact of the human voice box.

And today, as we record on Friday, just two or three hundred miles away from the Crimea, the Sochi Paralympics is beginning.

Putin has in fact suggested, according to sources close to the bugle, that the entire Ukraine incident is in fact just part of the closing ceremony from the Winter Olympics that got a bit overlong and out of hand, as these closing ceremonies inevitably do.

And further proof of quite how serious this crisis is came with the news that some some countries, John, are considering not sending their dignitaries to the Paralympic opening ceremony.

You cannot send Russia any clearer message than that

at all.

Cameron said a week ago or so, every country should respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Ukraine.

Russia has made that commitment and it is important that Russia keeps its word.

The world will be watching, said Cameron.

And he was right.

Russia did not keep its word and the world is indeed standing by and watching with a bit of a scowl on its face.

All in all, as you suggest, it has been arguably one of the weirdest wars in history, even if it's not technically yet a war.

Alongside, for example, Zanzibar versus Britain in 1896, that was a war that lasted 38 minutes.

Yes, good war.

Britain versus the Netherlands.

That was a 335-year-long war in which there were a total of zero casualties.

Weird war.

Passive-aggressive war.

Yeah, it was declared, it was, I think, late 17th century or mid-17th century.

The war was declared after some dispute about an island somewhere in the

somewhere off the coast of Britain.

And

nothing was done about it.

And then everyone just forgot there was still a war going on.

And a peace treaty was officially signed in the 1980s.

There was the Pig War, discussed in Bugle 78, that resulted in one dead pig, a bit of name-calling and mild bickering between Britain and America.

There was an EMU war in Australia.

in which the Australian military managed to lose a war against some EMUs.

And that is more true than it should be.

And the Russo-Antarctic War, in which Nikita Khrushchev chipped his tooth on an ice cube while simultaneously drinking a mojito and singing Perry Como's magic moments at a Cuban night in the Kremlin during the Bay of Pigs crisis, he collapsed in drunken agony and declared war on Antarctica and all ice until it was pointed out to him that he'd have to invade his own Siberia, at which point he said, Oh, balls, war's off.

The war lasted only eight seconds and resulted in just 120,000 Russian deaths.

That's just the way they used to do their wars back then.

Ancient virus news now and there was a particularly terrifying story this week unless you live in Ukraine, Syria, Somalia, Egypt or any of the many many countries where there is a lots of frightening news that is not merely theoretical.

But an ancient virus has come back to life after lying dormant for at least 30,000 years.

It was found frozen in a deep layer of the Siberian permafrost, but after it thawed, it became infectious once again.

Did it have to be Siberia?

Andy, because it was, it was probably trapped under about a hundred feet of historically frozen tears.

And the point is, that sequence of sentences also reads like the plot on the back cover of an abandoned VHS tape found behind a liquidated blockbuster.

Ice virus.

Jean-Claude Van Damme is Professor Dublinsky, who accidentally releases a 30,000-year-old disease while drilling for frozen Siberian plutonium.

Can he defeat the ancient disease with a roundhouse kick?

Yes, he does.

This film is 93 minutes with occasional boobs.

The French scientists

who've discovered it say the contagion poses no danger to human or animals, but other viruses could be unleashed as the ground becomes exposed.

I tell you what, Andy.

That sounds like a pretty sweet sequel to Ice Virus.

Ice Virus 2.

Jean-Claude Van Damme is back as Professor Dublinski.

Gerard Depardieux is arrogant French scientist Dr.

Camembert.

Damn it, Dr.

Camembert.

How could you let another virus escape?

Silence, Dublinsky.

You know nothing of my work.

Do not think that one of your roundhouse kicks can kill this virus.

Can Jean-Claude Van Damme defeat the virus with a roundhouse kick?

No.

Does he do it with a karate chop?

Yes, he does.

This film is 92 minutes with frequent boobs.

Solid sequel, Andy.

Solid sequel.

And that coming from you, John, that means a lot.

That means.

Box office smash and artistic vortex.

Well, the interesting thing about this

forest, it's from 30,000 years ago.

That is technically from before the world even existed, if Little Billy Bible Writer is anything to go by.

And this virus is absolutely massive, John.

It's the biggest virus ever found.

So big that you can see it under a microscope.

It's 1.5 micrometers in length.

But what, John, you have to ask, what if, deeper in this permafrost, they find even bigger viruses, maybe the size of a marrow or a cat?

What then, John?

I do not want to spend the rest of my life batting off killer viruses like irritating tennis balls at a badly positioned picnic.

That is

not how I see the future.

And it raises a number of very

very important questions,

this thawed-out virus.

For example, could dinosaurs come back to life?

Why a virus is all such dicks?

Would you trust Vladimir Putin with a test tube and a big chunk of Siberia?

The answer to that is the Popa Gog-Go dancer.

And from a British perspective, could Captain Oates be found on Antarctica, thawed out and brought back to life?

He could really spice up some celebrity chat shows.

I would love to see that happen, John.

Would you have him on your show, Captain Oakes, if he was

sounds?

Definitely.

But he'd have to be plugging something, Andy.

You've got to have a natural conversation to talk around.

Not just, where have you been?

Any funny stories from your death?

That's not going to fly, Andy.

He can do that on network TV.

Or he can play ping-pong with Jimmy Fallon.

He's got options.

I'm saying, just come with an agenda.

In other Armageddon-related news, there's a couple of other stories that maybe link in with this.

There's one from Lancashire in northern Britain, northern England.

A teenage boy has built a nuclear reactor at school.

Again, what could possibly go wrong with that?

Ice Virus 3.

That's right.

You just know when you read.

Yeah, that's just going to end up with

a hot guy and a fit chick running around in overtight t-shirts whilst zombies conquer the earth.

And also this week, a chunky little asteroid zipped between Earth and the moon at 30,000 miles an hour, missing, smashing into the planet and destroying everything by just a few thousands and thousands of miles.

Ice virus 4 there.

So what is...

I don't know what you think the most likely Armageddon scenario is, Buglers.

I guess the options are A, deadly mega virus the size of a dog.

B, teenage boy explodes homemade nuke in bedroom.

3.

Asteroid misjudges fly past and splats into Earth again.

D, Ukraine gets funky and sparks a worldwide nuclear flip out.

E, Wrath of God, basic wrath of God, or even F, F, fracking, causing the earth to crack like a teenage egg.

Basically, John, it's hard to see one of those not happening within the next 18 months.

Pope news now.

The Pope, Andy, is increasingly beloved by the global media, whether he's expressing his historic and groundbreaking partial tolerance of gay couples, or finding himself, as he did this week, holding up a baby handed to him in the crowd dressed in a little little pope costume.

people can't get enough of Pope Aldinho I.

So much so that a new magazine has been launched in Italy this week.

A glossy 68 page real life magazine called Il Mio Papa My Pope which hit newsstands on Wednesday and this might be his first genuine miracle Andy.

The Pope has brought print journalism back from the dead.

Some popes get sainted for making the blind see.

This pope instead decided to go full Lazarus on the magazine industry.

It is a true miracle, Andy.

There was no pulse in magazines, none.

They were just corpses littering pavements across the world.

And now a new one is suddenly getting up and walking around screaming, I can sell.

Oh my god, I can actually sell.

Sounds like a real pace turner, though.

My Pope.

My Pope, is it weekly or monthly?

What are we looking at?

It is weekly, and apparently, each weekly issue is going to have pronouncements and photographs in it with peeks into the Pope's personal life.

Each issue will also include, and this is true, a pull-out centerfold of the Pope, accompanied by a quote.

What a lovely thing to put on your bedroom wall, Landy.

Perhaps the quote will be, I can see what you're doing, and unless she's about to get pregnant, you're both going to hell.

The magazine's editor, Aldo Vitale, said it's it's sort of a fanzine, but of course, it can't be something that you do for one direction.

We aim to be more respectful, more noble.

Wow, really?

They're aiming incredibly high there, Andy.

More noble and respectful than a one-direction fanzine.

To be honest, you could take a dump on a piece of cardboard and be more respectful and more noble than a one-direction magazine.

Seriously, Andy, which is...

more noble a piece of reading matter?

Liam tells us his five favourite serials and Harry reveals his top ten eye colours in a girl.

Or you can go for something more substantial and read a human shit on an old cornflex box.

One direction would be quite an appropriate name for a magazine put out by the Catholic Church.

True, true.

Not the most directional

towards the past.

You'd think the Pope would be flattered.

by all of this, but in fact he seems a bit uncomfortable with his newfound popularity.

In an interview with the Corriela de la Sera this week, he said he doesn't appreciate the myth-making that has seen him depicted as, on a quote, superpope.

So

he doesn't want people to think he's a superpope, but to be honest, Andy, isn't that exactly the kind of thing that super pope would say?

He'd want to conceal his superpope identity.

Also, the modesty thing...

It's just a little bit hard, Andy, to swallow, coming from the head of the Vatican.

Please, I'm far too humble to want to be called a superpope.

You can simply refer to me as the infallible church leader appointed directly by God.

I'm just a regular guy who people kneel before.

He said a couple of interesting things this week.

He's defended the Catholic Church's record on tackling the sexual abuse of children by saying, no one else has done more to root out paedophilia.

Which is rather eerily reminiscent of cigarette companies saying, look how many lives we've saved by making our cigarettes low-tar.

We are the heroes.

Why are you still giving a shit?

And the other interesting thing he said this week was f.

Apparently, inadvertently, in a speech in Italian last weekend, he used the word casso,

which is the equivalent of f

rather than casso, which means case.

And

one article I read about it from a British newspaper said, this makes Pope Francis the first pontiff in history ever to let slip an expletive in public.

Now that, John.

In public, yeah.

Well, that simply cannot be true, John.

When you look at all the naughty popes in history there have been.

John XII, I think we discussed him recently on Bugle.

I bet he stood on the balcony in St.

Peter's when he was poping it up all over the shop in the 10th century and said to the entire congregation, I'm gonna f you all before

grabbing his crotch and gobbing off the balcony.

And he'd have meant it too.

He would have meant it.

Boniface VIII, the old turn of the 14th century pontiff, squabble with poetry celeb Dante, who in his smash hit comedy, the divine comedy, plonks little Boniface in the eighth circle of hell, or Florida, as you call it, John.

Boniface VIII, he smashed up an entire town near Rome, killing 6,000 people and destroying a shrine to the Virgin Mary.

That is not the most popey of behaviour.

And it is hard to believe that at some point in this little rumble of his, he did not turn around to one of his cardinals, flamethrower in hand, and shout,

yeah, this is what I'm talking about.

14th century historian John Gower, John, he a very elegant left-handed historian, claimed that

Boniface tricks Pope Celestine V into abdicating by having a young cleric pretending to be the voice of God speak to him while he was sleeping and convince him to abdicate.

No way.

How is this the first time I'm hearing this story, Andrew?

Is this true?

Yeah, well, it's true that it was written by a 14th century historian.

That's fine.

I mean, I'm fine.

That's credible as far as I'm concerned.

This is too good not to be true.

If that is true, could could Pope Boniface Boniface VIII

possibly have pulled off that stunt without saying afterwards,

that was funny.

That was funny.

No, it's impossible.

Here's another thing by Gower,

who was

not necessarily the most reliable historian, but had a lot of flair.

He repeats the rumour that...

That's some pretty niche references for any cricket fans listening.

That Boniface died by gnawing off his own hands.

But

now,

he attributes this to hunger rather than a deliberate suicide attempt.

Well, you'd hope so.

But I challenge any bugler out there to eat off their own hands without swearing.

That is not possible.

Because it's either going to be very painful or surprisingly tasty.

Either way, you're going to struggle to keep control of your language.

Fair point.

Fk that hurts.

Holy shit, that's delicious.

Yep.

Popes, I'm just saying popes have sworn.

And we just tend to exaggerate everything these days.

But I've got to say, Andy, it was the first thing you said before the holy f incident that really shocked me.

So I've got to say, when this new Pope came into office,

I've been experiencing a little bit of a crisis of faith in the Catholic Church, specifically in its ability to function as an almost cartoonishly reactionary force permanently stuck in a 13th century sense of morality.

It's been a confusing time.

My faith in the destructive and self-destructive force of the Vatican had been unshakable my whole life, Andy.

And this Pope seemed to threaten to overturn that with his seemingly progressive views, which is why I was so relieved in a way to experience my kind of come to Damascus moments when, as you mentioned, in the same super Pope interview with the Corriella de Sera, he said, and I quote, no one has done more to prevent child abuse than the Catholic Church.

And suddenly, Andy, faith restored.

I will never doubt the church's ability to disinpoint again.

In the interview, Pope Francis explicitly defended the Catholic Church's record on tackling the sexual abuse of children by priests, saying no one has done more to root out pedophilia.

Well, if that's true, which it isn't, Andy, but if it is, which it absolutely isn't, but if it is, it might be worth mentioning that no one has done more to provide cases of pedophilia to root out either.

In fact, the more I think about it, almost every organization in the world has done more to root it out, root out child abuse than the Catholic Church.

I think Reebok has done more and Reebok hasn't really done anything.

These comments were in response to the United Nations last week denouncing the Catholic Church for their systematic cover-up of child abuse and accusing the Church of systematically placing the preservation of the reputation of the Church and the alleged offender over the protection of child victims.

And the Pope strongly rebuffed these claims, saying that I quote, the Catholic Church is perhaps the only public institution to have acted with transparency and responsibility no one else has done more yet the church is the only one to have been attacked well hold on Andy it's easy to mock that but let's let's pause for a moment because if the Pope honestly feels that the church has been abused if he has evidence of that abuse or even just an inkling that abuse of the church has taken place we must address that because I'm sure everyone would agree that to not address and immediately investigate any claims of abuse whatsoever That would truly be unforgivable.

Well, that is all for this week's bugle.

I'm afraid no time for emails because John has to go and have

his mouth chainsawed off by a dentist.

That's right.

So, good luck with that.

I've got to get a root canal, root canaled.

I don't know what that means, but it sounds fun.

I've got to fire up dark side of the moon.

So, we'll be back.

In fact, we're off next week because I'm going off to India for just a week.

So we'll put something out as a bonus sub-bugle next week and then we'll be back in two weeks' time with Bugle 263.

In the meantime, best of luck to everyone in Ukraine.

We hope you're still there by the time the next bugle is broadcast.

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.