Bugle 249 – America stands that little bit smaller

This is a podcast from thebuglepodcast.com

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 249 of The Bugle, the world's last bastion of truth, righteousness, justice.

Personal health advice, ransom demands, African dance tips and the good old-fashioned fear of the Lord.

This is the week beginning Monday the 14th of October 2013.

I am Ian the Tortoise.

Sorry, wrong job.

My name is Andy Zoltzman, father to a non-murdered son and a daughter in good health as well, husband to a very much still alive wife and I have no particular vengeance beef to grind in this life or the next currently.

I'm in Bangalore.

The garden city of India.

I think the garden has been on sick leave during the last 20 years of rapid urbanization, but still.

And joining me from Chicago, where he's doing his new Chicago-themed show, John Oliver's Chick Cargo a hilarious rump through the seedy underworld of illegal poultry smuggling it's John Oliver

Hello Andy hello buglers yes I'm in Chicago Andy you're in Bangalore and in doing a bugle linking these places together these two cities are now officially twinned in bullshit I expect to see plaques in each place by tomorrow morning and once again this is a shiny example of how you can take technology so amazing and use it for something so pointless.

All we're doing now is essentially the equivalent of taking a space shuttle and using it as a coffee table.

It's completely unnecessary and it's slightly insulting to the technology involved.

So,

how was your week, Andy?

Because I know that the gastronomics scoreboard currently reads prawn one Andy Zoltzmann zero.

Have you recovered from your own personal prawn Mageddon?

I hear that you really taught that prawn who was boss, Andy, and more specifically, you taught it that it was boss.

Yes, that that is a pretty accurate uh summary of the situation, John.

That that prawn that prawn went through me.

It went through me like Henry VIII through a wife.

The uh the prawn of Puna, incidentally, coincidentally, the title of a puppet leader installed by the British Raj in the seventeen eighties, I believe.

So that that that prawn gave me a a proper one-to-one churning.

So

but other than that, it's but it's been grand, and thanks to all the buglers who've been to the shows I've done in Mumbai at Pune, in which I was slightly incapacitated by having spent 24 hours

communing with a god I did not want to be communing with, and in Bangalore last night, as we record.

So, and just Calcutta next Friday to come on the 18th.

So, do come along to that if you're in the area, John.

You're going to be in Calcutta then?

Shard might swing by.

So, this is for the week beginning the 14th of October.

On this day, in the year 222, Pope Calixtus I was killed by a mob in Rome's Trastevere district.

Now, the reason for this, John, is that during his reign as Pope, he had made people fast on Saturdays three times every year.

No food, no oil, no wine.

And the moral of the story is...

Do not stop the Italians having lunch or wine or oil to slick their hair back with, or you will end up extremely dead.

And 105.

Now, you're in Chicago, John.

And it is 105 years to the day on Monday since the Chicago Cubs last won the World Series.

So

big celebrations to

mark the historic occasion, John.

Oh, very much so.

Any day now they're going to win a World Series, Andy.

But that any day may be another hundred years in the future.

I mean, I guess statistically, they're probably

over halfway through the gap between their World Series victories, just by the laws of probability.

Statistically, they should win it, but unfortunately, statistically, they are also the Chicago Cubs.

And

that might be the bigger problem.

And it will also be 10 years to the day since the Cubs fan Steve Bartman plucked the ball from his own fielder's grasp to deny the Cubs a probable place in the World Series in 2003.

Sure, happy day in Chicago on Monday for baseball fans.

On the 12th of October, which is today as we record, in 1823, the first raincoat ever sold was sold by Charles McIntosh, its inventor, in Scotland.

It was initially developed as a medical device to stop Scottish people osmosing when it rained, which they'd always done until then.

In fact, in the famous Battle of Sclooty Baron in 1365, which was fought in a torrential downpour, the English King Edward III described the Scottish forces as, quote, waddling into the fray like an army of giant tomatoes, so red with anger and swollen up.

That's a fact.

And this is Bugle 249.

And 2 for 9, of course, the reaction of Angela Merkel when she went to celebrity chef Scluton Malvain's new geologist restaurant in Berlin, which serves recipes all featuring rocks.

She was offered the daily special, which included some soft, porous sedimentary rock consisting of calcium carbonate deposits.

Two for nine, she shouted.

Bringens me das granitsgeschnitzel bitter, und einer crunchikwatz, und them igneous mustard gesplatz, ichbenein hard rock Fraulein.

And a section in the bin.

125 years ago today, on Monday, the 14th of October, 1888, the earliest surviving motion picture was shot, John, entitled Round Hay Garden Scene, filmed by the French film pioneer Louis LePrance near Leeds in England.

It was 2.1 seconds long, John.

Now, you might want to pass that on to your next director.

2.1 seconds.

Can you honestly claim that they proved by a a similar level of editorial ruthlessness?

These 2.1 seconds involve four people walking around in a garden, two women and two men.

One of the women walking backwards, two of the men walking around the woman.

I think it's two-second satirical slamming of 19th-century gender politics.

Or it could possibly have just been the start of something absolutely filthy before they ran out of film after 2.1 seconds before any of them could even get their tailcoats off.

And a number of films are being specially released to mark the 125th anniversary, including Three Mules in a Donkey Sanctuary, that's a George Clooney vehicle in which he plays the owner of Los Angeles's leading donkey sanctuary, attempting to deal with the hostility of the purebred donkeys against three half-donkey, half-horse hybrid mules who were given to the sanctuary one day by a passing Russian billionaire.

Brutal, predictive satire on species prejudice in 26th century America.

The Fourth Man, that's the long-awaited sequel to The Third Man.

Also, a film entitled Slow Motion Footage of Arnold Schwarzenegger biting the heads off swans.

Pretty self-explanatory and strangely compelling.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week, America has gone f ⁇ ing crazy.

But America has now, I think, officially gone insane, Andy.

I think history doctors are currently checking their watches and are officially ready to call it time of craziness, 12.01, October 1st.

Captain America, Andy, is currently rocking backwards and forwards in the corner of a psychiatric ward, muttering something about how he believes he's a helicopter.

What is happening here is complete madness.

The government is still shut down for no logical reason whatsoever, and Republicans are still managing to poster about like pontificating peacocks about how this clearly bad thing is actually a much more unclear good thing.

But if we look out of Washington, outside of Washington, D.C., Andy, there are other stories that make a case for this being one of the more eccentric times in American history.

It's not just the U.S.

politics which has gone nuts, it's the American judicial system too.

In Ohio this week, a judge ruled that

a man who was declared dead after he disappeared nearly three decades ago cannot now be declared officially alive even though he's returned home and is in good health.

You heard that right.

A man lost an appeal to overturn a legal ruling that he was dead and he lost that appeal in person.

I think the key question is who the f ⁇ was his lawyer, Andy?

How do you lose that case?

It's as simple as saying, Your Honor, the defence calls to stand the defendant.

Yes, there he is.

Arrest my case.

Are we done here?

It's almost like he's an inverse one-man Republican Party.

He's legally dead whilst being actually alive, whereas the Republicans are actually dead whilst being legislatively alive.

And I take an opposite view, John.

I think this is the correct decision by the courts.

I think the law has to be firm on on chances like this guy.

The problem is, you make one exception to a law.

You open the floodgates.

You know, if they let this guy through, who may or may not be alive, as he claims with his moving mouth and his breathing body, then all of a sudden you're going to just have a load of corpses turning up to court saying, oh, I'm alive too.

Come on, judge, give me a chance.

One rule for one, another rule for another.

Yeah, according to the law, he walked in dead and he walked out dead as well.

The dead man walking in question is Donald Miller, who left his family behind in debt when he ran out of them in 1986.

He was officially declared dead in 1994, and then he re-emerged back in 2005, attempting to apply for a driver's license.

Apparently, he was not entirely aware that he'd been declared dead, so has been trying to overturn it ever since due to the fact that, you know, he's f ⁇ ing alive.

But

the judge claims that the state law prevents any death rulings from being overturned after more than three years.

Judge Alan Davis called it a strange, strange situation, saying, we've got the obvious here.

A man's sitting in the courtroom, he appears to be in good health.

He then turned to Donald Miller and said, I don't know where that leaves you, but you're still deceased as far as the law is concerned.

That is an absolutely amazing thing to have to say out loud in a court.

Well, it's this kind of official intransigence that is making America the glorious nation it is today, with its government basically head-butting itself as hard as possible in the face.

I think it's a glorious moment for America.

And his ex-wife's lawyer said that his client was satisfied with the ruling.

Well, of course he is, Andy.

Because he's dead to her and now he can continue being dead to the law as well.

He's basically now, legally, a ghost, Andy.

If he goes into a supermarket, he's technically haunting that supermarket.

His house is, under Ohio state law, a haunted house.

So, John, is there any sign of this shutdown coming to an end?

Because it seems that America, as a nation is being treated by its politicians like an unwanted Christmas orphan and basically finds itself being forcibly caneveled across a now unstaffed grand canyon of political self-interest.

No, no immediate hope, Andy, due to things like the people involved.

That's the problem.

Well, I guess as the old saying goes, you can't spell Tea Party Republican without f ⁇ ing lunatics.

And they seem to be indulging in what looks from afar, and I am afar in Indy, John, and I've not been following this story too closely because I've been quite busy and thinking about cricket and stuff.

But it looks from afar like an elongated session of political auto-erotic asphyxiation, which makes it very hard for those who aren't into that kind of thing to understand.

And it is fraught with needless risk.

And the only difference is that the belt is not only tied around their own throats, but also the throats of the rest of the country, and indeed the global economy.

But I guess the thing is, John, it's now reached the stage where neither side can be seen to back down, which is dangerous political territory.

And history shows how dangerous it is.

The Titanic not wanting to show the iceberg that it was prepared to sacrifice sailing in a straight line on principle.

Joan of Arc's drunken claim to have flame-retardant skin that she wouldn't go back on.

And Julius Caesar's claim to be completely immune to knife wounds.

To outsiders, John, I think this deadlock appears more self-serving than either, A, Roger Federer throwing hyper-intellectual English writer Will Self in the air and smashing him with a tennis racket diagonally across a tennis court, or B, more self-serving than a mozzarella addict in an all-you-can-eat buffalo tit themed buffet and a fair amount of empirical research went into that joke.

The Times of India addressed this issue this week with these words.

What is chilling is that American politicians are willing to engage in a game of brinkmanship that is tantamount to detonating a nuclear device over their economy.

A bunch of intransigent American politicians are holding not just President Obama but the entire world to ransom.

And the Republican official response was, oh do stop, you're making us blush.

It's nice to be paid compliments but we're just doing our job.

So, have there been any constructive suggestions for how to solve this crisis, John?

Because I've been thinking about this a lot during my downtime in India.

I think there have been some constructive

suggestions from the American people, who I think in generally are suggesting, unshut the government right now.

Unshut it.

Unshut it.

I guess the options are get 1860s on it and start a massive war war with itself.

Eat some hot dogs.

Watch the baseball, obviously.

The best suggestion I've heard is that Barack Obama and John Bona, who I know is not officially pronounced like that, but I believe it's due to be recategorised pronunciatively to Bona to express what this crisis is doing to his political plonk trumpet.

Obama and Boehner are going to have a bare-knuckle slugout in a disused corn silo in Idaho.

I think that's the best way to do it.

And the best idea, I I think, John, is to learn from ancient Greece and have a sex strike, Lysisstratus style.

It needs the politicians of America to be hit where it hurts by their various sexual partners withholding humpy privileges until this crisis is resolved.

Now, it's clearly not going to be easy.

Things aren't as simple as they were in the comic dramas in the 5th century BC Athens.

It's going to need a concerted effort by the wives and husbands of the senators and the congressmen, as well as their mistresses, toy boys, concubines, assorted harems, Puerto Rican rent boys, inflatable and cultural, blow-up Glenbecks, and camera phones.

But it might just work, John.

It might just work.

Latest news just coming in on the wires is that Vladimir Putin has just bought Alaska back for its original 1867 purchase price of $7.2 million,

less 25% because there are fewer bears there than there used to be.

And also on the subject of bears, apparently a feral colony of yogic bears has escaped from Yellystone Park and is rifling through bins, meditating and stealing people's hats, collars and ties.

They've also outsourced Pentagon to Starbucks, who are now flying drones filled with coffee over Pakistan and bombarding people with scalding drinks.

Whilst the latest prediction from the UN simulation team suggests that by 100 years today, John, the 12th of October 2113, the entire American population will have emigrated to get job-stitching luxury silk nappies for Chinese babies, apart from one Democrat and one Republican, who will be face to face on a salt flat in Utah, cudgels in hand, prepared to to duke it out until one of them dies of a heart attack and the other triumphantly shouts, yes, yes, victory is mine.

I knew I was right all along.

That is, to be honest, that seems like the logical end point to what's happening here.

I just, even as you were describing that, I go, yeah, that's probably it.

That's probably where we're heading.

Listen, these are tough times in America, Andy.

Not just financially, not just politically, not even just legally, but now physically too.

Because last week it was officially announced that Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, is actually 83 feet shorter than previous thoughts.

America is 83 feet less tall than it thought it was, and that is a national disaster, Andy.

It's f ⁇ ing shrunk.

Or, if the initial measurement was wrong, or it's shrunk, Andy.

Why would it have done that?

Could it be that the tallest mountain in America is now so appalled at what America has become that it's physically retreating into the ground in shame at an incredibly slow rate, meaning that in 10,000 years it's just going to be a vast gaping hole for America to throw whatever's left of its hopes and dreams into.

This is just terrible, Andy.

Mount McKinley is quintessentially American.

It's like saying that it turns out that bald eagles have one less wing than was first thought, and the majestic icon of Americana has just been flapping around in low velocity circles for centuries.

And look, there's only one possible response to this, Andy.

If it really is 83 feet shorter than previously thought, they need to build another fing peak onto it.

America cannot afford to be seen to be weak, Andy.

In fact, they should build it 300 feet taller this time, just to teach that mountain a lesson and make it think twice about shrinking again.

Send a message to the world.

Or, I guess, as a possible backup plan, you just give Mount McKinley to Canada.

Canada, they'd probably snap up that piddly little hill now that it's eight feet shorter than a majestic American icon.

Well you just think in all this John that as with so much of what comes out of America now China must be laughing its collective nuts off with its park shares in Mount Everest K2 and its seven and a half thousand meter beauty Mount Gonga Shan.

And I guess this is a good news story for the Republicans John because it just shows how Barack Obama is diminishing America in every way.

Yes.

And let's not forget Alaska, where Mount McKinley so proudly resides became a state under Republican President Eisenhower in 1959.

It was named Mount McKinley after a Republican president, and now a Democratic president has f ⁇ ing shrunk it.

And it actually turns out it's partially in Kenya as well.

And look, I can tell you, Andy, that I'm not alone in feeling this outrage, because I mentioned this story on stage in Chicago last night, and no sooner had I said Mount McKinley is 83 feet shorter than previously thought, a man, and I swear this is true, shouted out, Fuck that.

See?

People aren't having it, Andy.

America is not getting this one stand.

Because the mountain now currently stands at 20,237 feet, which is clearly pathetic.

That's like the height of when you stand on top of a chair or something.

It's nothing.

Certainly not like the soaring 20,320 feet that it used to be, which is so tall you can practically touch the heavens.

It was last officially measured in 1952.

So what we really need to find out is what happened.

Did Russia somehow steal the peak?

Did they take it in a daring midnight raid or just shave a foot or so off it whenever we weren't looking?

Where's our fing peak, Andy?

The US Geological Survey claims that the reduced height could either be the result of a more accurate measurement technology or of climate differences.

Yeah, that's true.

Or, Andy, it could be the result of a group of Russian KGB agents who've been climbing the mountain every month, digging a bit off the top, filling their pockets with rocks, and then emptying them out at the bottom of the mountain.

You give us our peak back, Ruskies.

You give us our peak back, or we're going to come and lop 90 feet off your tallest mountain, Mount Elvarus.

How would you like that?

You wouldn't like it.

Well, I guess, I mean, it might actually, I mean, the fact that it was last measured in 1952 and the story has only come out now puts a different complexion on American foreign policy over the last six decades, John.

All those wars of questionable purpose.

Maybe they were just trying to steal 83 feet's worth of peak

from another country's mountain.

Where does all of this end, Andy?

Is it going to turn out that Lincoln was actually four foot two after all, and they're going to need to shrink down his memorial?

I just don't know what to believe in anymore.

And look, the point is, you're right.

This doesn't look good for President Obama.

He's going to get annihilated by history over this.

You say what you like about President George W.

Bush, Andy.

He never lost 83 foot of an American mountaintop.

This all makes me sick.

India News Now and this entire nation of well over a billion people came to a standstill this week with probably the biggest piece of news since this nation first bumped into Asia and created the Himalayas all those unforgettable years ago.

Because now you might, what is this, John?

What could this news be?

Has India overtaken China in the global race?

Has a cure been found?

An injection against poverty?

Who knows?

No, it was not that.

What it was, John, was the retirement of Sachin Tendulkar, the great cricketer.

Now, this might not mean too much to our American listeners and listeners from other tragically non-cricketers countries, but Sachin Tendleke is, it's hard to overstate the level of fame and

sort of the icon that he is in India.

It goes way beyond celebrity into the inner reaches of deification.

He's sort of like Babe Ruth crossed with Abraham Lincoln in India.

And he's announced his retirement after 24 years in the Indian team and he's going to retire after his 200th test match for our American listeners.

That's a really long game of cricket taking from reality.

Five days in which you can check out from reality.

Now baseball gives you, what, three hours?

That's not enough.

Five days.

Embrace it, America.

And India is now in pre-emptive mourning for the passing of their greatest ever sportsman.

Admittedly, that is not the most extensive list of great sportsmen.

But

it's, I mean, it was such big news here, John, that Indian MPs reportedly stole 2.3% less money than on the average day.

That

puts it into perspective.

And

to give this some context, John.

The Indian cricket team without Sachin Tendulka is like Silvio Berlusconi without his penis.

I can think of

no other way of really expressing what this man means to India.

He made his debut aged 16 in November 1989.

So that gives you an idea of how long he's been this massive figure in Indian public life.

Basically, when he first played for India, bits of the Berlin Wall were still in pretty good shape.

Bits had

had pretty active disagreements with sledgehammers, but bits were still standing.

Mr.

and Mrs.

Ceaușescu at that point were still planning a nice nice family Christmas with each other, and it didn't quite work out that way.

Nelson Mandela was still imprisoned in South Africa.

Margaret Thatcher was still imprisoned in Downing Street.

Thankfully, both sentences ended the following year.

And Tim Berners-Lee was still a geeky dreamer with a vision that one day people using his great invention of the internet would be able to send pictures of their plinky dinks instantaneously around the world.

And most poignantly of all, John, to give this some kind of historical context, Taylor Swift was still one month away from being born.

Oh

boy.

So I mean, this has been.

Has this made the news in America, John?

It hasn't, Andy, but it's very hard to explain to people why this matters so much to pretty much anyone else in the world other than Americans.

They're Teflon when it comes to this kind of stuff.

Tenuka is from Mumbai and where I spent a week recently, as buglers will know if they pay attention to last week's show.

And I thought I'd go and have a look around the market area of South Mumbai.

and I got in this taxi.

Had a bit of a language barrier with the taxi driver.

I thought we deliberately left the language behind for everyone to talk here but anyway he just gabbled incoherently at me as most bizarre.

But anyway so I kind of managed to get across from that I want to go to this area called Chaw Bazaar which is like a big kind of flea market selling all kinds of things antiques oddmunds clothes bootleg copies of your films and my book.

Absolutely everything.

So anyway he drives me there and he points down this street and says basically there, there.

So I walked down the street and basically all it had was motorcycle spares.

Next street, more motorcycle spares.

I turned the corner, motorcycle spares.

Now, this market is a big place.

But it's fair, this taxi driver clearly took one look at me and thought, this guy looks like the kind of guy who wants to build himself a motorcycle from scratch.

I've never been read so well by a strange John.

It was uncanny.

Uncanny.

I also there saw, you see some incredible sights in in India, just bizarre things.

And I saw in this market, there was a full car engine to which was tied a goat.

And I thought, if India can ever make this experiment work, they are going to dominate the world.

Clearly there's trouble, Andy, both in America and in India where they're one crooked god down.

But one of the things you should do if you ever want to feel better about yourself is try to find people in a worse state than you so you can feel superior to them.

We tried this with the US Congress last week, Andy, by pointing out that a third of India's Congress has a criminal record.

And if America and India want to feel better about themselves, they might like to look over to Brazil, where they actually have a comparable rate of congressional criminals.

About two hundred legislators, or a third of Brazil's Congress, are facing charges in trials overseen by a Supreme Federal Tribunal.

This level of corruption is just one of the things that has prompted the recent riots in Brazil.

And for Brazil, one of the reasons politics is such a carnival of crime is that until 2001, politicians could not even be tried without the authorization of Congress, meaning that there was so much deference paid to elected officials by the legal system, they were effectively above the law.

There are some truly incredible stories behind some Brazilian politicians.

One was elected to Congress while under investigation for murder after having an adversary killed with a chainsaw.

With a chainsaw, Andy.

This same man reportedly dispatched other bodies by dissolving them in acid.

He's not a senator, Andy.

He's a f ⁇ ing serial killer.

Another Brazilian congressman.

Yeah,

well, it's a very fine, very blurry, non-existent line if you live in Brazil.

Another Brazilian congressman is wanted by Interpol after being found guilty of diverting more than $10 million from public road project offshore bank accounts.

And Brazil's highest court convicted another congressman of having poor female constituents who could not afford more children surgically sterilized in exchange for their votes.

Take a bow, Brazil, by which I mean hang your finging heads in shame.

Which is just basically a bow without the getting up again bit.

Yeah, exactly.

And other charges include employing slave labor on a Catholic state to ordering the kidnapping of three Roman Catholic priests as part of a land dispute in the Amazon.

I mean, they're really raising the bar of qualification to use the word corruption, Andy.

I think we might all be in much better shape than we thought we were.

Well, as Jesus himself said, let he who has never kidnapped three Catholic priests in a land dispute cast the first dot.

The frustration towards traditional politicians in Brazil is now so high, the Congress includes Francisco Evrado

Oliviera Silva, a professional clown, better known as Tirarica or Grumpy, who was elected in 2010 to Brazil's lower house with more ballots in favor than any candidate in the nation's history.

They elected a clown, Andy, a clown.

The platform he ran on was also incredible.

His ad said, what does the federal deputy do?

I don't really know, but vote for me and I'll tell you.

And also, I promise to help those in need, especially my own family.

But

once he actually got into office with this historic margin, he actually took it very seriously, pushing a piece of legislation allowing children whose families move frequently to receive schooling and health care.

Not only that, but he also became one of the very few lawmakers to actually attend every single legislative session, winning the best congressman award

in the process.

And yet, after only three years, Silva has now given up and is leaving office saying he's deeply frustrated by government gridlock and bureaucracy.

He plans to quit rather than seek a second term in next year's election, saying, We work so hard every single day and nothing happens.

You can't get anything done here, nothing gets done.

I'll get more done as a clown.

And that

really is, I think, the profound statement I want people to take away this week, Andy.

It might be the most fitting sentence possible after the events of the last fortnight.

I'll get more done as a clown.

Your emails now, and this one comes comes in from Murray in Sydney, who writes, dear Andy, John and Chris, in order of likelihood of getting the SNP.

Wow.

Uh-oh.

That's a strong start to an email.

Anyway, there's some context of this.

I recently had a vasectomy, writes Murray.

As at least one previous listener has done, I decided to take my mind off my testicular disconnection by listening to the bugle.

Oh, no.

This cannot start becoming a habit.

We're going to get sued at some point.

Wait until you hear the rest of this email, John.

I asked the surgeon going in if I could have headphones on, and he said sure, and asked what I was listening to.

I said, a funny podcast, to which the surgeon replied, Is it the bugle?

Holy shit.

I was a little surprised at his response, writes Murray.

And he said he'd had about a dozen patients listen to the bugle without having to second me.

No.

No.

I do not know.

John, John, you know, a market is a market.

You know,

it's a niche demographic, but, you know, we might as well exploit it.

It's a key demo or a keyhole demo.

Murray continues, on the way home, I tried to distract myself from

my increasingly aching jungle schwackers.

And I got to thinking.

A dozen represents just under 5% of the bugles ever made.

This surgeon said he's about 800 vasectomies a year.

A bit of googling shows that there are over half a million done each year in the UK,

US, and Australia, the primary bugle markets.

By my calculations, this random sample means that there is a statistical certainty that every single podcast is being listened to by at least one and probably several men undergoing the sector.

Not all the groaning from the bugle is caused by Andy's pun runs.

Oh, boy.

Well, that gives this podcast a very different context.

And he concludes, to those men currently under under the knife and listening to this podcast, let me just say, take a deep breath, relax, and look forward to feeling like you've been kicked in the love spud for the next few days.

Yours and infertility, Murray.

Well, thank you, Murray.

I'm glad we could share that special time with you.

It's nice to know we have some anesthetic properties as well.

We also had a a couple of emails in from people who'd listened to the bugle whilst running marathons, Liam Roberts and Stephen from College Station, Texas.

But I'm afraid, next to having your testicles surgically rearranged, that just doesn't stack up, I'm afraid.

It doesn't stack up.

We have another email here from Leroy saying, dear Oliver and Andy, since I've begun listening to you lot, I've been enjoying myself very much.

I feel very nostalgic listening to your podcast as it reminds me a lot of parts of Monty Python.

I'm not even sure if you two are even as funny as Monty Python, but like most people in the US, I just like listening to you Brits talk.

That is damning with faint praise, Andy.

That is...

I wonder if he's aware of the insult wrapped in a very thin velvet glove there.

But he says, I could easily imagine you two performing the men's thing eaten by a crocodile skit or reading the results of silly elections.

He clearly likes Monty Python.

I think they've made that clear.

So he goes on to say, so even if you aren't really that funny.

F ⁇ you, Leroy.

Even if you aren't really that funny, keep up the good work.

To any Brits who may want to correct me about my belief that you sound like Monty Python, because they've heard a lot more Brits Brits talk than I have, bl blow me, he says.

Some wanker hanging out in a pub, drunk off some warm abomination of a drink, could probably make up a speech and be indistinguishable from y your telly and radio celebrities.

Thank you and may the gods bless you.

Good email, Leroy, because I cannot work out if you like us or hate us.

and I think it might be a bit of both.

Great, do keep your emails coming into info at thebuglepodcast.com.

Check out our SoundCloud page, soundcloud.com/slash the hyphen bugle.

And I've got the merch and voluntary subscriptions at thebuglepodcast.com.

So we better wind it down for this week.

I hope it's been a sonic experience never to be forgotten.

I've been on a phone in Bangalore.

John's been on a phone in Chicago.

I think that probably makes it a unique recording in the history of broadcasting.

So we've got the next two weeks off, Buglers, in the build-up to probably

the most historic event in the history of human creativity, maybe even since Michelangelo finished the Sistine Chapel.

Bugle issue 250.

We're a quarter of the way to the thousand, John.

That's right.

2.5% of the way to 10,000.

That's how I would think of it one day.

Yeah, that's much, much, much more significant.

So we'll be back.

We'll have sub-bugles out for the next two weeks.

I'm back with Bugle 250 in November.

Thank you for listening, Buglers.

Goodbye.

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.