Bugle 242 – Woman gives birth!

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The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to Bugle issue 242 for the week beginning Monday the 29th of July 2013 for the first time ever in 3D, meaning that this show will be equally funny if you listen to it lying down standing on your head or falling off a cliff try it out if you don't believe us with me Andy Zoltsman now sadly demoted to I think around 87 millionth in line to the throne always a bit of a pipe dream to be honest and in New York City the city of the much photographed penis it's the man who can look at a field of raw newspapers and turn it into a bowl of satire flakes in under a minute it's the comedic combine harvester himself john oliver well hello andy hello buglers uh You're right, this has been an exhausting week, made especially so by the fact that Anthony Weiner, and the woman who is still inexplicably his wife, held a press conference to address the news that even after he lost his congressional career by texting pictures of his penis to people, he's seemingly been at it again just before he started running for mayor.

And look, you can say what you like about Anthony Weiner, Andy, but very few people can say they haven't seen his penis now.

And in an age of personality politics, that might depressingly count for something.

He doesn't just have name recognition, Andy, he has penis recognition.

And you can't buy that kind of branding in a hard-fought election race.

I know a lot of people in New York have been wearing what would Anthony Wiener's penis do wristband?

It would throw itself at your camera phone and text itself to strangers, Andy.

We know what it would do.

So, this is Bugle 242.

The 242 was a Russian aircraft made by the Tupolev Aerospace Manufacturers, the first fighter jet ever to have flapping wings to try to scare enemy aircraft into thinking it was a bird of prey, but it was ditched after just five test flights after it kept swooping to the ground and crashing into a rabbit.

242 also the number of tickets sold on the Bill O'Reilly 2008 Furniture Restoration World Stadium tour just didn't really hit home with his core fans who wanted provocative right-wing lunacy, or with the furniture restorers who feared that his constant culping on about abortion would detract from his undoubted skills at repairing hairline cracks in 17th century sideboards.

And this is for the week beginning Monday, the 29th of July, which means, John, it is 1,775 years since the amusingly named Roman Emperor Pupianus

saw...

This is a fact.

He soiled his toga for the last time.

He was dragged through the streets of Rome, tortured and hacked to death on the 29th of July in 238 AD.

Disappointing Disappointing day for the lad.

Tough to take many positives from that.

And Benito Mussolini would have been 130 today if he hadn't died.

I can't remember what happened to him after his death.

I hate forgetting stuff.

Still, best not get hung up about it.

And 55 years since NASA was effectively created by Dwight Eisenhower,

the National Aeronautics and Space Act signed NASA into being.

Since when it has singularly failed to make intergalactic space travel available to the mass market.

Did make amazing progress in its early years, considering that on day one of its operation in October 1958 it tied Air Force pilot Franklin Dramchild to a giant balloon, let the end go and hoped that he would whiz into orbit.

11 years later and a few fine tunings down the line, Man on the Moon.

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

This week, an exclusive audio recording of New York Meral candidate Anthony Weiner thudding his membrane onto a table.

A recording which he then allegedly left as a voice message on a woman's phone.

are we sure that was was definitely wiener just sounded more like an old recording of president calvin coolids trying to sound authoritative and uh what a name john uh as you mentioned on the daily show carlos danger carlos danger yeah and that is that is strong work strong work i mean you you could you could ask people for suggestions you could get a thousand suggestions back of different names that would be better and you would still say no let's go with carlos danger that is the stupidest name in the history of words.

Was that his nickname for his prom?

Is that, do we know that or not?

I think it's a full schizophrenic alter ego now, Alex.

New Yorkers are voting for a Weiner Danger ticket now.

Top story this week: on your knees, planet Earth, behold the baby king.

On your knees!

Everything the light touches is your kingdom.

Or it was.

It was.

There have been some quite serious historic developments regarding it.

You see, we've still got Bermuda.

We've still got Bermuda.

On your knees, world!

The boy is here!

It finally happened, Andy.

What a magical day of entirely precedented biology.

Princess Kate Middleton, in a way that only she could, Andy, gestated a child for nine months in her inimitable way and then gave birth to it in a completely unique pushing it through her vagina motion.

Only for the queen to dive in and bite off the umbilical cord herself with her mouth, as is tradition, before dangling the baby over the balcony of Buckingham Palace in the now traditional Michael Jackson style and screaming, This boy will be king over over my dead body, before pausing and saying, seriously, that is what is going to happen.

I don't like the way that baby's looking at me.

It's got murder in its eyes.

The news here in America, Andy, truly disgraced itself.

I can only imagine.

how bad it was over there.

Because I think the American news media officially cares more about this baby than the Queen does.

That is the only way to explain the week-long thundering babygasm that everyone has been subjected to over here.

I think the world's media in general seem to, I think they love the baby more even than its own doting parents do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you know, the world has gone absolutely baby crazy.

And

the highlight of the coverage, though, for me was the first picture of the royal baby on the front cover of the Times newspaper, our classic former sister publication.

And unquestionably, it had a picture of the little baby prince flipping its first ever V-sign.

Did it really?

Yeah.

It had two fingers pointing out just above its blanket.

As if to say, f ⁇ you, Paparazzi, this one's for Granny.

That is a king I can get behind.

It's unforgivable what you did.

It's unforgivable what you did.

The BBC

really got stuck into this story.

Publicly funded national broadcaster.

Not everyone enjoyed its coverage.

It is constitutionally bound, the BBC, to broadcast in such a way that it can be criticised by all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but ideally not by all of the people all of the time.

But that does seem to happen quite a lot.

And it was basically accused of going either over or under the top in its coverage by different ends of the Republican monarchist seesaw.

And often, you know, when the BBC does go over the top, it cops an abusive machine gunning from trenches on both sides of the no man's land of neutrality it operates in.

But it could have at least, I think they should really have presaged their coverage of the royal birth with the warning, viewers are warned that they may find the editorial choices made in this report extremely distressing.

At least we know where we stood.

The baby crowned in every sense of the word on Monday afternoon and is named George Louis Alexander, which is a fantastic choice, Andy, because historically Britain has had such a good experience with kings called George.

What could could possibly go wrong?

One of the weirdest moments during the blanket coverage here was a commentator pointing out that the Queen likes to go to bed at 9 o'clock, so it would be a problem if Kate gave birth too late in the day.

The commentator said, you do not want to rouse the Queen after 10.30pm.

And that's true, Andy.

Why?

Absolutely.

Because she'll bite your f ⁇ ing face off, that's why.

If that baby would be born after 10.30, I believe the plan was to push the baby back into Princess Catherine's womb until the following morning when it could be born at, and I quote, a civilized hour.

You don't rouse the queen after 10.30, Andy.

She's basically like a gremlin.

You don't rouse her after 10.30, you don't feed her after midnight, and you don't get her wet.

That is why the Jubilee flotilla was so dangerous, Andy.

One splash on her during that and she'd have killed and eaten everyone in a three-mile radius.

That's a fact.

Of course, it happened with Queen Anne at her coronation in 1702.

Of course.

But it, I mean, this simply has to be the biggest news story of the millennium so far.

Arguably more so even than that, John, because this precious child is our future king.

One day, in maybe just 60 or 70 years' time, or maybe with the way medical science keeps improving and the fact that he's from a family that for a couple of generations now has been pretty effective at not dying, maybe even 80 to 100 years' time, this baby will be king, John.

And I personally could not sleep worrying about whether or not in a time after I am long dead, there will be a male or female arse sitting on my nation's throne that has kept me

awake at night, to be honest.

The baby was born at eight pounds and six ounces, and no sooner had that statistic been released that there was someone on TV here pointing out that that was the heaviest royal baby in a hundred years.

Could we not even wait at least 24 hours to try to give him body issues, Andy?

Could we not give that baby a single day of feeling good about himself?

Also, if you really want to give that statistic some context, how about explaining what that weight really means in a real-world sense?

If the baby was a steak, you could probably win a t-shirt by eating it.

If the baby was cocaine, it would have a street value of $64,000.

If the baby was luggage, it would be well under the airline weight requirements, so no extra allowance would need to be purchased.

Well, it wasn't just a baby giving being given body image advice early on.

His mother, predictably, was overwhelmed with advice of all kinds, her royal mumminess.

And it can be really hard to separate the sweet corn from the pile of teeth.

In fact, Kate Middleton, within hours of giving birth, was given advice by OK Magazine.

Oh, that's good.

Yeah, well, I know this, John, because I bought a copy, and I have to say, I was very disappointed by it.

Turns out it was just pointless celebrity chit-chat, not an academic analysis of the Austrian expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka.

Anyway, OK magazine, hours after the birth, chunded its latest copy onto Britain's shelves with the front page, Kate's post-baby weight loss regime.

And a magazine that had devoted its entire existence to exploring never previously imagined swamps of irrelevance was then bombarded with fully deserved abuse before hastily issuing an apology in which it said, Kate is one of the great beauties of our age.

We would not dream of being critical of her appearance if that was misunderstood because of our cover.

It was not intended.

And they could have added to that, that said, yuck, big fat tummy, blah, wobbly, wobbly, wobbly.

All women should look pretend.

Prince Harry said that one of his key duties as an uncle was going to be to make sure that he has fun.

And that shouldn't be a problem for Prince Harry, Andy.

He's not afraid to ride the fun bus.

He's not afraid to even drive the fun bus at times and drive it all the way to the Nazi costume shop.

He knows what fun is, Andy.

He knows what fun.

I'll give the kid some slack, John.

He just had a dodgy GPS.

Prince Harry said it was fantastic to have another addition to the family, and that newborn was crying his eyes out when he met him.

Do you know why that might be, Andy?

Because maybe someone told that baby Prince George that he was now third in light to the throne and he was screaming about understanding that.

Wah!

In this day and age, what does that even mean?

Wah!

This is a best of ceremonial position

I'm only a few hours old and I already feel like a relic of a bygone age

and it was uh I mean it was an absolutely historic moment uh for the country we all uh cuddled around on national collective radio as the news slowly broke firstly that uh Lady Jamelia Farwattle, the Countess of Clussex, was roosting on the royal egg before Cape Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was officially impositioned for the hatch.

Proving its royal princeliness, the sound of the egg cracking was detected by NASA satellites as far away as space.

And the nation waited for news of what brand of baby had been spawned.

And the atmosphere, John, let me tell you, around Britain, was electric as hundreds of thousands of people gathered around

big screens across the nation to watch live coverage of an empty easel outside Buckingham Palace, waiting for a bit of paper.

Because this is how the news was broken to the nation of whether or not it was a boy or a girl.

They had planned to screen the actual birth live, as I think we informed you on the bugle last week.

That was scuppered when no deal could be reached with director Danny Boyle, who, of course, did the Olympic opening ceremony over exactly at what point in the birth a 19th century factory chimney should magically appear through the floor.

But it was the nation waited to see.

whether it would have a king or a queen not actually reigning over it in any concrete way in 60 or 70 years time.

Massive implications.

Massive implications, not just for the nation as a whole, John, in a lifetime's time, but for late 21st century coin designers.

I mean, this could really affect the way they go about their work in this country, whether it's with feminine facial features or a proudly jutting male jawline.

And the banknotes, I mean, assuming the banknotes still exist by them, which they probably won't, I mean, they will look so different depending on whose face was on them.

And that's...

That explained the media coverage, John.

That shows you what was at stake.

And a clue was given when a bicycle courier was photographed

arriving at the hospital, delivering a tiny crown enclusted with sapphires.

He was then seen cycling round the corner, stopping by a bin and dropping a pink diamond encrusted crown into that bin.

It was clearly at that point going to be a boy.

And so it was, the royal baby was launched, sporting a brand new set of royal drongle rod and galumphs.

Traditional infant garb dating back to Tudor times.

You just feel so rooted when these traditions come out, don't you, Andy?

You feel the depth of history again.

That's what it's all about.

Well, the relief was palpable, you have to say.

And Prince William,

for all that he clearly should have married someone else for reasons of Britain's economic and political strategy in the global race.

That's what Prince is for.

But he seemed quite fond of his wife.

And he must have been relieved, John, that it was a son, because genetics is genetics.

And if Kate Middleton had spawned him a useless daughter, all those dormant Henry VIII genes would have come flooding to the surface, which would have been a constitutional nightmare in this day and age.

Thank you, Brussels.

And Buckingham Palace quietly withdrew an advertisement from next Monday's Guardian job section for a new Lord High Executioner.

So relief all round.

And what an extraordinary day for it to be born as well, John, the 22nd of July.

Now,

it's perfect, Ante.

Just the perfect month and day that the baby just seemed to instinctively know.

Yeah.

But the thing is, John, human gestation is, of course, known to be exactly nine months to the day,

give or take, no days at all, which means that this baby was conceived on October the 22nd

last year.

That is the day that the great New Zealand rugby captain, Sir Wilson Winneray, sadly passed away at the age of 77.

Now, I know in the internet age, people get turned on by the weirdest things, but that is just f ⁇ ing freakish, John.

69 years since an RAF raid on the German town of Kassel killed 10,000 people and we're letting these people run the country.

I guess in mitigation it was also the 130th birthday of the Hungarian Olympic swimmer and 1904 Olympic silver medalist Geza Kiss

and the 420th birthday of the Polish politician Gustav Horn and the 44th birthday of the Jamaican-born American-based rapper Shaggy.

So you can see why maybe they were just perusing the birthday column and one thing led to another.

And of course the moment that the magic child popped out, tributes came flooding in from around the world, from celebrities of all ilks.

The musical actor Chemical Brothers, who were given exclusive access to the birthing suite, have sampled the birthing yelps and screams of the Duchess of Cambridge into a techno-hardhouse remix of the national anthem.

Whilst the late historian AJP Taylor is rewriting his entire Herv from Beyond the Grave to take account of the birth of the prince.

This puts a new perspective on everything, spluttered the 22 years dead author of classics such as How Wars Begin, The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy 1847-1849, Beaverbrook, a controversial departure into erotic fiction, and the Rothman's Football Yearbook season 1983-84.

Australian soap opera neighbours, John, you'll be interested by this.

They've recorded a special episode in which the late Madge Bishop and Helen Daniels come back to life to watch the first pics of the royal baby on ABC News before dying again.

And in the anniversary games athletics at the Olympic Stadium this weekend, to mark one year since the Olympics, the Great Britain 4x100m relay team have been given special dispensation to use a live five-day-old baby instead of the baton.

They will sprint round the track, passing the screaming infant to each other in a tribute to the royal proto-king before handing the traumatised child back to its weeping mother.

So it's

it's I mean it's very touching the way.

David Cameron said that the royal baby is, quote, easily the best baby out of the roughly 360,000 born in the world today.

It just makes the others look fing shit by comparison.

Look at him, as British as a fking nut.

Beautiful.

And meanwhile, at a mega death

gig at the Sin Valley Festival of Loud Noises, a tearful lead singer Dave Mustaine interrupted the band's set to say, I love babies.

and lead the heavy metal four piece in an emotional rendition of Barbar Black Sheep, described by critics as the loudest lullaby since the New York thrash metallurgers Anthrax played a 45-minute twinkle twinkle little star in an unsuccessful effort to play drummer Charlie Bernante's new Labrador Puppy to Sleep at the Decibels of Death Festival in 1987, a concert which resulted in a record 2,000 perforated eardrums and one extremely unhappy dog.

Whilst dead celebrities have also been paying tribute to the 16th century Polish astronomy ace and the heliocentrism superstar Nikki Copernicus gushed from beyond his grave, today's media coverage truly proves that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

Boom!

Your emails now, and we have a lot of emails concerning the coin of truth prediction.

There's one here from Carl saying, Dear Andy, Chris, and John, in order of who is most likely to be a witch.

I was recently listening to Bugle episode 238, in which Andy introduces his coin of truth.

Along with correctly predicting seven out of seven cricket matches, the so-called coin of truth also made one other correct prediction when John asked, The coin rightly predicted the gender of Kate Middleton's unborn baby what does this mean is the coin of truth magic or was this simply a lucky coincidence are 50-50 odds too low to base such an important decision the NSA certainly doesn't think so but perhaps the most important question is does Andy still have the coin if so I can only plead that he used the coin for good remember with great power comes great responsibility sincerely Kyle Stranger Strayer so well Andy yeah that is do you still have that coin oh I I do.

I'm not sure I've got it on me.

Let me see if I've got it on me.

Hang on.

I think I'm...

No, I think I've got it in a locked vault at home, actually.

It's just too powerful to really risk taking it on.

Well, yeah, I'll do it.

Because I could accidentally spend it on something, you know.

That will be the worst possible thing you could do.

You know, handing that back to the bottom.

And you're giving that the power of that to anybody.

Yeah.

And who knows where that will end?

So it doesn't even bear thinking about.

This email came in

from

Matt.

Dear John, Chris, and Andy,

is it just me?

Or is this new grey girl smurf kind of hot?

She's been winking out at me from bus-side ads as they cruised past.

And God help me.

In the face of all reason and logic, I may actually have to see this film just for a little taste of hot grey girl smurf action.

Ooh, Smurfing, yeah.

So out with it, John.

I know you're not the kind of Smurf to kiss and tell, but did you get any hot on-location blue-on-grey action?

Yours in vicarious Smurf lust.

Matt.

Wow.

Well done, Matt.

You have just written, and I know I'm not telling you something you don't already know, Matt.

You've just written a very creepy email.

I think if you find a grey smurf attractive, Matt, that says a lot more to do with you than the Smurf involved.

I don't think you can.

You're projecting, Matt, is what you're doing.

That Smurf is not coquettishly leading you on.

Okay, that is,

I believe,

I believe if I recall the story right, and there's absolutely no reason why I should be remembering this right, I believe that is a naughty smurf.

I think, so you're attracted to naughtiness.

I don't want to be armchair psychologists with you, Matt.

You've clearly got some things to work through.

We have another email here from Hiram saying, dear Andy, John and Chris, a month ago, my wife and I had our first baby.

He came out all right, as babies go, A few weeks.

That's good to have that level of objectivity from a parent because I liked it.

You know, usually it's our most beautiful thing in the world.

In fact, you know, usually a parent say, I know, objectively, this isn't right, but personally.

On the bell curve, he's kind of in the middle.

I can't see why all supermodels don't have squished-up faces and weird scarf on the tops of their heads and snot running out of their noses.

That's how beautiful babies are.

A few weeks into his invasion, we encountered a dilemma.

You see, it's normal for newborns to be fussy all the time crying and complaining is the only language they have so he cries all the time 24 7 you can imagine the relief when we found out that one of the few things that actually soothes the little crying machine is you guessed it andy and john's bullshit oh my god the only thing that calms him is yo yo mars bark solo renditions and herein that the other thing that calms him is yo-yo mars bark solo renditions and herein lies the dilemma bark versus the bugle

my wife contest as old as time itself that's right the uh My wife thinks it's actually a good idea to expose the baby to classical music as it's supposed to stimulate his young neurons and might help him turn into an intelligent, thoughtful, and sophisticated individual.

I, however, I already like the way this is going.

Here I am.

Have a strong opinion about pacifying him through the bugle.

Not that exposing him to bark will hurt him, but it's obvious to me that being exposed to industrial amounts of bullshit at an early age builds character and, above all, imagination.

So, guys, could you settle this for us?

Bark or bugle?

With respect, here I am.

San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Well, I think.

Fantastic.

I mean, I think it's very hard to say this early stage, John, because I mean, the bugle's been

coming up towards six years in existence now.

I guess there could be some children that were exposed to the bugle six years ago that are now...

I mean, my own daughter for one.

Maybe she can be a control experiment of what happened if you are exposed to that level of bullshit from that early an age.

But

I mean, I think we need to let history and science be the judge of that.

Buglers, if you do have a small child and you're willing to be part of the most significant psychological human development experiment in probably in human history, do send your children in.

Do we have a postal address, Chris?

No.

Well, just put it the Bugle London.

It'll find it well yeah.

That's the kind of power we wield in this town.

We'll then just look after your children over the next 12 years,

playing one.

We'll have a control sample that listened to both Bach and the Bugle.

Then of the rest, rest, half will listen to just the bugle and half will listen to just Bach.

And we'll see

who comes out the stronger.

Or Andy.

Or Andy, maybe Chris could start a whole new industry of baby merchandise by setting some of the most bullshit moments of the bugle to the music of Bach, thereby...

Thereby stimulating and intellectually demoralizing your child.

I'm going to go

for this.

Like kind of, yeah, exactly like an audio anesthetic.

That's all your emails.

Thank you for sending them in.

Do keep them coming in to info at thebuglepodcast.com.

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

Also on SoundCloud, if you like cricket, is the greatest test that Chris and I have been doing, the

greatest hyphen test.

And at the Bugle's own website, thebuglepodcast.com, you can get our merch.

And we'll hopefully be expanding the range quite soon.

And which is, you know, it's probably been the greatest phenomenon in retail history, I would think.

So phenomenal, in fact, John, that someone came to the recording of the greatest test we did in Brighton this Wednesday who works in the Lebanon and said that she'd seen someone in the street wearing bugle merchandise.

No way.

No.

No way.

We are basically...

halfway to solving the Middle East crisis

through the medium of merch.

The Bugle Brigade have been making

insertions into Syria for the last couple of months.

So, yeah.

Well, clearly, you know, talking seriously about these problems, it hasn't solved them in the last 6,000 years.

So, maybe just

speakers spouting bullshit across that troubled region could

just distract everyone.

It could work.

Anyway, you can get all that at thebuglepodcast.com.

Well, that's it for this week's Royal Baby Special

Bugle.

I don't know when the baby's first coming to New York, John.

If you managed to get it on the daily show, that'd be quite a coup for you, wouldn't it?

Well, that's I'm trying harder than anything, Andy, just to get the first interview with that baby.

I just think a six-minute searing interview of

desperately trying to get it to stop crying would be electric television.

Be just like Rhys Witherspoon, but more so.

so yes uh i'm doing a show at the phoenix fringe in london on the 8th of august buglers if you want to come and see me try out uh sort of work in progress new material that's at the phoenix pub on cavender square uh three shows that evening with uh pappies the sketch team and the uh canadian comedian peter hanson who's excellent you can get a day tick ticket or ditch those losers and just see the real deal by which i mean i went fishing and i reeled in an eel and I'll have it on stage, a reeled eel.

We're doing a musical double act in which I keep calling it a snake and it keeps getting cranky and saying, f you, I'm a fish.

So do come to that on the 8th of August.

Until next week, Buglers.

Hey, John, John, John.

Yeah.

I mean, you've gone very quietly.

I've just like, I've not done a lot of puns recently, over the last few months.

It's been quite clean.

Yeah.

I've had quite a lot of emails and comments on social media about

a number of puns you've been doing on the daily show, John.

Zero, zero puns, Andy.

That must be a good thing.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what people have been saying, John.

There will have been no puns, Andy.

They clearly misheard.

Any pun is accidental, Andy.

Well, John, I mean, I just don't know if that is going to stand up in court.

That sounds

like a Lance Armstrong defense to me.

Oh, shit, I nearly forgot.

My stand-up series starts tonight.

Oh, right.

If you live in America or anywhere else that gets it, or you have the internet, I don't know how it works.

This is a plug as bad as yours usually.

My stand-up series starts Comedy Central Fridays at 11 o'clock for the next eight weeks, I think.

Watch it or don't.

Right, that is the other option.

Somebody sidestep that pun issue there, John.

Well, I guess there's

no way I intentionally punned it.

Knowing how you feel about puns, it shows that you have more respect for the bugle as a franchise than you do for the daily show.

So I guess that's a good thing.

Thanks for listening, buglers.

Until next week, 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.