Bugle 203 – No medals for Syria

This is a podcast from thebuglepodcast.com

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, Buglers, and welcome to Bugle issue 203.

Watt in that bottle, please.

Oh, you're clear.

For the week beginning Monday, holy crap, there's going to be less than a week of sport to go by the time Monday comes around.

Oh dear, that puts everything in perspective.

I'm Andy Zaltzman, Great Britain, live just a few miles away from where British athletes are going for glory.

If you're working for or watching the BBC coverage, and if you're not, where the world's greatest sporting event is taking place.

And with me this week, it's the former Czechoslovak second scientifically enhanced 800-metre ace, Jomila Kratoch Vilova.

And alongside him or her in New York, bugling under the IOC banner for comedians no longer affiliated to any nation, it's John Oliver.

Hello Andy!

Hello buglers!

Now if you've been following any of Andy's micro bugles this week or indeed his Twitter feed you'll probably be aware that Andy has come down with a very serious case of Olympic fever.

He's been attending events all week long, frequently more than one a day and is in fact sandwiching this bugle recording in between seeing athletics before this and then leaving immediately after this to go and see I believe fencing and table tennis.

That's right.

This isn't just Olympic fever, Andy.

This is advanced stage Olympic fever.

And at this point, there's just not much that any doctor can do.

I was just panicking now.

Yeah, there's no point even sending in a priest to see Andy now, partly because he's Jewish, and partly because he'd take one look at the cross around the priest's neck and just automatically assume it's a new medal for getting fourth place in the triple jump.

In fact, I believe that if you took an x-ray of Andy's torso right now, you would see his intestines have rearranged themselves into the shape of the five Olympic rings.

When I spoke to you on the phone yesterday, Andy, you sounded as happy as I've ever heard you.

And that absolutely includes both your wedding day and the birth of both of your children.

What were you doing at the birth of my children, John?

I didn't want to interrupt.

I just wanted to be there.

My only concern is that when these Olympics are over, you are headed, Andy, for a spectacularly large come down.

After the closing ceremony, you're going to be like Ewan McGregor in train spotting, lying in the corner of a room, shivering and hallucinating a hammer-throwing baby crawling across the ceiling.

What are you going to do?

That doesn't bear thinking about, John.

How are you going to wean yourself off this level of happiness?

Well, I don't know.

I mean, it's going to be hard, and even more concerning than that, John, is that it looks like it is going to be...

at least another four years until London hosts the Olympics again.

Probably even more.

So

it's going to be dark times.

I think your best bet might be just to move straight to Rio after this and sit in the unfinished Olympic stadium and just wait for four years.

I think that's your best bet.

Yeah.

I'm going to need a lot of help and support from my family and friends.

That's certainly true.

But it'd be nice to get some sleep.

I think doing these daily micro bugles has been

it's been good fun and thanks for those thanks for those who've fed back on them, particularly those who fed back positively.

I hope you're enjoying them.

But it does mean that I've been getting about three hours of sleep a night and then getting up at 6 a.m.

to go, for example, to watch rowing.

And the first hour of rowing yesterday basically involved people rowing for the opportunity to row in the C-final for the classification of 13th to 18th position.

So I could perhaps have treated myself to a lie and skip the first hour.

Besides, which, rowing as a spectator sport,

I mean, it's pretty dull, frankly, if unless you could, if you're standing on the bank about a mile from the start and about 500 meters from the finish,

that's and you know, you see a boat whiz past at medium speed every 10 minutes and then basically watch it on a big telly.

So, but that's uh, you know, that was that was definitely a sleep opportunity lost.

Top story this week.

are there more important things to care about?

Of course.

Can you name any of those things right now?

Of course not.

What's the first thing you think of when you think of the word news?

That's right, it's Michael Phelps' face, isn't it?

That's because it's the Olympics, Andy.

Humanity's emotional morphine.

It doesn't make everything okay,

but it sure as shit makes it feel okay.

It's Olympics update time!

I'm about 30% joking when I say any of that, Andy.

And I know that for you, that number is currently significantly lower.

Well,

there was a news bulletin

the other day I heard on the radio, and it had about, I think it was maybe even, it was radio four, actually.

So, I mean, this is, you know, the serious bit of British media.

And it was like a the three-minute news bulletin on the hour.

And the first two minutes were all about the Olympics.

And then other news was there's been a massacre in Syria.

Yeah.

I think that showed, I mean, you might see that in a negative light.

I see that in a positive light, because that just shows that things don't need to be bad, even when they are.

You know, it's just...

So the human, it's like an evolutionary thing.

We've seen the evolution of humanity.

There didn't used to be Olympic Games.

Then we developed Olympic Games and now we are able to ignore major catastrophes.

That is self-preservation, John.

It is mental self-preservation.

It's the evolution of the species, Andy.

That's action.

Well done, Darwin.

So the Olympics is a week in now, and after a spectacular Olympics opening ceremony that saw a five-minute Mr.

Bean sketch and James Bond bursting in on the Queen with a look in his eyes that made me think he was about to shoot her in the head, the Queen, of course, then jumped out of a helicopter and even more spectacularly, managed to scowl her way through the rest of the opening ceremony.

She did look like she absolutely hated it.

She had a face like a bored trout, Abby.

Would it have killed her to smile just once rather than have a permanent expression that seemed to say, I f ⁇ ing hate all of you.

All of you.

I think, and I think I mentioned this in the very first monicro bugle last week, that there was an explanation for this, John, that she just spent 10 minutes in a helicopter with James Bond.

Now, what happens to women when they get in bits of transport alone

with James Bond?

Oh, and it could have really set off her arthritis.

That's all I'm saying.

The point is, Andy, what a week.

There's been triumph.

There's been despair.

There's been sunshine.

There has been rain.

And there have been cheating badminton players bringing that noble sport into disrepute.

How dare they disgrace badminton Andy?

They brought shame upon the shuttlecock

what happened

in the book about

shuttlecocks John yeah

the feathers on shuttlecocks are made only from the left wing of a goose

They said this, I went to badminton last night and it was announced during the pre-match build a filling of it at a time.

They said incidentally the shuttlecock was made using feathers feathers only from the left wing

of the goose.

That sounds like one of your lies.

Yeah, I know.

I was listening to that thinking, have I been...

I'm a bit confused.

I've been very busy, but I don't remember writing the continuity links for Olympic badminton.

I think that might be the single most pointless fact I've ever heard.

I mean, that literally has no use to me.

And yet, I'm probably never going to forget it now.

But disappointingly, they have removed the original phase of Badminton from when it was invented in around about the 17th century of competitors having to chase and de-feather a goose to make the shuttle cock.

Now of course originally it wasn't from the left wing of the goose it was from the shuttle of the goose which is like the turkey's wattle underneath the goose's chin and the cock was made from the

cock of the goose.

Now obviously for the sake of the flight of the shuttlecock

you need the cock bit to be you need the shuttle bit to be feathery and you need the cock bit to be hard.

So

it needed to be removed in an aroused state.

Now clearly this is a tricky maneuver for a badminton player to pull off to sever the aroused penis of a goose.

It's okay for the goose because they just, their wangs grow back like hydras, which is why, you know, in the 18th century, you couldn't move for geese with about 50 penises.

But it did make making the shuttlecock

difficult.

It's been a long week.

Get some sleep, Andy.

You're hallucinating.

Is this still the fact?

If it was at 20 all in the game, rather than nowadays you have to get two points ahead until it gets a 29 or then you have like a golden point.

A 20 all,

the bald, angry, and recently de-penised goose was released onto the court.

And the last player to be pecked by the angry goose won the game.

That is no less useful a fact than the actual fact you started that with.

Though there's the same amount of use.

What happened in the badminton, if you missed it, was that four women's doubles teams were disqualified from the Olympics after deliberately trying to lose their final group games to secure an easier draw in the knockout round.

It looks bad when one team in a match tries that.

It looks terrible when both teams are simultaneously doing it.

It's not technically cheating, but it did turn the crowd on them and did cause a badminton scandal.

And you don't often hear those two words anywhere near each other, Andy, badminton scandal.

In fact, there hasn't been been a badminton scandal since 1986, I believe, when for a couple of days the then world champion Park Du Bong was briefly thought to have caused the Chernobyl nuclear disaster with an Aaron Shuttlecock

until the investigation eventually blamed electrical engineering equipment and the use of graphite in construction materials.

But for 48 hours, it looked to have been the single worst combined badminton and nuclear reactor disaster in decades.

Badminton scandal used to open the bowling for Jamaica in the 1980s.

Erin Corney.

There was a great feature on the BBC Olympic website this week, which gives you a chance to find out, and I quote, your Olympic athlete body match.

Now, you can put your height and weight into the program, and it will tell you which Olympian's body you most resemble.

So, you know, I'm about six feet and around 175 pounds.

So, I put that in, and it turns out that I'm most like Stefan Feck,

the German Olympic three-meter springboard diver, and also Ian Lewers, the British men's team hockey player now this means I technically have the body of an Olympic diver Andy that is a numerical fact it's not a visual fact but which do you trust more your eyes or numbers exactly without numbers you wouldn't even have two eyes to see things with you just have some eyes that's my point so it turns out that I have the body of an Olympic diver Andy and I'm as pleased with that fact as I imagine Stefan Feck is angry with the fact that after a lifetime's dedication to carving his body into its perfect sleek form he numerically has the body type of a 35 year old British comedian.

Well I did the same on that same test John and it turns out that I have exactly the same body

as the 15 year old British gymnast Rebecca Tunney

Are you

I mean I haven't measured myself for a while to be honest but I was just going on my last recorded

measurements from six months ago.

But, you know, then I was six stone

and four foot ten.

The point stands.

Interestingly, American politics and the Olympics combined on Thursday through Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee.

He's had a special connection to these games, not just because he seemed to imply that the London Olympics last week would be a bag of shit before they began, but also because he actually owns one of the competitors in the Olympics.

His wife Anne had a horse competing in this Olympics in the sport of horse dressage, otherwise known as horse ballet, otherwise known as the single stupidest thing in the history of the world.

Not so stupid, though, that there were not 23,000 fans who turned up to watch the horse dancing in Greenwich Park on Thursday.

Kudos to British sports fans, Andy.

They will turn up to watch anything, whether it's a sport or not, as long as it's called a sport.

If you called an old lady crossing the road a sport, Andy, you would have thousands of people turn up to watch her and millions more people complaining that there weren't any more tickets left to see it because they'd all been given away in corporate deals.

Well, that was basically the Jubilee John.

Come on, Ethel.

Come on, Ethel.

She's just crossed the river instead of a road.

Anne Romney's horse is called Rafalca, which is a stupid name for a horse that you are asking to do stupid things in a stupid sport.

But Rafalca has become a bit of a touchy subject for Mitt Romney, as, you know, its very existence does play into the image of him being a bit of an elitist.

Now, he's claimed that it is not an elitist sport, horse dressage, but let's just look at the cold facts for a moment.

The rider wears a top hat and white gloves, and the horse trots in place and performs pirouettes.

A pirouetting horse, Anthony.

A pirouetting horse.

I think Mitt Romney is smart enough to know that you do not get elected to the highest office in the land by being associated with a pirouetting horse.

Rafalka's rider insisted that the sport is not just for the rich, saying that it's open to anyone on, and I quote, a normal budget.

But that might be stretching the term normal just a bit because it might be normal to anyone with a large Swiss bank account but the horses cost upwards of half a million dollars to buy and according to their tax according to the tax returns that Romney has deigned to release so far the Romneys wrote off $77,000 in horse expenses in 2010.

Horse expenses Andy!

Horse expenses and not just horse expenses pirouetting horse expenses.

And not just pirouetting horse expenses.

$77,000 in pirouetting horse expenses.

Well, that's mostly the

training costs of teaching a horse to pirouette

in a China shop and having to pay for all the breakages.

That's how you train them to do it delicately.

But it does cost.

It does cost.

It's been pointed out here that if President Obama wins this election with the economy in this bad a shape, it'll be a huge achievement.

But Andy, if Mitt Romney wins this election with a pirouetting horse, I think it'll be even more impressive.

In fact, if he does win, I think he should ride onto the stage to give his speech with a top hat and white gloves, with his horse pirouetting all over the place, shouting, you just elected a tax-evading Mormon with a pirouetting horse.

This is the greatest country in the world.

Also, I mean,

Britain got a medal in the

eventing, equestrian.

We've also had gold medals in rowing, cycling, and canoeing and shooting.

And it seems that we, as a nation, specialize in being good at obsolete forms of transport and self-defense.

And we've got a silver in judo, as a women's judo as well.

So I'm also concerned about this deer.

I mean, the canoe slalom is quite impressive, John, given that as a nation, we do have so few crocodile-infested rapids.

There isn't a necessity driving on our young canoe slalomist like there is in other countries.

And I am very concerned about this: the shooting goals that we won yesterday.

That I saw a bit of on tele whilst having lunch in a cafe in between

rowing and badminton.

My hectic schedule.

What am I going to do, John?

There's only just over a week left.

What am I going to do?

And personally, I thought it was about the dullest sporting event I've ever seen.

Well, no, you take an opposite view on that

basically clay pigeon shooting.

It was awesome.

Yeah.

It's so awesome, Andy.

So let me.

You're watching clay discs explode in pink smoke.

Yeah, I'm just being shot by a huge shotgun.

I don't know what is boring about that.

Well, no, the first one, not boring.

The second one, you know, nice to confirm that the first one wasn't a fluke.

It's really when it gets to the 800th one towards the end of the competition that the novelty of seeing those things explode in pink smoke starts to wear off gradually.

Also, you know, as a sport goes, that's not a

massively wide range of skills.

I've got a commentator saying, whoa, what a beautiful trigger action he's got on that finger there he's uh he's a flare shooter so many options on that gun it's just not enough for me as a sport john it has been an amazing thing to go to so many of these uh events and and see the uh just the joy on the faces of the british people and one very notable thing has been the uh how friendly all the staff have been that uh the the games are largely staffed by volunteers and the military and they've made a superhuman effort to be be kind of chirpy and polite to people.

And I think, John, this is a very significant moment in the history of Western economics because it has shown that the future for our workforces is to have volunteers wearing dangerously flammable-looking purple shirts and being paid zero wages.

It clearly makes people happy and it makes them helpful.

And what this shows all along is that the Soviets were right.

I think it's time to admit that we got the Cold War wrong, John.

This is the future.

This is the future for all our economies.

In other Olympics updates, Rafalca, Mitt Romney's horse, finished apparently in 13th place on Thursday, I'm sure to the huge relief of the Romney campaign.

Because it was rumoured that it looked like if Rafalca was going to win a medal and get all the publicity that came with that, that the Romney campaign had secretly hired Tonya Harding to run onto the field and hit Rafalca in the ankle with a hammer.

One notable thing thing about watching all this sport is that, like so much of sport these days, there is just an unceasing soundtrack of musical shit spewed out into all the venues.

At the rowing yesterday, the PA system veered between blasts of the rapper Dizzy Rascal and commentary links by Rob Curling, the former local newsreader and host of the rightly cancelled TV game show Turnabout with Rob Curling, which was a wonderful juxtaposition of Edgy Urban and failed local TV newsreader as cocktails go John it was like having a bourbon whiskey laced with a cheap strawberry milkshake and this morning at the athletics you know it's the first morning of the athletics in the Olympic stadium there was a we have Jessica Rennis gold medal hope going in the first two events of the Heptatlan and you might want to know what the atmosphere was like in the stadium on this morning a sense of anticipation building Well, I can tell you what that atmosphere was like, John.

I've basically no idea.

It was impossible to tell because some soulless imbecile was playing 30 second pukes of pop music unceasingly throughout the build-up and throughout the athletics itself.

On the rare occasions that he did shut his fing mouth, and by his mouth I mean his sound system, maybe because there was a short enough race on that he thought the crowd might be able to cope with out of tune they'd heard a minimum of 100 times before for the 48 seconds of a 400 metre hurdle race for example or because he was having to field the calls from his parents telling him they didn't love him anymore because of what he had done to the sport.

In those rare moments of crowd authenticity, it was incredible.

The stadium shaking roar for British possible 400-metre hurdle finalist, but unlikely medalist Jack Green, making it through the first round, suggests that when a British athlete is actually going for or wins a gold medal, the noise could wake Shakespeare from his cold, dead grave and inspire him to pen a new sonnet about people running around, jumping and throwing stuff before saying, hey, I've had a new idea for another rom trage.

Right, boy meets girl, girl dies,

boy dies, the end.

I'll whip it up and give it a modern twist.

Who's got a quill I can borrow?

What, you don't use quills anymore?

You flash fks.

I wrote everything with a quill.

Stop being so needlessly modern.

You still shit in buckets, though, don't you?

What?

What the hell has happened to this fing country?

I'm so pissed off I could burn a witch.

I don't tell me you don't do that anymore.

Oh, you do do that still.

But you need a special fire safety license.

Oh, for f's sake.

Thank you, Brussels.

I digress.

Andy.

Andy, you're just wrong.

High-energy dance music uplifts when punctuating incredible moments.

I can prove this to you.

Tell a joke quickly now.

Tell any quick joke.

I'm a pessimistic man.

In that respect, I'm like a German vegetarian.

I fear the worst.

You cannot say that didn't give your joke extra punch, Andy.

This is different, John.

You know, that kind of music is fine when it is needed to fill a silence.

And after that joke, there is a silence to be filled.

But this is the difference.

And do you want to hear the roar of the crowd, John?

Clearly, these high-volume, pitilessly persistent musical turds that show absolutely no remorse throughout all sporting events these days are the result of much planning.

So, guys and girls, eyes on me, we need to finalise plans for the Olympic Stadium experience.

We've got a stadium that might be a bit drabbly pedestrian on the outside, but it's pretty decent on the inside.

It's going to have an 80,000 expectant crowd ready to voice their giddy thrill at the most exciting sporting spectacle in the history of this nation, with all due respect to the 1985 World Snooker Final.

Right, so any ideas how we should maximise the sense of occasion, the uniqueness of the atmosphere, the modern 21st century Britishness of this momentous day and the feeling that sporting history is being created?

Me, me, me, boss, Tony, how about a 30-second blast of last Friday night by Katy Perry?

Good start.

Anyone else?

Brenda?

I was thinking that whilst a triple jumper is striving to nail her third attempt in qualifying with a place in the Olympic final at stake, we should try to interfere with the single most important moment of her sporting life with 45 seconds of girls aloud sounds on the underground.

Hi, Decibel.

Oh, very high.

Decibel Issima.

Now we're cooking.

Julian.

What about trying to drown out the roar of the crowd as heptathlon star Jessica Annis fulfills a nation's vicarious sporting dreams by breaking a national 100 meter hurdles record by honking out a mega volume bastard?

Let me stop you there.

It doesn't even matter what it is, Julian, does it?

It doesn't matter what it is.

You've just hit the nail on the head.

In fact, you've not just hit the nail on the head.

You've knocked the f ⁇ ing nail spark out.

That is the best idea you've had since getting Paul McCartney to sing one of his own songs very badly in a thematically incontinent anticlimax to the most ambitious piece of stadium theatre in European history.

You're on fire, my friend.

Mike, what is your hand up for?

Uh, yeah, boss, do you think we should maybe ease off on the music for a bit whilst you know, maybe a longer race is on, like, for example, the steeplechase heat.

What the fing hell's arse are you talking about, man?

What if there's a momentary lull in the stadium?

What then?

Oh, a bit of light and shade, boss.

You know, might add to the rhythm of the occasion.

We could let it grow organically for a minute or two.

You're fired, Mike!

What is this?

1740?

We're not dying of typhoid now, Mike.

God gave us massive stadium sound systems.

If we don't use them all the time, he'll probably turn us into lizards.

Off you go, Mike, and sing Let Me Entertain You on the way out.

Or you've never seen your desk tidy alive again.

Basically, John, I can only imagine how good the atmosphere would have been in the stadium this morning if there was allowed to be any.

I know there are arguably more important issues in the world today than the remorseless chundering of irrelevant part-digested musical musical boluses into sporting arenas.

But if I had a two-word message to the cack-headed idiots responsible for this kind of shit, those two words would be

off.

No, no, no, no, no, no, they'd be stop it.

No, no, actually, they would be f off.

Off, then read up about sports, what it's for, what makes it good, and why people like it, realize that what you're doing is wrong, and then off again.

I think I've made my point.

Oh, Andy, it's a really good point, and there's only one better way to punctuate that.

I'm not saying there should be no music at all.

Just not all the f ⁇ ing time.

But apart from that, it's been a bloody amazing job.

It has been, as you say, it has been, it's been incredible.

It's been,

I don't know, it's almost too much sport to cope with.

Yeah.

For the rest of today's show, do you want me to not have any of those little musical stabs between items?

Do do you want me to just leave a little silence

context and variation okay I'm gonna leave a silence in and then we'll see we'll see how that goes down make it a long one okay let people savour the moment okay

Syria update now and well a bit of a change of pace here Andy because I'm afraid that it is not good news.

Tragically, Syria has not won a single Olympic medal in the entire first week of competition.

And from

the

look of some of the footage I saw briefly on the news, it looks like they're not at all happy about that.

It seems like they were writing in the streets in protest of the dismal Olympic performance or something like that.

It wasn't clear.

That is a particular pity, Andy, as it really does seem like winning an Olympic medal might be the only way for Syria to get the world to pay any kind of attention to what is happening over there at the moment.

Their best bet the Syrians is to somehow win a gold medal in pursuit cycling then as their national anthem plays run off the podium grab the camera by the lens loom into it and frantically say before the music stops please help us the Assad regime is routinely shelling cities with civilians trapped inside this is a massacre please do something to stop this human rights atrocity and then just pray that it makes the primetime highlights package in the evening on nbc because otherwise it was all pointless

and the bbc will probably cut from that to see a british person who's got a reasonable chance in the wazzing in a bucket competition

It really has been horrendous news for Syria.

Rebel fighters in Syria's second city, Aleppo, attacked an army base using a tank they'd seized from the military.

While in Damascus, government forces launched operations to root out rebel activists, killing people all over the place and to add to this Kofi Anand the UN Arab League joint special envoy to Syria announced this week that he is leaving his post in a news conference he said that the Syrian people desperately need action but he also criticized the UN Security Council for finger pointing and name-calling well he better get ready for more of both of those Andy because after making a principled call for greater accountability and maturity like that he can expect instantaneous results in the form of fingers being pointed at him and chance of Kofi is a poopy head.

He left his job because he wet the bed

in his time in Syria.

Kofi Annan authored a six-point peace plan, which was intended to bring an end to the terrible fighting, but the plan was never fully adhered to by either side, and the violence has continued to get worse and worse.

Just out of interest, the six-point plan was one, stop it.

Two, stop it now.

Three, seriously, watch where you're pointing that thing.

Four, watch your language, Mr.

Assad.

That kind of talk will just make everything worse.

Five, are you threatening me, Mr.

Assad?

And six, does anyone know a cab number to take me to the airport?

But of course, it being the Olympics of the six-point plan, the most aggressive and the most conciliatory points will be removed, and an average will be taken of the rest of the points.

And if you'll average out,

nothing will be done.

You cannot process a single single human thought without putting it through the proxy of the Olympics.

It's impossible.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Kofi Annan was, I quote, a man of great merit, a brilliant diplomat, and a very honest person, so it's a great shame.

He then said, seriously,

I honestly mean that.

Why is everyone laughing?

I think he's a great guy.

Look, please don't laugh, because if you start, then I'm going to start.

I'm going to miss Kofi Annan a great deal.

Boy, you are making this difficult.

Hold on.

Kofi Annan is

a man of great merit.

I can't even look at you now.

I need to think of something sad.

Kofi Nanan, forget it.

Scratch the sentiment.

I'll just send him a fruit basket with a note that says, f off.

So if I can interrupt that, sorry.

Service over.

Andy to talk.

Matt Badminton is a great sport to watch, John.

It's absolutely fantastic.

So he resigned.

But the timing is a bit suspicious, John.

Not only did he resign, but three minutes later, he took delivery of a new 42-inch 3D television and then locked himself in his office with a guide to all the sports.

Well, John, if we can just lay aside

other news stories like Siri and return to the big one.

Logistically,

aside from the ticketing being just abject chaos, it has been incredibly smooth.

There's been almost no queues to get into venues.

The transport seems to have held up.

And the security problems that arose when G4S, one of the private security companies, admitted that it had forgotten basically to recruit anyone to do all the security,

has turned out quite well.

The army have been involved and it hasn't broken out into civil war yet, so I guess that is better than

when we held the Olympics in 1642.

But here's a nice little kicker to the story.

earlier in 2012, at the Recruiters Award for Excellence, G4S won the highly coveted Best Global and International Recruitment Strategy Award.

Now, on the evidence of this Olympics, might be a bit of a tough job to hang on to that title on current form, but it happens so many times in sport, John.

You strive to reach the top, and when you get there, you've just got nothing left in the tank.

It's clearly the same for G4S and recruitment.

You know, your competitive goose has been baked.

Certainly happened to me after winning the egg and spoon race at my school sports day age six I was never quite the same again after that and being disqualified from the sack race at the same meeting for crossing line out of my sack it was it was a very marginal call I still thought I had contact with the bag and what what counts as in the sack John I mean the regulations of this sport are a grey area not until the WSRF clears it up once and for all and introduces finish line video technology controversies like that are going to happen anyway I was never quite the same competitively after that peak of achievement same thing happened with golfer David Duval, tennis player Eva Maioli.

I mean the list goes on.

Maybe GeForce had just achieved everything they wanted to achieve in the field of recruitment and then just couldn't keep it going anymore and started cutting corners like a champion rabbi on an eight-day-old square penis.

Fast food restaurants use as proxies for ludicrous cultural wars in American news now.

And look, gay marriage is gradually happening here in America, Andy.

State by state, it is quietly, slowly but surely becoming law.

And in a good way, it's not creeping like an ominous storm, it's spreading like a sunrise, gradually, naturally, and inevitably making the whole country a significantly brighter place.

Unfortunately, there are obviously some moral king canutes trying to stop this tide of basic human equality from rolling in.

And one of those men is Dan Cathy, the owner of

Chick-fil-A, a high-end, low-grade chicken sandwich restaurant chain here in america he's donated a lot of money to so-called traditional marriage groups in the past and comments emerged this week of him saying in an interview and i quote i think we're inviting god's judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say we know better than you what constitutes a marriage and i pray god's mercy on our generation that has such prideful arrogant attitude to think we have the audacity to try to redefine what marriage is about.

And he should know, Andy, he is, after all, the owner of Chick-fil-A.

A man who's had the audacity to redefine what constitutes food fit for human consumption.

Sadly, a few well-intentioned city mayors in America made statements suggesting that they would ban Chick-fil-A from opening restaurants in their city, something that they are legally not allowed to do, and something that unleashed a whirlwind of whack jobbery as conservatives with a capital K such as Mike Huckerby and Sarah f fing Palin to give her her full name, decided to embark upon a Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day on Thursday, prompting thousands of Americans to line up around the block to show their support for traditional marriage by eating a fried chicken sandwich.

It is a quintessentially American form of protest, Andy.

Years ago, people would march on Washington.

Now, people will line up around fast food joints.

There has been also a weird tone of victimhood from conservatives during this who seem to view this as some kind of Christian persecution.

Fox News yesterday encouraged people to, I quote, stand up to anti-Christian, anti-chicken, heterophobic bigots.

I don't even know where to begin with that, Andy.

Anti-Christian.

Oh, sure, Christians have...

have it so bad here in America Andy.

Who knows?

Maybe one day we'll live to see the day when America has a 45th Christian in the White House.

And as for anti-chicken, are you fing kidding me?

If you are standing up to anti-chicken people, you are casting yourself therefore as pro-chicken.

And it is hard to be pro-chicken when you are lining up to go into a Chick-fil-A to eat a chicken that has been battery farmed with another chicken shitting on its head and packing its eyes out

before being ground down into a processed chicken paste and then breaded and fried.

That's basically what Jesus did at the feeding of the 5,000.

but with fish instead of chicken.

Now, Chick-fil-A are not alone in being a politically vocal company and they're allowed to be Andy.

Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream is openly liberal.

Domino's Peter has donated a lot of money to conservative causes.

But I think now it's just best for everyone to come clean.

And it's time for all of America's fast food chains just to come out and reveal their positions on the most important political issues affecting America right now.

Would Tarco Bell let the Bush tax cuts expire, Andy?

Does KFC think it's time to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba?

What is the Cheesecake Factory's position on abortion?

These are important questions, Andy.

What is Dairy Queen's attitude towards a preemptive strike on Iran?

America needs to know.

I can't enjoy a strawberry cheesecake, Andy, if I'm wondering whether or not Dairy Queen would allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon.

And hold that burrito for a moment, Chipotle.

Why don't you let me know your view on the ethics of stem cell research first?

Your emails now, and last week we broadcast an email from Ian apologising to Liss.

And we weren't sure who or what Liss was and what on earth he was apologising for.

But to be honest, our suspicions headed in some fairly unpleasant directions.

We have had a response from Liss.

Dear John, Andy, and Chris, in order of who is most likely to have been the Queen's stunt double in the Olympic opening ceremony.

I reckon you could work.

I reckon you could pass that off, Chris.

Thanks.

Yeah.

I've got the purple rinse.

You've got the purple rinse.

I could do with a bit more sagginess of jowl, but apart from that, you're heading there.

She writes, I am the Liss that you were having to apologize to in episode 202, and I'll need you to send help.

I'm not exactly sure where I am, but I've spent the last few months in a basement somewhere, changed to a radiator with only the Bugle for Company played on a laptop out of my reach.

After training a mouse to type by rewarding it with scraps of food and punishing it with quotes from the love guru, hey!

I've managed to send this SOS.

Please locate and extract me from this place as quickly as possible.

Yours in desperation, Liss.

Now, here's the problem, Andy.

I'm not sure that, because we also speculated on whether

he was apologising to the town of Liss

in Hampshire, the village of Liss in Hampshire.

And we actually have a response from that as well saying, dear Andy, John, and Chris, in order of how easy it is to spot clouds that look like you, last week you read out an email from Ian offering his sincere apologies to Liss.

However, he did not say what for.

I'm a resident of the leafy village of Liss, Hampshire, and was very disturbed by this news.

The big question that I have is, is he apologising for something that he's already done or something that he's about to do?

I certainly hope he wasn't responsible for any acts of sabotage at the recent Village Olympic Scarecrow Festival, nor for that matter the well-publicised mindless vandalism of some potentially championship championship-winning onions in the local allotment ahead of the horticultural show.

If it's for something that he's about to do, then he can bring it on.

He doesn't have a chance.

List is one of the most heavily fortified villages in the UK.

There are bear traps.

Those are illegal.

There are bear traps, tripwires, and the neighbourhood watch have a staring and tutting routine that would knock even the great Vladimir Putin off his feet, hence putting to rest the unasked and unthought-of question as to why Putin hasn't visited the Hampshire countryside during his recent soiree to the UK.

Rest assured that the alert level is high now in the village and will remain so at least until the autumn steam fair.

A time for wiping the slate clean and joining together in the love of the vintage bedonka donks.

So, if you could please inform Ian that any attack on Liss over the next couple of months would be futile, that would be appreciated.

She just he tries Lip Hook down the road.

Much easier to say to Capa there.

Best regards, Andy, from Liss.

So, I don't know, Andy.

I don't know what.

I don't know who to believe.

My instinct says neither of them.

This email comes in from the wonderfully named and presumably fictionally named Aristotle Sagazitor.

Now, if that is not your real name, whoever sent this in, then please do change your real name to that.

It will be infinitely better than what you've currently got.

And he's writing on the subject of my micro bugles, which for legal purposes I've entitled

The Games that has been covered as the Londinium 5772 Nemean Games.

He writes, dear Andy, Chris, and John, in order of Olympics events visited.

Yeah, I'm definitely ahead there.

What's your current title, Chris?

Well, I've got five in the next six days, so I'm currently on zero.

Zero.

So you're level neck and neck with John.

I've just been to, I think, my 14th.

I'll be on 16 by the end of today, which will put me at the halfway point.

Jesus.

You're almost catching up to Michael Phelps.

I've been to nearly as many as Prince William.

That's

been to everything.

I think he's serving dinner in the athlete's village as well.

He's often at two different events at the same time.

He's magic, though.

He makes our teams win.

It's clear to me that Andy's inspired retitling of this year's Corporate Sports Day was lacking a suitable logo, so I took the liberty of designing one.

The gaudy numerals were a given, but they assessed in the background of the pillars from the site of the original Nemean games.

That's in Nemea for anyone wondering.

The wreath-based symbol would be familiar to all buglers and features wild celery leaves, again from the ancient games.

Finally, the unofficial motto of the bugle has been rendered in Greek to add that final authentic flourish.

And also is used rings that don't necessarily look...

Oh, I see, they are the wreaths.

But they kind of look slightly like Olympic rings in the shape of a cock and balls.

And the motto of the bugle, ante gamesu cris.

I think we can work that out.

Yeah, I think I worked that one out.

Very good, very good.

Good classic sticker to help me along with that.

The rest of you can probably work it out.

Quality use of time there, Aristotle.

So do keep your emails coming into info at thebuglepodcast.com.

And don't forget to check out our SoundCloud page, soundcloud.com slash the hyphen bugle, where and the websites, thebuglepodcast.com, and the daily microbugles will continue to go up this week, assuming that I do not fall asleep for 36 hours at some point.

Sport now and I'll just listen back to this show again and

probably cover you for it.

No time anyway because I have to go and watch some people with swords go at each other like it was still the 15th century.

The men's team sabre fencing final.

It doesn't get any bigger than that John.

Oh it's gonna be huge.

Just hope it doesn't doesn't lead to an increase in knife crime around London.

Let's just finish on a serious note.

Goodbye, Buglers.

May the sport be with you and with your spirit.

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.