Bugle 220 – The Cheat Hits The Fan

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The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 220 of the Bugle for the week being Monday the 21st of January 2013.

We are now officially in what what used to be known in days gone by as the future and I'm in London which even this early in the year is all set for yet another title as Britain's most populated city.

Six million ahead of Birmingham.

Easy, easy, easy, and in Sacramento.

Yes.

Which sounds to me John like a Latin verb rather than a place name.

It's John Oliver.

Hello Andy.

Hello buglers.

Yes.

I'm in Sacramento Andy.

I'm about to leave for the airport to go to Seattle.

I'm basically doing the S's around America at the moment.

What is the point in touring, Andy, unless you're willing to do it alphabetically?

The least you can do.

Um, America is still in the midst of flu mageddon at the moment.

We're still sitting on top of an erupting flu cano, surfing the waves of a gigantic flu nami.

And I mean, you can tell that I'm not feeling great still, Andy, because those were three puns right there, and you know exactly what I think about those.

Well, I don't know.

But maybe you've been ill up until now and you're just getting better.

Well that's one way of looking at it.

The East Coast in particular has been in the situation where basically everyone is sick at the moment.

There was a point last weekend when it had definitely become a slight national panic.

They were running out of flu shots.

There were huge angry lines of people demanding them and I was at an airport.

last Saturday where the atmosphere was one of real suspicion.

One guy in the line of the for the plane coughed and people immediately shot him vicious glances as if to say don't you get me sick I will punch you in your congested face if you try and get me sick I'm remembering your face right now and if you give me the flu I will track you down and I will kill you

New York has basically become an episode of the walking dead.

There are some people shuffling around slowly, groaning like zombies, moaning and grabbing out for help and the rest of the people walking around with masks over their faces and shovels in their hands that they are fully prepared to beat people to death with if they try and infect them.

So

sixty years ago, tomorrow, if you're listening to this on Monday, was the opening nights of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, the smash-hit witch-based blockbuster that sensationally blew the lid on the Salem witchcraft scandal just 260 years after it happened.

Recent archaeological research suggests that around 85% of people in the 1690s were witches or warlocks.

And during the 20-year period when witchcraft was at its height in America, the population of frogs dropped by between 95 and 120%.

In fact, so overcrowded was Salem with witches that in 1691 alone, there were 84 fatal mid-air broomstick collisions in the town.

Thank God Miller put a stop to all that.

And it's also 25 years since the day that Abraham Lincoln would have died had he not been assassinated in the 1860s.

Scientists reckon the 6'5 inch president and hat fan would not have popped his clogs of natural causes until he was aged 179, by which time

historians calculate he would have been assassinated a further 16 to 18 different times, mostly in theatres, but also twice whilst practicing golf at a driving range and once by being pushed off his own face on a trip to Mount Rushmore.

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

This week, TV reviews, including a review of the new reality TV TV show Pray or Slay, in which leading religious figures are presented with hypothetical crime scenarios and asked whether they would pray for the redemption of the perpetrators or personally slay them in a vengeance-fueled frenzy of score settling.

A computerized god programmed using the characteristics of the world's top 20 ranked leading deities, each scored out of 10 for qualities such as benevolence, irascibility, infantile vengefulness, and oversensitivity to mild criticism and lampooning, will then decide whether that was the correct verdict.

All that section in the bin

top story this week liar liar your career is on fire

well and the it happened a couple of nights ago ago the cheat finally hit the fan Lance Armstrong sat down with Oprah Winfrey on her own network channel which on a side note America suddenly realized as one that it had she began the interview with a flurry of yes-no questions.

It was a very dramatic opening to the interview.

She said, Did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance?

Yes.

Was one of those banned substances EPO?

Yes.

Did you ever blood dope or use blood transfusions to enhance your cycling performance?

Yes.

Did you ever use any other banned substances such as testosterone, cortisone, or human growth hormone?

Yes.

In all seven of your Tour de France victories, did you ever take banned substances or blood dope?

Yes.

And with that, Andy, it was basically done.

I'd have loved it if Oprah had had the balls to get those answers and then just leave.

Just ask our final question in all seven of your Tour de France victories.

Did you ever take banned substances or blood dope?

Yes.

And then say, okay, I think we got it.

You're a live piece of shit, Lance.

I'm out of here.

And then take off our microphone and leave Armstrong sitting there for 90 minutes, awkwardly, occasionally looking uncomfortably at the camera and eventually asking,

is she coming back?

He did fess up big time.

And I think in conclusion, John, on balance, having heard now both sides of the story, I think he was probably doping.

It's hard.

It's hard to say.

But the thing is, John, after everything that's gone before, after more than a decade of deceit, why should we believe him now?

I mean, sure, he's got more reason to lie now than any other time.

So I think on reflection, the conclusion from this interview has to be that he was bullshitting through his artificial teeth and he was always clean.

It really was a sensational start to the interview.

Basically, in 30 seconds, the entire symphony of lies that he spent the last two decades aggressively perpetrating came crashing to the ground.

One of the most incredible moments was when Armstrong, who had pretty much just openly stated that he was a human pincushion of hypodermic needles, stated that he never really saw what he was doing as cheating.

He said, I kept hearing that I'm a drug cheat, I'm a cheat, I'm a cheater.

I went in and I just looked up the definition of cheat.

And the definition of cheat is to gain an advantage on a rival or foe that they don't have.

I didn't view it that way.

I viewed it as a level playing field.

And

he should then really have looked up the word asshole, megalomaniac, and pathological liar, because those definitions might have rung a few more bells for him.

Trying to split hairs by redefining the definition of the word cheat is like still gripping onto the rock that you were clinging onto on the side of a cliff before it gave way and you fell 200 feet to the floor you're lying on your back you have 75 broken bones but you're still gripping the rock in your hand saying it's fine as a long as long as i hang on to this i'll be fine

of course after all the recent revelations by other cyclists and the thousand page uh report detailing his misdemeanours his life ban and the stripping of all of his titles discovering that armstrong was doping is is a bit like seeing a bear confessing to shitting in the woods in an interview with Ricky Lake.

You kind of knew all along that the bear did shit in the woods.

You just never expected to hear the bear himself say it, and you're not entirely sure that he chose the right avenue to break his silence on the matter.

He's still not being able to co apply himself to the word cheat is spectacular, I think.

It's almost like the word cheat wasn't doing what he needed it to do.

So he started to pump some more unnatural definitions into it to enable it to perform semantically to the level that he needed for success.

Sure, lots of people stretch the definition of words, Andy.

He's just levelling the linguistic playing field.

Apparently there were various takes of the interview before Armstrong finally told the truth, or at least the parts of the truth he wanted people to hear.

In one of the earlier takes, he claimed he was kidnapped in 1994 and held in a dungeon for 12 years, whilst his evil brother Arnold cheated his way to glory.

He also claimed the world was guilty of double standards, saying, well, if it's okay to use science to stop children dying of cholera, why is it not okay to use science to get round France on a bike as fast as possible?

You can't have one rule for one thing and another rule for another.

Can you?

Well, maybe you can, but I'm not going to stop juicing until you let children die of cholera, as the almighty Lord clearly intended.

He also asked Winfrey out on a date, tearfully confessed to playing a significant role in plotting the JFK hit in 1963, and concluded the interview by inviting Britney Spears on stage to sing a special duet, Oops I Did It Again, Again, and again and again and again and again.

He then accused Winfrey of masterminding the whole shebang and of running international cycling like a fing vampire, suggesting she, quotes, might have well have strapped herself to Marco Pantani's foot and put herself in a tumble dryer.

There was a lot of anticipation going into the interview as to what level of emotion was going to be on display.

Was Armstrong going to cry?

And if he did, would they be real tears?

Or were those tears going to be chemically assisted?

Little onion capsules in his tear ducts?

Were there going to be tear testers on hand to check samples from his face?

I mean, just the whole thing around him comes into question now.

What a gigantic liar.

Yosk slightly expected him to finish the interview by standing up, unbuttoning his fly, and saying, I've got one more surprise for everyone.

Whilst Oprah desperately said, that's all we've got time for.

Next week, Barry Bonds tells us how he used a bat fitted with a Trebuchet catapult.

So where next for Lance Armstrong?

I think the only way he can possibly come back, as he seems to want to in some form, Andy, is if he can win seven more Tour de Francis, but openly under the influence of performance debilitating drugs.

That's

the only way to answer the question in people's minds.

And I'm talking about him doing a drunk Tour de France, Andy.

Weaving his way dangerously up and down a mountain, screaming obscenities at trees as he flies past, pissing into people's front gardens and throwing up in front of the Arctic Trial.

We've all been there.

If he can win under those conditions, Andy, truly he is the greatest cyclist in history.

For Oprah Winfrey, next said to be a warts and all interview with the al-Qaeda former number three ranks baddie, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed.

Winfrey apparently said that Khaled knows he's done some wrong things and he's now ready to talk.

So that is the next big thing for own TV on the internet, John.

Or she's going to admit doping, Andy.

What we say last week I couldn't believe she didn't admit it at the end of it you can't get as powerful as Oprah Winfrey has it's not humanly possible without juicing at some point in your life and the ICU the International Cycling Union has challenged Armstrong to resolve all their differences in a special episode of Judge Judy to be aired in March so

also there's suggestions he's going to reach a plea bargaining deal

with the World Anti-Doping Organization and the UCI in which in return for a full full chapter-and-verse confession of all his naughty needlings and all the people involved, instead of his seven tour de France titles, he will instead be awarded a semi-final spot at the 1997 US Open tennis, replacing Sweden's Jonas Bjorkman.

Hearing the news, the Swede was disappointed but philosophical.

Well, I'll do anything to help World Sport heal itself from the scourge of doping, he said, but it is pretty annoying.

The 1997 US Open was about the highlight of my singles career.

It was one of only two Grand Slam semis I ever reached, and in the other one I was absolutely horsed by Federer.

And I was too up up on Rosettsky in the 97 one before things went more belly up than prices at a Japanese fish market during a tuna shortage.

So anyway I guess I'm not the first sports dude to be cheated out of his rightful finishing position by Lance Armstrong but still does this mean Lance is now partially Swedish?

It does.

Oh fair enough then as long as the fatherland doesn't miss out.

At the start of this week, the Armstrong story was all that America was looking forward to.

It was the key story in sports.

But on Wednesday here, an even more bizarre story emerged when it turned out that Mante Teo, a linebacker, a star linebacker for Notre Dame, who will be going to the NFL next year, it turned out that a girlfriend he claimed he'd had who had died of cancer was fake and had never existed.

And

the whole story is truly bizarre.

It turns out that he was duped online.

How much he knew about it is still slightly unclear.

But it was broken by a website called Deadspin, a fantastic sports site in America.

And this website has received great plaudits for doing the investigative journalism that no one involved in reporting the story at the time of his girlfriend seemed to bother to do.

And in the midst of all the credit coming their way on Thursday, there was an absolutely magnificent moment when Donald Trump tweeted his congratulations to Deadspin, saying, congratulations to Tom Soker and Timothy Burke of At Deadspin for exposing the Manti Teo fiasco.

And Deadspin tweeted Trump back, Andy, immediately with a simple, elegant, and and well-crafted message that simply read, go f yourself.

And I think that ended up being one of my favourite parts of the story, Andy.

It was Deadspin both reclaiming their ground and also telling Trump to go f himself, which if anyone ever has a chance to do, they really should.

The Manteo story for a while completely swamped the Armstrong coverage and knowing how inhumanly competitive Lance Armstrong is, I was half expecting him to suddenly announce his own scandal and claim that Cheryl Crowe wasn't real.

I've never met her, she doesn't exist, and I never had cancer, and I've never seen a bicycle.

I'm the victim of a huge online scam.

Cheryl Crowe and bicycles don't exist.

I deserve sympathy and attention, and all my Tour de France titles back, please.

I think in all this, John, you do have to ask what the f were the cycling authorities doing during this sort of 20-year period or more in which cycling was completely scourged by doping.

I think they really need to take a long, hard bath with themselves.

It's just baffling how they managed to miss all this.

It's a bit like Burt Reynolds saying, moustache, what moustache?

I really think they should have noticed it.

Amongst further admissions, Armstrong did admit riding the 2001 tour.

using transfused artificial blood made up of 75% rocket fuel from the old Soviet space program, 20% Bloody Mary mixed by Oliver Reed, and 5% Communion wine supplied by some cycling fans in the Vatican, who calculated that Jesus would have won eight Tour de Francis riding his donkey and would never have failed a blood test.

Because if he could turn water into wine, he could sure as turn EPO and testosterone into completely legal blood.

Or if he was feeling in the mood for a party, like he was at that dry wedding, he was so pissed off by at Gana, he could turn it into a passable mint julep.

Garden news now, and Andy, this week, the president attempted to flex his political muscles and give America tickets to his gun show where he would be firing off plans to introduce gun regulation and introducing gun regulation to America is not an easy thing to do Andy it's just not an introduction that has gone well in the past America of lucky to meet gun control gun control meet America oh hey gun control go f ⁇ yourself what f ⁇ myself you're out of your mind you need me buddy what I need you to get the f ⁇ out of my face face, gun control.

You're not welcome here.

No, what people absolutely want me here.

I've got two friends that want you to leave right now, Mr.

Smith and Mr Weston.

Get the f okay, you two, let's slow this thing down.

It was a bold, bold move from the President.

After attempting to deal with health care and now attempting to tackle gun control, he's tried to catch two of the most elusive chickens in America's political coupe.

So much so that when he announced his intention to deliver a speech outlining his gun control plans, you could feel part of the country reacting by saying, hold on, only a week ago it was too early to even talk about gun control, and now suddenly you're actually going to try and do something about it.

Are you out of your mind?

This is America.

So we have the right to never do anything about anything.

I think that's the Ninth Amendment.

I may be wrong about that, but it doesn't matter because the point is that I'm still free to say that it is the Ninth Amendment.

I think that's the Fourth Amendment.

Or is that your right to free bagels?

I can't remember.

But okay, Mr.

President, if that is your real name, you want gun control, shoot.

Oh, I'm sorry.

You're probably going to ban that word too now, aren't you?

Let me put it a more appropriate way.

You want gun control, get it in the most effective way.

Line it up in your sights, scream, look at me, and then shoot the problem in the face.

He's called for a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines

and wider background checks on people buying guns.

Now, I mean, it's one of these quintessentially American issues, John.

It's very hard for outsiders to comprehend.

And, I mean, is it the case that in that controversial Second Amendment, the founding fathers wanted ordinary citizens in the 21st century to be able to carry assault weapons with high-capacity magazines and not have their backgrounds checked before they bought them?

They didn't seem to say so explicitly, but they didn't not say so explicitly either.

So you can see the confusion.

Yeah.

Well, the ironic thing about gun control and the basic impossibility of passing it is that the vast majority of Americans are in favor of some form of gun control, but somehow that isn't enough.

In other words, some form of gun control is something that around eighty percent of Americans want, but that twenty percent of Americans say that you can prize from their cold, dead balls.

Obama announced his intention to issue twenty three executive orders to the consternation of the Conservative press here.

Although the truth is there's actually very little he can do with executive orders alone.

Anything significant is going to have to go through Congress and everyone knows this.

In fact, at the announcement, the President even read out a letter from a little girl called Julia who had written to him after the Connecticut massacre saying, you know, in the letter that Julia wrote to me, she said, I know that laws have to be passed by Congress, but I beg you to try very hard.

He then went on to say, so I wrote back to her and said, Dear Julia, you have no f ⁇ ing idea what I'm dealing with here.

Sure, I'll try very hard, but please try to get your tiny head to understand that these people are crazy.

Yeah, the logic of the gun lobby seems to be that if Hitler hadn't had a handgun, he wouldn't have been able to shoot himself, so he'd probably still be at large today.

That is true, Andy.

That basically is a logical extension to all these Hitler analogies at the moment.

But

the figures, I was reading some figures that suggested that there are more firearms than people

in

the USA now, which

might explain why

there are 40 times more intentional homicides pro rata in America than in the UK.

And partly, I guess, you know, we're slightly more buttoned up as a nation.

We don't let it all spill out.

But

I think it's clear that guns are dangerous, John, and I think any buglers that fought at the Battle of the Somme would acknowledge that.

So what were these tyrannical 23 executive orders then?

I'm sure they were pretty extreme, rounding up gun owners, modifying guns so they can only fire marshmallows, legally mandating that all guns be shaped like penises.

They must be pretty good.

So let's take a look.

Executive Order 6, Andy, was

publish a letter from ATF to federally licensed gun dealers providing guidance on how to run background checks for private sellers.

Publish a letter?

That is one of his key solutions.

Getting the ATF and gun dealers to basically become pen pals.

What about the police?

They have to deal with military-grade weapons on the streets.

What do they get?

Let's see.

Executive Order number 13, maximise enforcement's efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime.

So that seems to basically be an executive order saying try harder.

Come on.

Obama is supposed to be a time rant, not a little league coach.

He's asking Congress for much bigger laws, such as curbing sales of

semi-automatic weapons, as you mentioned, and large magazines both of which are ideas exactly as good as they are also certain not to happen.

Another suggestion is for Congress to require, again as you say,

a universal background check for anyone trying to buy a gun, to which your first response, especially as a non-American, is, hold on, you don't already do that.

Holy shit, that seems dangerous.

That seems like it should have happened with the very first rifle sale back in Frontier times.

Sure, I'll sell you this rifle.

Very exciting to be the first rifle seller.

Enjoy her.

She's a beauty.

But just before I do, I hope you don't mind.

I'm just going to ask around with a few people just to make sure that you're not a complete maniac.

I mean, I'm not going to sell this weapon of death to a stranger without any kind of background check because that would be f ⁇ ing insane.

Well, it's clear.

I mean, it's a tough issue for a bomber.

He's really had to bite the bullet on this one.

And, well, it's not easy biting a bullet when it's being fired into your mouth at point-blank range from Charlton Heston's handgun.

But it's all about the the timing, then.

You've got to bite the bullet and chew the bullet and then spit the bullet out, reformed into a commemorative lead figurine shaped like a dove.

It's a very high tariff maneuver for an American president.

The president signed detective orders in front of a group of children in a far from original form of slightly manipulative political stagecraft.

And even this became controversial with Rush Limbaugh, the fully qualified shithead.

I mean, fully qualified, Andy.

Post-grad.

Post-grad was using the.

He claimed that the president was using the children as human shields.

Now, here's the thing.

Isn't that technically exactly the opposite of what he was doing?

Isn't he trying to literally shield them from gun violence?

I think those kids would probably take that trade-off, being physically protected, if they have to briefly metaphorically protect someone else.

I still think they come out of that deal pretty well.

Given that the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms was ratified in 1791, perhaps there's a loophole here, John, that will enable nothing to be done, but just a slight tweak of this amendment that will allow people only to fire a weapon that is an exact replica of a 1791 firearm whilst wearing a wig and silly clothes and address any resulting wounds with historically authentic medical treatments, for example, getting a dog to bark at it or bleeding to death.

The US Constitution was adopted in September 1787.

It was ratified in May the following year and went into effect in March 1789.

Now, just six months later, they tagged on 12 amendments.

So I think they realised they'd made a few bloopers in their excitement.

They were probably drunk, John.

Understandable.

They were exciting times.

They just won a key civil war.

They rushed these 12 amendments out on the same date.

They were probably hurried a bit.

They probably didn't sit down and discuss now how might these words be interpreted in 220 years' time in what all our predictions suggest will be a time when civilization will have advanced so much that all forms of media will be balanced, factually accurate and geared towards improving the sum of human knowledge and happiness, apart from the odd podcast.

Do you think the wording as it is of this amendment, people might view it as carte blanche for everyone to wander around with the tools of mechanised slaughter in their pockets?

No, Georgie, I'm sure they won't take any notice of this in 220 years' time.

I'm sure they'll be smart enough to see this as a document of its time that will need occasional tweaking and twerking as the world changes and develops.

Yeah, good point, Jeff.

Oh, let's just chuck this out to get things going and assume people will be grown up enough not to let this become a divisive issue of personal and national identity.

Right, Amendment 3, since we're all eternally wise and fair, should we do something about not allowing people to enslave other people?

Or should we hang far on that for 75 years?

Yeah, good shout.

Okay, who likes women?

Yeah, who wants to establish their equality as a species and or gender in this little constitution of ours?

Just kidding, let's whack that on the back burner for another cheeky hundred.

Okay, 120.

130, done.

Now, right, compulsory for all men to wear powdered wigs.

That will never change.

Let's write that one in.

Write it in.

In what was generally a pretty excellent speech, President Obama even played the Reagan card saying weapons designed for the theater of war have no place in the movie theater.

A majority of Americans agree with us on this.

And, by the way, so did Ronald Reagan, one of the staunchest defenders of the Second Amendment, who wrote to Congress in 1994 urging them, this is Ronald Reagan speaking, urging them to listen to the American public and to the law enforcement community and support a ban on the further manufacture of military-style assault weapons.

And in case you're wondering why on earth Reagan would be for gun control, such as background checks and an increase in mental health resources, it's probably something to do with the fact that

he was shot by a mentally ill man who illegally purchased a firearm.

I'm guessing that sometime around the point that he was clambering off the pavement and into the back of the presidential motorcade before bleeding his way back to the hospital, he thought, yeah, something should probably be done about this.

Yeah, but that's just a knee-jerk reaction, John, isn't it?

Letting his own personal experience cloud his objective judgment.

Bad burger news now and horse DNA has been found in some beef burgers being sold in the UK and Ireland in supermarkets.

And

I mean, look, there are two potential explanations for this, Andy.

One is disgusting and one is even worse.

First, it's possible that somehow horse meat has made its way into beef burgers.

And second, it's possible that horses have somehow been having sex with people's hamburgers.

Neither of those eventualities are good, Andy.

The two aren't mutually exclusive either.

Britain was absolutely appalled by this, John, and rightly so.

We as consumers, as British consumers, have a God-given right not to think about what is actually in our cheap shit food.

food.

We fought world wars to keep the ingredients of things like the great British sausage and the great British burger a secret.

We might suspect that our 15-pence burger contains a bit of bull's nut sack or scrafings of pig gut or essence of chicken butt or the chick quivering remnants of what was once the proud penis of a mighty hedgehog.

But we don't want to actually know it's in there.

We want to think it's made of the voluntarily sloughed muscle of prime royally bred cow directly descended from Queen Elizabeth I, hand-minced by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

And also horse, John.

I mean, who on earth would eat horse?

I mean, a lovely little horsey.

Who in their right mind would chow down on that succulent, tasty, healthy meat with so much nutritional value?

That is not a British thing to do.

That is French, John.

Horse meat apparently accounted for around 29% of the meat content in one sample from Tesco's.

And

a spokesman for Tesco said the safety and quality of our food is of the highest importance to Tesco.

We will not tolerate any compromise in the quality of the food we sell.

The presence of illegal meat in our products is extremely serious.

Illegal meat and the, you know what, here in America, crime procedural dramas are incredibly popular here on TV.

And I think we've just found the next hit.

CBS's hit new show, CSI Meat Detective,

patrolling the streets, tracking down that illegal meat and imprisoning it.

But it did show a lot about Britain's attitude towards food that people were disgusted by the fact that it was from a horse but seemed completely unconcerned about which bit of a horse it was which was surely the more relevant issue.

It's an amazing amount of human ingenuity.

We've seen in these last two stories in this week's bugle.

The amount of human ingenuity and effort that has gone into A, developing ways of shooting people and B working out what bits of what animals you can eat and more importantly how far you have to go to camouflage it before people will actually eat it.

We are in an infinitely resourceful species, John.

Well, it's slightly curtailed, Bugle, because of John's hectic alphabetical tour of America.

What's after Seattle then?

Probably Syracuse.

Syracuse.

I'll come right to the end of the SUV.

Yeah.

And, well, and it's the inauguration on

Monday.

You're going to be there, Joe.

I will be there.

Yes, we're doing a piece down there.

Any hope of sneaking in on the bill, getting inaugurated for something?

Well, you know, if I get anywhere close, then I'll probably just quickly answer the oath of office before he does.

Boom.

I think that puts me in, basically.

Then I'm president for the next four years.

And what's your forecast for the tone of voice as Obama inaugurates himself?

Is there going to be like a sigh of resignation?

Yes.

Shit, I've got four more years of this bollocks to do.

There is going to be an audible sigh through his microphone that echoes across the country of, ah, shit.

One more.

At least this is the last time I have to do this bullshit.

So that's almost all the time we had for anything this week.

John has left to go to the airport.

I've just got time for a quick email.

We'll have more next week.

Do keep them into info at thebuglepodcast.com.

This comes from Richard on the subject, Stefan Feck winning the public's hearts.

Dear John Chris and Andy, in order of physical similarity to the man who reinvented the sport of diving.

I thought you'd be interested to know that all three of the BBC sport website's most watched videos of the Olympics currently feature John's diving doppelganger, who we reported on during the Olympics.

I'm sure you remember, who basically

hit the water hard with his back.

They are in reverse order.

Three, the painful side of the Olympics.

Two, the funny side of London 2012.

And one, Stefan Feck's dive itself.

There can be no doubt, says Richard, that this dive has changed the way we look at this pointless sport forever.

Keep up the bullshit from Richard.

So that's great to see.

Great to see people really embracing dangerous incompetence.

More emails next week, and we'll play you out this week, appropriately enough, with some excerpts from Lance Armstrong's famous book, It's Not About the Bike, which proved to be an extremely opposite title.

And some of his writings now have to be read with hindsight with a considerable degree of scepticism.

And here are some excerpts that you might like to reassess in the light of his recent confession.

I was fortunate enough, in addition to the six decades of ruthlessly hard training that I put myself through, to have an advantage due to my bicycle, a magic bicycle that I bought from a passing wizard in exchange for my mother's cow.

When cycling in the mountains, remember, gravity is 99% psychological.

I could see the other riders struggling because they believed all the hype that gravity has put out about itself in the press over the years.

But I knew that it only slows you down if you let it.

A valuable lesson that I learnt from my uncle Neil, who famously flew to the moon single-handed in a rocket he'd built himself out of old soup tins and the engine from a tractor he found abandoned in a farmer's field with only a farmer in it.

And finally, success in the Tour de France is all about the accumulation of small advantages.

I had a significant advantage over my competitors due to my choice of music that I listened to while cycling, whilst they mostly listened to the kind of anthemic rock anthems and strutting hip-hop that are supposed to inspire sportsmen.

I simply had the Benny Hill theme tune playing on a loop for three solid weeks.

Scientists have shown that it is impossible not to run or cycle at least 60% faster when listening to the Benny Hill music.

Others could have done it.

I did do it.

And it also helped that I had on the inside of my trademark sunglasses a little projector screen showing footage of scantily clad women running away from me in decreasing amounts of underwear.

And don't forget to check out the Bugles page at soundclouds.com slash the hyphen bugle.

And if you've not yet taken out your Bugle Volunto subscription, then please f ⁇ ing do so

at thebuglepodcast.com.

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.