Bugle 209 – 5th Birthday Edition

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The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 209 of The Bugle, the world's leading thing for the week beginning Monday the 15th of October 2012.

Five years to the second since arguably the most significant cultural event in the entire history of the human race.

The official release of the first ever bugle.

So this bugle marks half a decade of hogwash, a twentieth of a century of satire, 0.5% of a millennium of mirth, and a billionth of a five-billion year era of bullshit.

I'm Andy Zoltzmann, and I'm five years older, five years wiser, silly five years less wise, and above all, five years more unemployable than I was when I first spoke to you.

And joining me

from a nation five years even further on hinge than when we first revealed its existence, it's the man who, since the bugle began, has acquired a wife, a dog, and a career in B-movies.

Read into that what you will.

It's the Manhattan Macerator himself, John Oliver.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Buglers.

We're in three different countries today, Buglers.

Andy is in Scotland, if you count that as a country, which nobody really does anymore.

This is in London, which is definitely a country in and of itself.

And I'm, of course, in New York and happy fifth anniversary, Andy, I believe that that's traditionally the wooden anniversary.

So what I've done is I've sent you a gigantic wooden horse filled with angry Greeks.

I've put it in the mail this morning and apparently FedEx said that you'll get it in the next two months.

So to be honest, those Greeks may be even angrier by the time they get there.

When it turns up, don't rattle it too hard to find out what's inside or they may really lose their shit.

The point is, happy anniversary, Andy.

Thanks, John.

That's touching.

The Greeks are quite angry enough as it is without being put inside a wooden horse these days.

Doing this for half a decade seems a lot of things, Andy.

It simultaneously feels impressive, ill-advised, improbable, pointless, fortunate, exciting, and slightly pathetic.

It's finally hard to make a good case against any of those descriptions.

Five years, of course, is the average lifespan of a gerbil, John.

And it's amazing to think that a gerbil born on the day we release the first bugle would, on average, be lying motionless in its wheel as we speak, gathering its final fond memories of eating seeds and urinating on its owner's shirt, waiting for a guinea pig, the priest of the rodent world, to come and give it the last rites.

I think that kind of puts everything in perspective.

And a Norwegian rat Is there any other kind of rat or Norwegian?

Yes, on both counts.

A Norwegian rat with a top-end lifespan of three would be celebrating its fifth birthday face down in a sewer, gasping for air, squeaking, End it, end it now.

I'm not supposed to live this long.

All my friends are dead, and society hates me on two counts.

One, I'm too old, and two, I'm a rat, and three, I'm a Viking.

I'm glad we can mark this special occasion with such positivity, Andy.

There's a quite high rodent body count already so far

and congratulations are in order also we're not the only ones celebrating this week congratulations are also in order to the entire European Union Andy who this week won the Nobel Peace Prize presumably for successfully not having a massive war for over 50 years now I think that's what the peace prize is now becoming it's not so much what you've done it's what you haven't done it's become a celebration of restraint president obama won it for literally doing nothing in comparison to his predecessor the Nobel Committee seemed to be saying nothing is better than something.

In which case, this begs the question, where is my fing Nobel Peace Prize, Andy?

I've not launched a single war my entire life, even though, quite frankly, I've wanted to on more than one occasion.

Well, I'll tell you where your Nobel Peace Prize is, John.

It's waiting here in your former country on a plate.

Because Jose Manuel Barroso, the head of the EU Commission, in an emotional Oscar-style acceptance speech, not only thanked his parents and his manager, but he said that the prize is for all 500 million EU citizens.

Oh, good.

That is going straight on my CV, Joe.

I've won!

Nobel Prize winner!

Yes!

Yes!

That should help all that.

That's great news.

Yeah, I mean, it would help me getting a job as a Middle East peace envoy if the bugle folds at any point.

Certainly helped breaking up disputes in pubs.

You know, I can just wade in and say, hey, guys, cooler.

I'm a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Let me deal with this.

Right, who spill whose beer?

Well,

let's learn from Europe.

Why don't you all club together and form a trading and economic cooperation group to force yourselves not to start fights with each other?

But then it might slowly acquire more and more social and political power, risking destroying one of the most important and successful alliances in the history of the world by overreaching to achieve questionable goals that should have remained well outside its remit.

Right, who's in?

I'll buy the next round.

I think that's a good point, Annie, because I think the first response

of the European Union to this news of the prize was probably: is there a cash prize associated with this as well because we are significantly short on money at the moment I would not be surprised if you see a Nobel Peace Prize listed on eBay in the next few days with a note saying owner keen to sell quickly no reserve price but I looked it up and the award actually comes with a check for 1.2 million dollars but they better be very clear who is getting that money and not just let the EU sort it out for themselves because otherwise they may find themselves the Nobel Committee in the the situation where the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize get into a massive fight over who the money should go to.

Germany instantly putting in a claim on the money due to the extent to which their banks hold European debt, then Spain arguing that their economy needs it more, then Italy jumping to Germany's side, then France saying that they think they deserve it more than anyone else but are unwilling to do anything about that.

Then Switzerland saying, if everybody wants to fight, please feel free to leave your valuables with us.

And the Queen frantically pulling a Spitfire out of a museum screaming, Let's fing do this!

Well, maybe there is some method in this apparent madness as a continent, which is not obviously most peacey at the moment with riots and protests and general social dissatisfaction.

But we should remember, John, what do you need to fight a war?

You need a lot of money.

So, by selflessly bankrupting itself, the EU has removed the possibility of being able to spend billions on blowing itself up again.

It's genius.

Maybe that's it.

Maybe that's it.

We've bankrupted ourselves for peace.

Noble, Nobel winners, Andy, all of us.

And is it 1.2 million, the prize money, you said?

Yes.

The 1.2 million.

I think with Europe's current economic problems, that is very much a goldfish's piss in the Pacific Ocean.

So over these five history-laden years, the world has lost many good people, but quite a few baddies, too.

Osama bin Laden, Colonel Gaddafi, too, that immediately spring to mind as being considerably less alive than they were when they sat sat down to listen to issue one of the bugle.

But let's not get too excited, John.

Who knows what monsters have been born in the last five years?

Tune in in 70 years' time to find out whether the first half decade of bugles has had a positive or negative impact on the overall despot situation.

Also, I mean, how much has the world changed, John?

Five years ago, October 2007, massive drug scandal in sport.

Sprinter Marion Jones had just been stripped of five Olympic gold medals, and a controversial Nobel Peace Prize being given to Al Gore.

So, plus achonge, as the French say, pleus s'est la même's, which I think roughly translates as Give me more change, that's what my mum chose.

I'm a bit rusty.

Also, the day after the Bugle was launched, John, this is the impact it had.

Hollywood actress Deborah Kerr listened to one episode, realised that life was futile and died at the age of eighty six.

And also within weeks, Pervez Musharraf, who had seen the bugle's power, and declared a state of emergency in Pakistan.

So I mean that goes to show, John, what an impact was made five years ago by a show that almost no one listened to.

Top story this week, what's that clanging sound?

It's the big brass balls update.

Big brass balls are not a toy, Andy, they're a gift.

A powerful tool, but with much power comes much responsibility.

Big brass balls can be used to stop a tank in the middle of a road using only the power of protest, but they can also be used to send those tanks to fire on protesters in the first place while simultaneously denying that you know what a tank is.

Brass balls can also be literally fired from tanks but that's a different story.

The point is that the ownership of brass balls has caused some incredible, some terrible and some improbable things to happen throughout human history and also over the last few weeks.

This is a roundup.

Russian brass ball news!

Russian brass balls are a different kind of balls, Andy.

Sometimes they're even a concentric sequence of ornately painted hard balls, one inside the other.

A few bugles ago, we discussed the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, who had the metallic cojones to play an anti-Putin protest song in Moscow's main cathedral and were consequently jailed on a charge of hooliganism and have been incarcerated ever since.

The problem was that they tried to go ball to ball with Vladimir Putin, and that is a battle that many have fought and few have won.

Yes, variously described as the Russian banana rama, and uh what would have happened if Miley Cyrus had been born twelve times in Russia and got into politics.

And Pussywright's uh renowned for wearing brightly coloured balaclavas and doing uh impromptu, provocative performances about Russian political life in unusual and uh generally unauthorised locations, such as uh the cathedral or on top of buses or in the metro and uh they then post these videos on the internet.

And as you say, take a young Putin, John, that is that that is brave.

They they burst into uh Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and performed a track entitled Punk Prayer, Mother of God, Drive Putin Away.

Now, I'm not a lyrics expert or a Russian expert, but I think the subtext of that song is they don't like Vladimir Putin and they would like God's mummy to pop him in the back of her car and drive him away somewhere.

Probably not to a nice holiday resort.

However, this week the development is that a court in Moscow freed one of the women in the band but upheld the two-year sentences for the other two.

The freed woman won an appeal by claiming that she'd actually been thrown out of the cathedral by guards before she could even get her guitar out of its case to join in with the band's, as you say, punk prayer.

That's a pretty bold defense, Andy, having your defense statement essentially being, I was actually attempting to commit the bullshit crime that you're charging me of, but you f stepped in before I could do it properly.

So, next time you want to stick me with a trumped-up charge, please, please allow me to commit it first.

I rest my bullsy case.

One of the women still in jail is Nadezhda Tolokhinokova, who was previously involved in another protest which involved five couples copulating him in a museum whilst a man dressed as a stereotypical Jew held up a big banner.

Now

that was,

yeah, I mean, that's an interesting form of protest, isn't it?

That was performed by the Voyner group, responsible for an incident previously discussed on the bugle, where they painted a fifty a 65-metre-long wang on a bridge in St.

Petersburg.

Was that art?

I mean, it didn't have quite the artistic delicacy or anatomical accuracy of, say, one of Michelangelo's wangs, but to be fair, Michelangelo did paint a lot of wangs, and if you put them all together, which I'm not suggesting you do, they'd probably be about 65 metres long.

And another protest by the Voyner Group involved a woman shoplifting a whole chicken by shoving it up her, well, let's just say shoving it somewhere Mrs.

Pankhurst would not have dreamed of shoving a chicken and where Martin Luther King would not have had the option of shoving a chicken were he so inclined.

And I think both of those two legendary political campaigners might have also raised the legitimate query of exactly what political point you could possibly make by shoving a whole raw chicken up any part of the human anatomy.

Maybe something to do with recycling or the sexualisation of Sunday lunch.

I have absolutely no idea.

The Russian church said that the women's actions cannot be left unpunished, although it added that any penitence should be taken into consideration.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev even stated that a suspended sentence would have been sufficient punishment for the band.

All this was added to wave upon wave of support for the band from all over the world.

But was Putin interested in any of that?

Well Andy, he's about as interested in that as he is not interested in flying at the front of a flock of migrating geese in a ludicrous bird outfit.

He defended the sentence saying it's right that they were arrested.

It's right that the court took that decision because you can't undermine the foundations of morality, our moral values, destroying the country.

What would we be left with then?

Andy, to make a statement like that while simultaneously dismantling your country's democracy before everyone's eyes and personally plundering its national resources like a modern-day Viking takes brass balls so big they need to be constantly lubricated by being constantly coated in a thin layer of oil to prevent them from rusting over.

It's like painting the fourth bridge.

It just never stops.

Never.

One of the pussy riot members told the hearing we are all innocent.

The verdict should be overturned.

The Russian justice system looks discredited.

To which the Russian justice system replied, We look discredited now.

You think this is as fing discredited as we can get?

Man, you don't even know you've been born.

You do not know you've been born.

Another massive set of clanking brass balls has been displayed by the 14-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl, Malala Yusavsai, who was shot and critically wounded by the Taliban

after calling for education for girls, which you might not think is too outlandish in most countries, but it's not really the kind of thing that the Taliban go on for.

And it does seem that the Taliban, by storming onto a bus full of school children and shooting a 14-year-old girl and two of her classmates, have still not fully mastered the delicate art of public relations.

They are, John, increasingly hard to warm to as a political organisation, the Taliban.

They just don't seem really into grown-up discussions, compromise, acceptance of other people's views.

And clearly, what they should have done is they should have sat little Malala down and explained to her why it makes sound social and economic sense to ban television, to ban music, to remove all education for girls, to ban women from shopping, and also to explain to her why violence, hatred, and terrorism are the best way forward for everyone in her region and how targeted and random slayings are a perfectly reasonable way to resolve disagreements.

Then allowed her to have her say, a little bit of give and take, and try to reach a satisfactory compromise.

And then just had a drink and a laugh about why they disagreed so much in the first place and why they thought it was a good idea to blow up more than a hundred girls' schools.

But the Taliban just aren't into that kind of compromise, John, so that did not happen.

That's right, the Taliban are at best stubborn and at worst.

I think the

events of the last week have proven they're probably right in the middle.

They are stubborn.

It's amazing.

This little Pakistani schoolgirl, she's been writing a diary for the last three years online about living life under the Taliban.

She was 11 when she first started writing the blog for BBC Urdu which dealt with life under the Taliban rule in her hometown of Mingora in the northwestern region of Pakistan which she affectionately calls my SWAT.

Now life for an 11 year old girl there is to put it mildly f ⁇ ing shit although she would probably state it much more elegantly than that.

In one diary entry she writes of the threats made against young girls who continue to try and attend her school saying I was afraid of going to school because the Taliban issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools.

Only 11 students attended the class out of 27.

The number decreased because of the Taliban's edict.

On my way from school to home I heard a man saying I will kill you.

I hastened by pace.

To my utter relief he was talking on his mobile and must have been threatening someone else over the phone.

I guess that's what passes for a funny story for children in the SWAT Valley at the moment Andy, but it's absolutely chilling.

There are three facts here.

Fact one, this girl is amazing and it's well worth worth reading her diary entries online.

Fact two, the Taliban are a shower of pricks.

And fact three, this little girl has some of the biggest, brassiest balls in the known universe.

The surgery so far to remove the bullet from her brain seems to have been something of a success and that is hardly a surprise because the girl is incredible.

She's absolutely amazing.

And I'm sure all buglers would join us in wishing her and her brass balls all the best.

Yeah, her father's also an anti-Taliban activist, so it clearly runs in the family.

And as you say, she started taking pops at the Taliban, aged 11.

Now, it's fair to say she's displayed rather more courage than the average 11-year-old, certainly than the 11-year-old Andy Zoltzman.

The bravest thing I ever did when I was 11 was attempt to stop the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Oh, no, hang on, no, it wasn't that.

No, the bravest thing I ever did was read cricketer Graham Gooch's autobiography, which did contain coded messages urging a long-term peace agreement in the DRC, to be fair.

The Pakistani Taliban said that Malala, quotes, is the symbol of the infidels and obscenity.

And I mean, aside from anything else, this is just factually wrong.

If you want infidels and obscenity, Taliban, just pop on the internet for five minutes and you will find bigger fish to fry.

They also added that if she survived, they would target her again.

Oh, well, big men!

Big men, you bravely hunt down those little girls.

You bravely hunt them down.

You are giving your press officer absolutely nothing to work with.

It is so hard to put a positive spin on that.

And your action movies, Taliban, must be an absolute blast.

The Taliban version of Gladiator, for example, ending with Maximus smashing the crap out of 12-year-old Cornelia, shouting, take that on behalf of your gender.

Single brass ball news now.

And in Britain, a rugby player for the Warrington Wolves called Paul Wood had a testicle removed after rupturing it during a game against Leeds Rhinos.

That's pretty ballsy, but it gets even ballsier when you hear that he was injured early in the second half, then played on before going to hospital after the match.

Andy, I simply do not understand that level of toughness.

If that happened to me, and it wouldn't, let me be clear about that, because I'm too cowardly to ever be in a situation when something like that might happen.

But if it did, which it wouldn't, I would immediately be screaming out, get me off the field immediately.

I think I've just ruptured my testicle.

I officially withdraw myself from this game, primarily due to the testicle I just ruptured.

And let me be clear, I'm not just withdrawing myself from this particular game, I'm never playing this stupid sport ever again.

On account of the fact, not to labour a point, I just ruptured a f ⁇ ing testicle playing it.

Also, I would politely ask that this game is abandoned now.

I do not think it's appropriate that either team continue playing because, if I have to remind you, someone ruptured a testicle out here and that person was me.

Hands up everyone who doesn't have a ruptured testicle.

Oh that's good.

I notice a lot of hands up in the air out there.

You'll notice that someone doesn't have their hand in the air and instead has their hand over their ruptured testicle.

That man is standing before you right now.

Well not exactly standing.

That man is buckled over before you right now awaiting an ambulance.

I have ruptured my testicle and I think the appropriate amount of attention I deserve at this time is all the attention.

This is complete bullshit.

That's more or less what I'd say Andy.

Yeah, and it happened on the same weekend there was a lot of debate about diving in football and players feigning injury at the merest contact.

And Paul Wood in the Rugby League Grand Final, that's basically like the Super Bowl for our American listeners, but a bit less glitzy.

I think the half-time show is usually a man in a flat cap taking his whippet for a walk around the pitch

before sitting down to eat a pie with no nutritional value.

I'd very much like to see the black-eyed peas take that on.

So, but as you say, Wood not only erupted his testicle, but carried on playing for for 20 minutes before going to hospital to have it amputated.

And he then told the BBC afterwards, it sounds worse than it is.

What?

What?

Does it, Andy?

Or does it sound exactly as bad as it is?

Because as far as I can tell from reading accounts of the incident, he ruptured a fing testicle.

And the mere words of that sentence alone are making my eyes water.

I'm gripping my balls right now

talking about this story as if to reassure my dual plums that I will never be glib about their welfare.

He admitted, it does smart a bit when you get hit down there.

It's a hard man's game, Rugby League John.

It's a hard man's game.

He continued to show a superhuman mastery of understatement as he went on to say, There was nothing special about this.

As a rugby player, you just do your job until you hear the final whistle.

There's nothing special about it.

Not special, Andy.

He lost a testicle

to him.

What is out of the ordinary?

He must be a nightmare to be around on so-called special occasions.

How was your birthday party, Paul, darling?

Did you have a special day?

Well, not really, love.

I've still got both my kidneys.

Be more eventful, to put it mildly.

Routine?

Yes.

Pleasant?

Sure.

Special?

Absolutely not, sweetheart.

There have been other incidents of Bollock-related injuries in sports.

And in the other Code of Rugby Rugby Union, notorious New Zealand hardman Buck Shelford, playing a match against France in the 80s, had his scrotum ripped open, told the doctor to stitch it up, returned to the pitch and was then knocked out.

That shows the folly of it, John.

I mean, I usually take an hour off from anything after sneezing just to get my equilibrium back.

Although, to be fair to Paul Wood,

he's not been completely dismissive of it.

He did admit that he's going to look into wearing added protection next season, saying it's something that I'm going to look at because obviously I've only got one now, so I've got to look after it.

The very fact, Andy, that in the course of one game, the way he referred to his testicles went from plural to singular suggests that that game was a lot more special than he gave it credit for.

I do think it is a shame, John, that rugby league is not covered by the American media and the way they write headlines, because I think it would have looked rather splendid to have rugby league player lose his final comma bollock.

Cycling big brass balls now, and well, I mean, if Paul Wood thought he had it tough, his fellow sportsman, the unicyclist Lince Armstring, won the Tro de Fance despite being used as a pincushion, it has been alleged.

Are we covered legally from that?

But

yeah, Lance Armstrong, the prominent cyclist,

he has shown amazing balls, John, because the US anti-doping agency have released a thousand pages of

evidence against him gathered from more than 25 different sources, and he has continued to say bullshit to it.

And you have to admire that, John.

I mean, the complexity of the operation described is frankly extraordinary.

But his continuing defense of himself is either one of the greatest cases of barefaced balls in history,

or one of the greatest acts of delusion in history or he is the victim of one of the most extraordinarily orchestrated lying campaigns in the history of the human race.

The United States Anti-Doping Agency has now labelled him a serial cheat who led

the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.

Basically Andy, if successful doping and subsequent evasion of testers was a sport and it was a cycle race, Lawrence Armstrong would have won it an unprecedented seven times.

Armstrong has now been banned from cycling and stripped of his titles and as you say his brass balls don't come from the fact that he took so many drugs his balls may have shrunk and become so leathery and tight that they've formed into little brass ball bearings no his brass balls come from the fact that he is still claiming that he is innocent he is sticking to his story despite a positive positive mountain of evidence against him his lawyer has even described the report as a one-sided hatchet job which is true only in the sense that a butcher performs a one-sided hatchet job on a cow that has been dead and refrigerated for days.

Amongst the various allegations are that he paid one million dollars into the Swiss bank account of an Italian doctor who helped him.

Now, I cannot stress how important it is, buglers, to get those two nationalities, Swiss bank account and Italian doctor, the right way round.

Because if you get them the wrong way round, you are going to end up absolutely skinned and absolutely

Amongst the other allegations against Armstrong are that he rode the 2002 Tour de France on a Kawasaki 350.

He responded to queries from the meter about the noise his bike was making in a mountain stage by claiming he was growling to ward off any bears that might be lurking in the forest.

There were also allegations that he had an extra pair of legs surgically removed from another young rider in his team and grafted onto his own hips to give him four legs compared with most other riders two or three in the also cheating Festina team.

Also, that his blood tested positive for being a condor after a gene transfusion program in which he and his teammates were given blood and DNA from various birds of prey to improve their eyesight, stamina, gliding speed, and the beaky aerodynamics of their faces.

Armstrong concealed the feathers that grew as a side effect under his famous trademark yellow jersey, but the whole shebang was nearly blown open on stage 14 of the 2004 race when Armstrong's US Postal colleague George Hinkapy pulled over to the side of the road near Carcassonne and laid an egg.

Also, allegations, John, that there were ten different Lance Armstrong clones, and each day, whichever one was riding, would be so much fresher than all the other riders, most of whom had only two or three clones as their team's cloning programs weren't quite so advanced.

Armstrong has also claimed that his feet were off the ground when the allegations were made, so he is technically innocent of all charges.

American people's brass balls now.

and well as we all know Andy American people have three balls one red one white and one blue and historically Americans have had had the balls to do things to misquote President Kennedy not Kennedy not because they are easy not because they are necessary not because they're even advisable but because they're fing awesome America is undeniably in economic trouble right now I don't think that's a secret 16 trillion dollars in debt with a deficit that's threatening to force the government into default and with an election that is being almost entirely based upon either side's plans and pledges to get the country out of this economic shitstorm.

So, how are American people responding to this, Andy?

Well, by spending an estimated $310 million on Halloween costumes this year for their pets.

Good luck competing with that, Greece.

Good luck.

Sure, Europe may opt for savage austerity measures, but Americans will go a different way, Andy, spending an unfathomable amount of money to make their animals look like other things.

That is ingenuity, Andy.

And it's not just physical ingenuity, it's emotional ingenuity.

Yes, David Cameron has argued that the only solution to

Britain's economic woes is cutting social services and arts budget, but that's because he's never looked at a pet and thought, I bet a British company could make something that would make that dog look like a wasp.

And that is where Britain is coming up short, Andy.

After the Wall Street crash in the 20s, Americans cut back.

They joined breadlines.

After the sub-mortgage crisis a few years ago, Americans stepped up and decided to dress their cats up like forklift trucks.

The greatest generation right now, Andy.

Sorry, did I say greatest?

I meant most ludicrous.

The point is, everything's going to be fine.

Feature section now, art.

And a painting bought at a flea market here in the US for $50 has turned turned out to be a work by Renoir and is now likely to be sold for around $100,000.

The woman bought the painting as part of a box lot that also included a doll and a plastic cow.

So it could be worth even more.

Perhaps that doll was once owned by Hitler and has a little moustache that he drew on it in MarkerPen.

Is there a string coming out the back of that doll that you can pull?

Because if you do, perhaps it gives people precise instructions

of where to locate the body of Osama bin Laden.

That would increase its value no end.

As for the plastic cow, that's probably just a plastic cow.

Has anyone checked its udders?

Perhaps that plastic cow was signed by Martin Amos.

That might slightly up its value.

The point is, the lady got a huge bargain.

Well, that's the thing with art, you know.

You can't tell what it is worth just by looking at it and working out how nice it is.

It goes way beyond that.

There was a painting by Rothko recently sold for over £50 million,

$87 million.

It's orange, red, yellow, the highest price paid for a piece of post-war art ever at an auction.

That is only slightly less than Chelsea played for Fernando Torres, John.

And

the Rothko painting has scored nearly as many goals for them as Torres has.

And in another Rothko story, a painting by him in the Tate Gallery, Tate Modern Gallery, in the prominent northern hemisphere city of London, former home of Karl Marx and John Oliver, amongst others,

was defaced by a man called Vladimir Umenets

from Russia, who claimed to be the founder of an art movement called Yellowism and compared himself with serialist artist Marcel Duchamp.

He wrote in black marker pen in the corner of Rothko's painting, Vladimir Umanets, a potential piece of yellowism.

And yellowism, ironically, sounds like a fancy way of describing what you might find in Marcel Duchamp's signature piece of a urinal.

The defaced painting was one of these Seagram murals originally commissioned

from Rothko for the Uberswanky Four Seasons restaurant in New York City.

Rothko disclosed that his true intention for the murals was to paint, quote, something that will ruin the appetites of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.

Is that true?

Yeah.

Oh, that's a great quote.

Yep.

He carried on, if the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment, but they won't.

People can stand anything these days.

Oh,

that's great.

Presumably the owners heard this and thought, well, it looks like Mark has slightly misinterpreted the brief.

I guess this could be a new fad in restaurant store in this increasingly health-obsessed age.

You control your overeating by surrounding yourself with massive paintings expressing the essential tragedy of humanity and the unavoidability of death.

That's right, the Russian Vladimir Umenets, who is definitely Russian, Andy, that's the story checks out, because that name is writing checks that his passport could very much cash.

Vladimir Umenets.

He claims that he is an artist and not a vandal.

is he absolutely sure about that Andy or is he potentially mixing up the description artist with being a cock he would be the first person claiming to be an artist to make that same mistake

he did he did compare himself with Duchamp saying art allows us to take what someone's done and put a new message on it and interestingly Andy the law allows us to take what someone's done and put a jail term on it.

Because Vladimir Umenets may soon find himself embarking upon a bold new installation artwork soon, where he is installed in a prison cell for a while.

This is going to be a very exclusive work as well, because you're only going to be able to see it if you get a job as a prison guard or commit a crime yourself.

He's clearly brilliant.

Or a cock.

Well, it's a classic excuse for any criminal, isn't it?

It was a piece of art.

We've seen it before.

Dr.

Crippin, when he bumped his missus off almost 100 years ago, claimed to the court it was a performance art piece exploring the inextricable relationship between love and death, poignantly advocating the fragility of life and the ephemeral nature of being.

Your honour, please don't hang me.

Although, to be fair, that would be an

interesting sculptural installation piece.

I mean, we hang pictures so they might live, but here you're going to hang a man so he might die.

His violent struggle of his twitching limbs playing almost erotically with the stillness of the gallows and the universal

inevitability of failure, life fighting its unwinnable battle with death before doffing its still twitching cap to the ultimate master of all until all the life force is stripped and we are just left with a primeval scream of futility expressed by the faceless corpse pendulum of a human rendered into a mere physical object, all ambition, will and essence stolen from him, swinging to the merciless beat of Time Immortal.

Sorry, I'm not really helping myself here, am I, Your Honour?

Oh come on, if I was Damien fking Hurst you'd be paying me four million just to do the autopsy.

Other art news, the Thread Needle Art Prize has been awarded and Ben Greener's piece My Feet won the top £30,000 prize which is the most valuable in Britain for a single work of art.

The work is a sculpture of his feet made from wood, canvas, tea and coffee.

And what I'm glad for Ben Greener Andy but I also feel slightly ripped off because Ben Greener must have seen or at least been aware of my controversial sculpture entitled My Penis made from paper mache, a balloon, hot chocolate and lemonade that nearly got me a suspension when I made it in my school art class at 10 years old.

I was of some influence eventually.

It was described as way ahead of its time by me back then or to give it its full review from my art teacher Mr.

Parkinson what is this John?

Is it a spaceship or some kind of abstract carrot?

It's a what?

That is disgusting.

Please go straight to the head teacher's office and drop this obscenity in the bin on your way out of the room.

The other nominees for the prize included Faustus McMillicent, a descriptionist sculptor who's never actually made a sculpture, but stands in galleries telling people what sculptures he would make if he knew how to sculpt.

The highly regarded by the London conceptual magazine Art Mageddon, who described him as, quote, the ultimate 21st century creationist creator, a divine child of an age of potentialist anti-achievement, a siren for the unfulfilled, whose very lack of talent makes him the most talented artist to emerge from these shores since JMW Turner.

His description of doing a man sitting down with his chin on his hands was viewed by some as a daring relocation of Rodin's iconic the thinker into an era when people don't really think anymore, and by others as lazy plagiarism.

Also nominated to Marpella Sclamphaven, a 96-year-old Southend-on-Sea resident who sat on the same seaside bench and eaten a smoked mackerel sandwich every day since her husband Ron died in 1965.

She accidentally declared herself a work of art after mishearing a question at a doctor's appointment for a minor cardiac problem and is now on permanent, if confused, display in the Saatchi Gallery in London, where she and her bench now reside in front of a 3D projection of Southend Beach.

She's the first prize nominee to be unaware unaware that she is, in fact, an artist.

Your emails now, and we do not have time for your emails this week.

I'm recording this in a slightly echoey hotel room in Edinburgh, surrounded by some pillows to try to deaden the sound on my portable sound recorder.

This is

being recorded on some of the faults.

That's a good visual, Andy.

You've made yourself a little pillow fort.

I have.

Yeah.

This is the first bugle ever to be recorded from a pillow fort.

If I could have made it with teddy bears, I would have done.

So sorry if it sounded a bit unusual this week, this historic fifth anniversary bugle.

But we will be back next week with your emails and the latest update dates on the history of the planet Earth.

Buglers, thank you for listening.

Five more years.

Five more years.

Five more years.

Five more years.

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.