Bugle 250 – No one is madder than Obama…

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The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome back after our two-week hiatus to Bugle 250

for the week beginning Monday the 4th of November 2013

with me, Andy Zaltzman,

back in London and still in the Northern Hemisphere, veteran of 249 previous full episodes of the Bugle, and joining me from New York, the only other performer in Bugle history to have appeared in 249 episodes of this newscast.

It's John Oliver.

That's right, Andy.

Where you bring brass, I bring

six drunk men in a pub rock band.

Happy 250th anniversary, Andy.

It's one thing to effectively waste each other's time, Andy, but to waste the time of people all over the world is truly an achievement.

Congratulations, my friend.

Oh, John, it's touching for you to say that.

We had our sixth birthday while we were away.

Thanks for

those of you who sent messages, goodwill messages or ill-will messages on Twitter.

Six glorious years.

I mean it's amazing to think, John, just six years ago, we were just two kids from the block with a dream that one way we could dance on Broadway.

And you at least are at least 98% of the way to achieving that dream, even if I'm geographically closer to it.

I'm geographically closer.

That's the only thing I've managed to get is physically closer.

So what?

I mean, it's a historic landmark, 250.

A historic landmark in bugle history, and which is, of course, the only form of history the world can truly agree on these days.

It means, John, at 250 episodes, we are now 0.025%

of the way to the big one millionth bugle.

We are also, to put that in context, almost, almost one quarter of the way to the 1003rd bugle.

And we are 18 bugles past the magic 232 bugle mark.

We've done now 20 bugles for each of Jesus' 12 apostles with 10 left over for the waterwalking, wine-wangling, corpse hastling, Hollywood style, moralizing, storytelling, three-time Judean Mr.

Loincloth model of the year himself.

And if you played all 250 bugles, plus the various sub-bugles from the last six years, back to back to yourself whilst in an induced coma, you would wake up with an in-depth knowledge of advanced calculus and an unswerving fear of encyclopedias.

That shows you how long we've been around, John.

You have a way, the kind of way with numbers numbers that you have with words.

You just refuse to obey the basic rules.

So this city, and indeed the entire country, was absolutely awash with people dressed as slutty sharks walking alongside pugs dressed as Darth Vader.

And now...

We can all enjoy the glorious sight over the next few weeks of children walking around in incredibly dirty threadbare Spider-Man costumes because they now understandably point blank refuse to go back to wearing regular clothes.

Why would I wear a button-down shirt when I could be wearing something that has sponge biceps and a mask?

I could be dressed as a dinosaur right now mother.

So frankly that sweater you're holding up holds no thrill for me.

It doesn't even have a cape lady.

The goalposts have moved on what I'm willing to put on my body now.

I will not set foot outside the door in anything less than a fireman's helmet.

That's a fact.

I will not drop below that line.

Now, Andy, I gather that you made an appearance on TV

last week as well.

More specifically,

you were caught in a crowd in Dubai sleeping through an international cricket match.

Now, for such a vocal defender of and champion of cricket, Andy, you don't make a great case for it by snoozing through it.

Well, you say you say in a crowd, John, but this was the problem there were

almost literally no people at this game so i was there with my uh my crick info editor and we went out from the press box to sit in the stands for a bit soak up some of the non-existent atmosphere and it was a you know one of those uh periods of playing cricket where you uh you know not not not all the action is happening at once so we say and um you know somewhere between the beginning and the end of a game you know in those those kind of you know during those five days between the beginning and the end.

And,

you know,

I did, I confess, momentarily shut my eyes and lull my head around like a nodding idiot.

And given that there was no one else in the crowd, the cameras at the other end of the ground

picked me out unerringly.

And the commentator on the tele said, well, it looks like the Crick Info boys are hard at work.

And I woke up from this little micro snooze to a stream of abuse on Twitter.

And it appears that me falling asleep at a cricket match garnered more public reaction than anything else I have ever done in my career.

And that reaction is hot.

I have taken that on board, people.

I've taken that on board.

I mean, you've got paparazzi, Dandy.

That's basically.

Right, let me live my own life.

I'm not just a piece of meat.

You vultures!

Yeah, so

I stopped in Dubai on the way back back from India.

And also, I've been to Belgium for a couple of days on a little

family break.

So, been India, Dubai, and Belgium.

And it made me think about those different countries, John.

If each of those three different countries were a naked man who'd been given £1,000

to get himself some clothes and smarten himself up.

Well, India was a nation with obviously massive poverty.

growing lower middle class and a reasonably affluent upper middle and a few frankly idiotically wealthy croesuses at the top.

So I think if India was given it this thousand pounds, the naked India, it would spend £2 on a functional pair of socks, £8 on a reasonably smart tie and £990 on an unnecessarily flash haircut.

Now, it would unquestionably be an impressive haircut, but it would also be extremely hard to stop your eye being drawn downwards and then back up, man, that hair is sensational.

Stop flicking it, it's making your things wobble.

Come on, at least try to cover your testicles.

Belgium, by contrast, would spend quite a bit of money on a smart shirt, some sensible trousers, a hard-wearing pair of trainers,

a functional weather jacket, a smartphone on a pay-monthly tariff, a total upfront cost of £350.

And it would spend the remaining £650

on waffles.

Whilst Dubai would spend all £12,000 of the £1,000

on surgery to give it the world's biggest man-made penis.

Top story this week, spying update, everybody snoops.

It's got to the point now, Andy, where if you live anywhere in the world and the NSA is not monitoring your phone and emails, you should probably feel deeply hurt or at the very least you should check to see that you're still alive.

The reason we're still finding out about this is that Edward Snowden has been continually leaking away like a BP oil rig, constantly with significant consequences and with no clear way to stop it short of shoving a cork in the USB drive of his laptop the latest revelations showed that the NSA has been monitoring the phone calls of 35 world leaders including Germany's Angela Merkel the news of which is likely to have pissed off at least 35 people including Germany's Angela Merkel although I will say Andy monitoring that last one I don't really have a problem with.

I still think that monitoring the German leader, however dubiously, is significantly safer than not monitoring a German leader.

And I think deep down, even though she's justifiably upset about this, Andy, she can probably understand that.

This is an outrage.

What gives this foreign agency the right to tap on my personal phone?

I cannot possibly let it.

Well, yes, we did that.

We did do it.

Yes, it was a long time ago, but well, when you put it like that, it was, I guess, less than 100 years ago.

Okay, in your position, I would probably do the same thing.

Probably.

Of course, it's a very valid point, John.

A German newspaper described the monitoring of Merkel's mobile phone as quotes the greatest conceivable affront

to which America presumably replied come on guys you of all people should be able to see this in some kind of historical context on the affront scale sure it's not exactly not an affront but it's also not starting a war on a front and then another front

nothing about this is particularly surprising.

I think everyone probably assumed that every country is trying to do stuff like this and the surprise is not so much that the US was successful but that the president at least claims he didn't know anything about it.

Now that seems bad in almost every possible way that you can explain it.

It's bad if he signed off on it and has now been caught and it's also bad if he didn't sign off on it and has now been caught not knowing about it.

The president either comes out of this looking shady or incompetent and he's got a two-item menu of options in response to this.

He's either going to have have to eat an entire humble pie or an entire humiliation omelette and neither is going to be particularly easy to swallow.

I guess the defense for America is to say something like, come on, it's nothing that George Orwell hadn't already made up in a novel more than 60 years ago.

And also the old classic, no smoke without fire defense.

But I guess given the existence of smokeless fuels, you do also need to check everywhere there isn't smoke.

as well as where there is smoke, just to see whether or not there might be a fire there that is burning with an invisible flame, as some fires do.

So I think, I mean, that is America's defense.

You just cannot, you cannot be too careful.

And also, America as a Christian country would say, well, if Jesus had only surveillanced Judas Iscariot properly, he'd still be alive today.

Oh, that is a good point.

Wow, that is a persuasive argument, Andy.

Now, the implication is that the president went nearly five years without knowing that his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders.

Officials stated that the NSA has, and I quote, so many eavesdropping operations underway that it wouldn't have been practical to brief him on all of them.

Well,

that is the opposite of reassuring.

Listen, if we were going to start telling him everything we're doing that he might not be comfortable with, we'd be in the Oval Office all week.

I haven't got time for that.

My daughter has a softball game on Thursday, and he hasn't got time for that either.

He's busy.

Malia's got the flu.

I know that for sure because I've been listening to his phone calls.

The White House moved quickly to deny that it was actively monitoring Merkel's phone.

The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, a man who has one of the worst jobs in the world, said the president assured the Chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communication of the Chancellor.

Okay.

Okay, that's good.

I mean, that's two out of three.

And he does seem to be missing a crucial tense there.

Is not monitoring good?

Will not better.

What about did not?

What about that?

Because that's like being asked in a murder trial, did you kill that woman?

And saying, put it this way, I am not killing her now and I will not kill her in the future.

I think that answers your question.

I'm afraid to go now.

The scale of it is extraordinary, John.

I read that the NSA monitored 60 million Spanish phone calls in a month.

That is 2 million phone calls a day.

That is half a million phone calls per working hour in Spain, John.

That seems too many.

Too many.

It is amazing.

There was a selection of stories.

The Angela Merkel story was broken by the German newspaper Der Spiegel, which is German for the Spiegel.

They reported that from back in 2002, Merkel's calls were either recorded or monitored by NSA officials.

And I mean, how would the president not have been aware of that happening?

Surely at some point he must have asked if they had any information on how Germany might be about to vote in the UN resolution.

And his advisor had said, not sure but Merkel's definitely ordering a pizza right now so take that into account.

And he's clearly said, okay, that seems like a very personal piece of information gathered in a way that I have absolutely no interest in uncovering.

And as you say, it didn't stop there.

The French newspaper Le Monde, which is French for the Monde,

ran a story that the US government had monitored millions of phone calls in France and the next day El Mundo, the Spanish paper meaning the Mundo,

reported, as you say that the nsa tracked tens of millions of phone calls texts and emails of spanish citizens all of which apparently went quiet for four hours in the middle of the day i'm agreeing with you andy i'm saying the spanish like to nap

they love a snooze andy almost as much as they love being chased by bulls in fact when they're being chased by bulls they're thinking about snoozing when they're snoozing andy they're dreaming about being chased by bulls that's just a fact that's a spain fact andy you give them a red blanket and they'll be torn about whether to wave it at a bull or curl up underneath it.

Spain fact!

For those of you who have not read any Hemingway, that's basically his entire IRV summed up.

The editorial in El Mundo, The Mundo, said

the massive spying on Spanish citizens requires a strong response from the authorities.

The foreign ministry should raise a formal complaint.

Mariano Rajoy should join France and Germany in their initiatives.

And as early as Monday, the public prosecutor should denounce the NSA for violation of the privacy of millions of Spaniards, which is punishable by up to four years in prison under Article 197 of the Penal Code.

So, hold on, Andy.

Is Spain threatening to put the entire population of the United States in jail for four years?

I'm not going, Andy.

I can't sleep that much during the day.

I feel sluggish.

I feel sluggish, Andy, if I nap that hard.

Deseit, a German newspaper, deseit, of course, means the lingering sense of national guilt,

said

it's high time for Obama to honour his promise of transparency.

When you say high to, I would say arguably, it is too late for him to honour that promise of transparency, John.

That would be like a waiter in a restaurant honouring his promise of a glass of house white after first serving a glass of house bleach.

It just seems too little, too late.

And another this was another glorious quote from

the German press.

Angela Merkel's phone, it said, her mobile phone is her control center.

Which does sound eerie like a line from a German love poem.

The tens of millions of phone calls and emails monitored in Spain

were just between December 2012 and January 2013, with the monitoring apparently peaking on the the 11th of December.

What the f were they trying to find out Andy?

Were they monitoring what Spanish children were going to be getting for Christmas?

Did they just want to make absolutely sure that Santa Claus wasn't giving little Pedro some depleted uranium?

Now,

a side note to these revelations was that, interestingly, traditionally, the US and four other countries known as the Five Eyes don't spy on each other.

The Five Eyes group are the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

First, there's no way that everyone on that list doesn't spot on each other anyway.

There's no way.

But secondly, and much more importantly, how the f did New Zealand get on that there, Andy.

Were they just thinking, look, New Zealand is mainly sheep, hobbits, and elite rugby players anyway?

We know what they're up to.

It's not just the US which has been caught bug-handed in the last few weeks.

Russia apparently gave out bugged goodie bags at the recent G20 summit in St.

Petersburg.

They reportedly gave out free zip drives with software on them which was designed to download the user's information and send it to intelligence agents at the Kremlin.

Now here's the thing about that Andy.

If you get given a free zip drive from Vladimir Putin and you put it in your computer, you are a f ⁇ ing idiot.

That's like been giving a headache pill from Silvio Berlusconi.

Don't put it anywhere near your mouth.

There's likely to be a lot more to it than meets the eye.

Apparently, Putin said in an interview recently that Edward Snowden, of course, who started all of this, that Edward Snowden himself could feel safe in Russia, although he then said that he found him a strange guy.

Why could that be a wonder?

It's the weirdest thing.

He flinches every time I'm around him, and he continually refuses the offer of my free zip drives.

So, I mean, how's Snowden viewed in America now, John?

He's, you you know, somewhere, I guess, between a...

By a few people as a hero and by a lot of people as a traitor, actually, who should be, you know, strung up called fashion style.

Like a cross between Lee, Harvey, Oswald, Trotsky, and France.

I guess he had a whistle to blow, John, and he's tooted it.

And that whistle actually turned out to be a f ⁇ ing great ocean liner's foghorn.

And the tune that it has played has been the police's 1983 Smash Hit Stalker Pop classic, Every Breath You Take.

and Every Move Europe has made, America has been watching it.

Every conversation taped, every email scanned, every stool passed has been analyzed somewhere in a laboratory in Langley by some extremely demotivated CIA operatives who have dreamed of assassinating inconveniently elected Latin American nut jobs, but are instead sifting through shit for no reason.

That's what America's been reduced to, John.

Dark days, dark days for the land of the free.

Amongst the people that America spied upon, not just the 35 world leaders, but also

the future Pope.

What?

Yeah.

I was reading this.

Probably some rabbis as well for the sake of balance.

Definitely some Muslims.

Brian Wilson, the

Beast Boy Extraordinaire.

I think they just wanted a heads up on the long-awaited Smile album before it came out.

Bill Belichick, the head coach of the New England Patriots.

He was snooped on.

Did the White House leak the Patriots' offensive strategy before the 2011 Super Bowl defeat to the New York Giants?

I mean, we haven't heard otherwise.

But the Pope, John,

the current Pope of the Year, Pope Francis, during the conclave in which he was Pope-picked,

they snooped on him, John.

But I guess if you're going to wear hats that can conceal a satellite disc, what the f do you expect?

And

the snooping revealed that the Cardinals

in the conclave were on very relaxed first-name terms with God.

Surprisingly informal, calling him Ian on several occasions.

Healthcare update now.

And well, look, Americans have always seen health as a frontier to conquer, and pushing cholesterol scores beyond what medical science thought was humanly possible.

But with the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare starting to get rolled out, the idea is that that might and perhaps should change.

It's a well-intentioned, if complicated, law, but that's what happens if you take a simple moral idea and let lobbyists f ⁇ the shit out of it before handing it back to you.

Now, unfortunately.

Oh, isn't democracy fun.

Oh, God, it's so depressing.

Unfortunately, the new website that the governor has set up to sign up uninsured Americans onto the new exchanges has been a mess.

Now, look, I'm no computer whiz, Andy, which is obvious because I just use the term computer whiz, which is a phrase you would usually find in the confused vocabulary of a grandparent.

You're a computer whiz.

Can you get onto the YouTube and print me out my hernia medication?

Now, people who've tried to log on to healthcare.gov have been confronted with an error page filled with question marks and incoherent data.

Again, Andy, I'm no expert, but that just doesn't look good.

Has the website been hacked into by the Riddler?

Is our only hope that some tech-savvy Batman will crash through the ceiling and save us all?

It's just, it's a true mess, Andy.

Again, it will be able to do great things if this website will fing work, which it seems it f ⁇ ing won't.

And I cannot understand, Andy, how this could have happened.

They knew this rollout was going to be critical.

And now the screen looks like the entire website has a virus because some idiot with access to the mainframe downloaded porn, which

does seem like an internet that has Joe Biden's fingertips

all over it.

Right.

I think you could have phrased that slightly differently, John.

Now

imagining Joe Biden's fingertips all over something.

But

I look at this in a more positive way, John.

You know, it's a very clearly divisive, controversial policy.

And the last thing that Obama would have wanted was for everything to go smoothly.

That would have just looked like showboating and rubbing Republican noses in it.

And it has, of course, proved controversial, the Affordable Care Act, due to the belief of many, many Americans that care is already affordable for those who can afford it and are therefore worth caring for.

I mean, right.

I mean, there are some linguistic pyrotechnics going on there.

I guess technically, grammatically, they're almost right.

It's just that's definitely not the point.

The president called a press conference where he said, no one is madder than me that the website isn't working as it should, which means it's going to get fixed.

So, is that how the White House is going to operate now, Andy?

Everything gets sorted out just as soon as the president gets angry about it.

Like some kind of legislative hulk Obama mad Obama smashed complicated coding problems with fist now new website work

I imagine quite a lot of American news channels just cut that statement off after no one is madder than me as well

so how are they going to fix this well The White House has claimed that they're going to attempt an, and I quote, a tech surge to tackle the problem, which perhaps isn't the greatest choice of language, Andy, to use in the circumstances.

Maybe, just maybe, don't use a word which is synonymous with Iraq.

Because initially they were describing the website problems as a glitch.

And now they're essentially describing it as the Iraq war.

Let me guess.

When you launched the website, you thought you'd be greeted as liberators.

You go in with the website you have, not necessarily the website that you want.

And they attempted to explain it further by saying they're bringing in some of the best and brightest tech experts from inside and outside the government.

government.

Again, I'm sorry, the best and brightest.

So now it's Vietnam as well.

Well the rest of your talking point is going to be.

Don't worry, we are going to Nagasaki this issue.

This website is our Alamo, but in a good way.

We can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you, and the people who knocked this website down will hear from all of us soon.

There is so much misinformation around now about the Affordable Care Act and what it actually does.

And so much of the problem with those misperceptions could all be solved straight away if people could just log on to this website.

And now they're announcing an option which directs users to sign up by phone.

So that's the best solution.

Giving up and going with a different technology altogether.

Why stop there, Andy?

How about if America's one health insurance, they just write a handwritten letter on fine parchment, attach it to the leg of a pigeon, throw it in the direction of Washington and just hope for the best?

I've just logged on to the website actually, and it's just a big page saying mission accomplished.

So not going well.

Oh, God, no.

And

that's a quality reference, Andy.

It's a good joke, but it just makes me sad.

In fact, I heard John Boehner talking about it this morning, saying he tried to log on yesterday to healthcare.gov, and he said all I saw was an animation of Barack Obama shooting George Washington in the face with a water pistol full of pus.

But Republicans have repeatedly tried to derail

the healthcare law, and they seem to be trying to now use this technical glitch as a way of delaying it still further.

And they seem to have the same attitude towards the healthcare law as Wiley Coyote had towards Roadrunner, at least before their final emotional rapprochement when Coyote was terminally ill in a hound hospice after contracting gangrene in a leg wound sustained when catapulting himself into a cliff.

A tearful Roadrunner said after Coyote's passing, I came to respect Wyle as an adversary.

I admired his ingenuity, even if I questioned the source of the funding for his equipment, which seemed at best suspicious, and at worst, obviously linked to either drug cartels or major terrorist groups who wanted a willing guinea pig to test out potential new equipment.

Whether Weill knew the provenance of his many lethal devices, which will one day no doubt bring pain and destruction to many, I do not know.

I prefer to credit him as an enthusiast, passionately devoted to the art and craft of predatory killing in an inhospitable desert habitat.

Wiping a tear from his beak, Roadrunner continued, Whilst I could not call Weil a friend, in many ways he became the touchstone by which I judged myself, my defining nemesis.

He was the Napoleon to my Wellington, the Roddick to my Federer, the Italian prison system to my Berlusconi.

For all our differences, he made me the Roadrunner I am today.

Coyote himself is said to have embraced vegetarianism and Buddhism in his final weeks, finding, his manager said, an inner peace that had eluded him throughout his time as a slavering carnivore in the

I can't believe we've done this 250 times.

I can't even remember what it is.

So meaningless.

I can't even remember what that bit began as.

Is this still the Obamacare section?

Maybe.

I mean, not really.

It started as that and ended up as something completely different.

Thereby functioning as a satire on Obamacare itself.

Bugle feature section now and 250.

Well as we trumpeted at the start of this show this is

this is a truly historic, historic bugle,

a landmark in

the history of human creativity, I would say.

Probably right up there with the 250th ceiling Michelangelo painted,

which was I think in his spare room at home.

The same number of bugles now is the number of Vladimir Putins in in a special giant set of Russian dolls that Vladimir Putin had made as a good luck in your new job present for Dmitry Medvedev when he succeeded Putin as president of Russia in 2008.

There was one tiny, tiny Medvedev in the middle weeping a single tear.

Also the same number of bugles as erotic dreams Silvio Berlusconi has had about Joan of Arc since we first broadcast in 2007.

And the number of times during the final painful hour of his life that Colonel Gaddafi thought to himself one of the following thoughts, relax, I'll get you for this.

Yes, to be fair, I have this coming.

Ouch.

On balance, I'm still winning on aggregate.

This is going to look bad on the telly.

We've all had a bit of fun.

Let's calm down and talk things through.

And, oh, what the heck?

Oh, yeah.

I've been lying to myself too long.

Now, 250 obviously is a very important number in maths and history.

250 million years ago to this day.

Life on Earth was almost wiped out in the Permian-Triassic extinction event.

Coincidentally, the name of a band I was in at school.

And also, coincidentally, a particularly concise review of Smurfs 2.

That was,

I believe, in the New York Flabbergast magazine.

Informally, the Permian-Triassic extinction event was also known as the Great Dying, which was also a term used for John and my gig at the Picture House in York in 2008.

Wow,

that is fair.

250 years ago, little Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, age seven, composed his first ever rock opera called Slimy Burt.

It was a rhythm and blues team's romp through the life of a garden worm, preminiscent of the yardbirds.

250 bugles ago, this happened.

Number one, Monday, October the 15th, 2007, with me, Andy Zaltzman, here in London and in America, John Oliver.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, world, but most importantly, hello, Andy.

Thanks, John.

250 minutes ago in London, this happened.

It's a Bugle Friday.

And 250 seconds before we started recording at the Bugle Recording Studio in New York, this happened.

Good morning, Mr.

Oliver, sir.

Good morning, Wendell.

Thank you, Mr.

Oliver, sir.

Would you like your duck now, sir?

Yes, please, Wendell.

Shot, Mr.

Oliver, sir.

Shot.

Wendell?

Sir?

Off, Wendell.

Of course, Mr.

Oliver, sir.

It would be my honour.

Thank you, Wendell.

I'm now ready to record.

your emails now and I mean it seems somehow fitting Andy that you know when we're celebrating the 250th anniversary of nothing that we received an absolute avalanche of emails about an overhead photograph

from of a Christian

science society church in Dixon, Illinois, which

I mean, look, there's no

easy way to say this.

Their church, when viewed from above,

very objectively looks like

a penis and balls with the penis dog legging left.

Yeah, I mean,

there's no more accurate way of describing that.

It says, I mean, it says,

in some of the descriptions of it, say that, you know, from a certain angle, the church from above looks like a giant phallus, complete with balls and bushy pubic hair.

Any angle, it looks like that.

Any angle, it looks only like that.

It is absolutely an act of God, is what it is, Andy.

Yep.

Well, God invented the jungle rog and sluggards.

Exactly.

So, exactly.

So, it's really a tribute to him.

Yep.

Yeah,

God is love, and love

can be transmitted via the penis.

So, I mean,

who are we to argue with them?

But thank you to those, I believe probably around about 75% of all buglers have emailed or twittered that link to us.

I think you know us slightly too well.

And a lot of you have also emailed in

the story of the Vatican forming its own cricket club.

Stephen I.

Tucker was one of those who said,

dear Andy, Chris, and John in descending order of interest level in this story, the Vatican has formed its own cricket club.

They're hoping to take on a Church of England 11.

Andy,

will you start our chosen chaps Talmudic test series?

Test matches in the Talmud are similarly incomprehensible and lengthy, and cricket doesn't require much athleticism, so we Jews ought to be half decent, right?

At the very least, I expect high-quality bugle coverage, digging up little-known facts about the overlap between cricket and religion.

For example, the suitability of Jesus and the apostles for different fielding positions.

And, I don't know, you have to set them nowadays.

You know, he might not take all the catches.

Probably his handling has gone downhill a bit after the

dangerous.

Come on, Andy.

Come on, splitter.

He cost us a lot of market share.

And

historical cricketers who could have been nuns and vice versa.

Well, I mean...

I think Mother Teresa must have put him in a

terrific little spin bowler, I reckon.

And possibly even a nun's ton pun run.

No, there's no time for that.

There's no time.

No time for that.

No time.

But it is fascinating.

I mean, I've always

an amazing idea.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, a St.

Peter's Cricket Club.

It's got Indian Premier League franchise written all over it, John.

The big money 20 over a side league that is transforming a game of cricket in slightly alarming ways.

I mean,

you can see the Vatican getting involved in that.

John McCarthy, who's Australia's ambassador to the Vatican, described the St Peter's Cricket Club as an example of sporting diplomacy, which would present the opportunity to play against Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs.

And of course, cricket, John, has a long and proud history of bringing peace to disputatious areas, as the almost ethereal Zen-like comm of India-Pakistan relations can testify.

Exactly.

I played cricket against St Peter's cricket club once, and the night ended with one of St.

Peter's failing, trying and failing to pull two Estonian lesbians in a bar in Brighton.

It might not have been the same team.

Oh, right, yeah.

I mean, was he wearing a cassock and a mitre?

He wasn't the most fashionable of men.

All right.

Also, the thing that I think could be most interesting, Andy, in any cricket match between the Vatican and the Church of England is the opportunity for some world-class sledging right there.

Hey, what part of original sin don't you understand, you idiot?

You're getting out next ball and then you're going straight to hell, you f ⁇ ing heretic.

Also, how do you get the Pope out, Andy, when he's infallible?

Oh, yeah.

I feel like you get him absolutely plumb-legged before wicket, make a big appeal to the umpire.

He puts his finger up and the Pope says, hey, put your f ⁇ ing finger down, read the rule book.

Not the cricket rule book, the Bible.

I'm infallible, mate.

I'm still in.

I'm still in.

It's like trying to get Javed Mey and Dad out LBW in Pakistan in the 1980s.

That's a niche reference for our American buglers.

Go and use the internet.

Father Theodore Mascarenus, an Indian official at the Vatican's Council for Culture, said that although the Pope is not a cricket fan, He said, I'm sure that cricket will be another thing that he accepts as part of his openness.

Well, John, that would make him unquestionably my all-time favourite Pope.

If the Pope embraces cricket, I might even consider getting my drong nozzler reattached and

embracing Catholicism.

Here's the problem, though, Andy.

The Vatican easily has enough money just to temporarily canonise the greatest cricket players in the world.

Just get ready.

This Cardinal Tendulka is coming

to a cricket pitch near you.

And finally, this one came from Lucy, who writes, Dear Andy, John, and Chris, in order of who most resembles a newborn baby.

That's both a compliment and an insult to all of us.

Since the birth of my first offering, sorry, my first offering,

I don't know,

you know, if you're into human sacrifice, I'm not going to judge you.

Since the birth of my first offspring a few weeks ago, I've been listening to whatever the collective noun is for a lot of Bugle podcasts, being as it is in the top recommended podcasts in the Laugh While You Lactate section of the NHS Scotland baby book.

I really hope that's true, but I fear that is a lie.

All was going well until the baby heard Bugle 247 and Andy's Philosopher's Pun Run, whereupon he released an unprecedented tsunami of vomit, covering all clothing and soft furnishings within a two-metre radius, moments before the health visitor arrived to witness the sodden aftermath.

Whilst I admit that my baby's physical and emotional experiences are chiefly a response to the smooth or

otherwise transit of milk from nipple to nappy, this gastric emptying event was of such a scale and ferocity that I can only conclude it demonstrates a severe visceral intolerance of puns.

I will have to report this to the GMC and suggest you warn owners of susceptible Neonotes to put down plastic sheets in advance of further pun runs to avoid further lactic accidents.

Yours, Lucy and Leon.

P.S.

He's fine now.

He's cuddled up and gone to sleep.

So there we go.

That's.

You know, if, you know, he's not my target demographic.

Couldn't give a shit, mate.

Couldn't give a shit.

Let him puke.

Dude, get your emails coming in to info at thebuglepodcast.com.

Don't forget to celebrate the 250 episodes you've had for free to take out your Bugle voluntary subscription at thebuglepodcast.com, where you can also get the merch, for which there will be imminently some new additions, hopefully

not in time for Christmas.

I think it'll be a shame to sully our commercial copybook by actually releasing these things at a useful time.

But sometime soon, might be a bag

and a hoodie.

I can't give away any further information than that.

So, well, that's it for this week's 250th bugles.

Great to be back.

We'll be back next week as we embark on the next phase of bugling from 251 to 500.

Now, seems a long way away.

It sure does

a long way.

Let's just try and get to 260.

I'll take 252 at this point.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Andy, over the last three and a half years, I've actually sourced every single one of those sound effects before.

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.