Bugle 193 – Happy Deathiversary!

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The Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World.

Hello, Buglers, and welcome to issue 193 of the Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World, the comedy show that dead celebrities Homer, Leonardo da Vinci, Marie curie jonah from the hit bible story jonah in the whale and queen bodicea would all have listened to had they been alive today and been contractually obliged to listen to it i am andy zoltzman one of the top five billion funk saxophonists in the world and in new york city is the man who was beaten by satirical beetle as a child and hasn't stopped satirizing stuff since it's john oliver hello andy hello buglers andy uh it's interesting you should mention the funk there because last night we uh wrote a bit on the show that we thought could have a great cameo from George Clinton in it from Parliament, Funkadelic and of course the principal architect of P-Funk.

Now, I could give you some more context as to why it seemed like a good idea, Andy, but it wouldn't actually make much more sense than what I just said.

The point is, it turned out he was actually available and doing a gig the previous night in the nearby city.

So we made arrangements for him to come up, rehearse, and do a bit on the show last night.

The problem is, Andy, that even when you've booked the funk, the funk is hard to pin down even when the funk's manager guarantees that the funk is on its way to you.

There is no ETA on the funk Andy.

The funk is either in front of you in which case it's there or it isn't in which case it's somewhere else.

You don't make plans to meet the funk Andy.

The funk makes plans to meet you.

Especially when it turns out the funk has missed its train in Baltimore

and is having to drive up the Jersey Turnpike in rush hour with one of the funk's friends.

Thinking that the funk was three and a half hours funking late.

And when the funk arrived, Andy, it seemed a little worse for wear.

And I wondered whether the funk knew quite where he was or what he was being asked to do until we started filming and it was like the funk looked at its watch and realised that it was funk o'clock.

So what

I'm saying, Andy, is that I danced with George Clinton last night and he told me afterwards that I I was a pretty good dancer, which I think proves two things.

One, that the funk is extremely polite, and two, that the funk also lies.

So this is the Beagle for the Week beginning Monday, the 7th of May, 2012.

25 years to the day since 1987, the day that Margaret Thatcher secretly gave birth to Lady Gaga and named her magic new child after herself, then shipped her off to America to be raised by the Reagan.

Also, 60 years since the Queen, in the early days of her reign, said, look, everyone, I'm levitating.

I knew I was magic, now I'm Queen.

Before the then Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, You're not levitating, mum, you're bouncing up and down on my tummy.

That's not the same.

To which the Queen replied, Shut up, Mr.

Trampoline, I'm having fun.

60 years ago today, solid bullshit start, Andy.

Thanks, John.

I'm afraid to get that first piece of bullshit under your belt.

The funk did not visit me, John.

That's Andy, because the funk never left you.

Is there such a thing as Jewish funk or or not?

It's a different kind of funk and it's like a sweetener.

It's not sugar.

You know, it's it's kind of chemically generated to taste like sugar.

So I believe there is Jewish funk, but I believe it's with a pH.

That's because it's transliterated directly from the Hebrew.

Top story this week, happy death anversary!

And look, I'm sure that there were some people who forgot Andy and desperately had to run to the shop on their way home to get a sad bunch of wilting flowers.

But this week was the one-year anniversary of bin Laden getting shot in the face.

And what a happy day it was, Andy, one of the best uses for high-velocity pointy metal that humanity has ever had.

It is amazing to me that the greetings card industry left this anniversary alone.

They've managed to commercialize almost every other course for celebration.

And the fact that there was not a one-year assassination anniversary line line of cards is a little confusing to me.

It barely seems 12 months ago that we were glad to see him go.

We really found the perfect place to put that bullet in that face.

We all wished him the worst of health, wanted so much for him to go f himself.

And now he's gone, the world is better.

And I thought I'd write you this letter.

For 12 months ago, together we said, Ding dong, the douche is dead.

Happy death aversary from mom.

Now,

I don't know how you chose to celebrate, Andy.

I know that many people here in America chose to head down to SeaWorld in Florida to see a recreation of the daring operation by their incredible SEAL Team 6.

It's basically six SEALs in night vision goggles, Andy, with plastic machine guns, storming an inflatable version of the Abadabad compound that's floating in the middle of their pool.

And they use their guns to shoot sucker darts at another seal wearing a long beard.

It's incredible, they are the best there is.

So, it's become quite a political event as well.

I understand

your president has been accused of milking it, yeah, somewhat.

Bin Laden is dead, General Motors is alive.

I believe that has been the Democrats' line on this.

I guess on the flip side, you could say that also under Obama's watch, golf legend Seve Balasteros is dead, but Fox News is still alive.

So

that cuts both ways.

Sure, Gaddafi is dead,

and Apple Computers are still doing fine, but also dead.

Brazilian football genius Socrates, Leslie Nielsen, comic legend, Liz Taylor, and Steve Jobs, you know, have all made a positive contribution.

We can all cherry-pick achievements.

But, you know, still going.

Traffic Eura.

You know, it's

flip sides, John.

Flip sides.

The death of Bin Laden was an event that brought the whole of America together.

So, you know, it only stands to reason that 12 months later it is tearing this country apart.

President Obama, as you mentioned, has been doing something of a public high-fiving tour this week.

Basically going around the country and saying, Watt's got two thumbs and is feeling pretty good about himself right now.

Not bin Laden, that's for sure, because I f ⁇ ing killed that guy.

Now, he even released a campaign ad reminding people that Mitt Romney had once criticised the president for saying that he would go after al-Qaeda and Pakistan if necessary.

And this put the Republicans in something of a tough spot because the problem is that you can't say President Obama is exploiting having killed bin Laden without saying President Obama killed bin Laden.

And none of them want to say that.

Once the ad was released, it got so much traction that Romney was even asked by a journalist, would you have given the same orders to take out Osama bin Laden?

To which he replied, Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order.

And with the greatest of respect, by which I mean with absolutely no respect at all.

That is the standard meaning of that phrase.

Whenever anyone says with the greatest of respect, it means with negative respect.

Exactly.

The point is, that's a profoundly stupid question to ask Romney, because what does anyone really expect him to say to that?

Would I have taken out bin Laden?

Hmm.

Knowing then what we know now,

I'd have to say no.

The only issue Romney has with his past record of flip-flopping Andy is not whether or not he'd have killed Bin Laden.

It's whether or not he'd have changed his mind two weeks later and brought him back to life.

Boom!

Boom!

Sit down, Romney!

Is that going to have been out there in a little fishing boat in the Indian Ocean?

With a defibrillator, would have...

I've changed my mind.

Well, if only Jimmy Carter had had the ball to take out Bin Laden when he was president, none of this would have happened.

Yes.

He lacked the foresight, I think.

I think history will judge Carter harshly harshly on that.

Further details have emerged of exactly the circumstances Bin Laden was living in, which are not really

what you expect from an A-lister, as he'd like to think of himself.

As we reported on the bugle last year, also, I mean, not only the one-year anniversary of the death of Bin Laden, John, but also the one-year anniversary of the first use of the term f eulogy.

That's right.

It's been with us for a year.

A whole year it's been in our mouths.

So it needs to be commemorated.

Yeah, so they're in the compound, and they found $450 cash sewn into his clothes,

which, I don't know, maybe just like having George Washington's face oddly close to his skin to keep himself angry about America.

But that's an oddly specific sum, John.

Because I've been on the internet and there are only three things you can buy that add up to $450.

He was saving up for a Nintendo Wii,

a George Foreman Grill, and a porcelain Chris Akabusi.

What atrocity was he planning with that lot?

Oh god,

that is a fearsome list of ingredients.

And they found two buffaloes.

Well, you know, fair play, everyone loves jousting.

They found one cow, because there are two things we know Bin Laden loved.

One, pantomimes, and two, realism.

And

I think we reported last year, they found 150 chickens.

And I've been thinking about this almost non-stop since then, John.

And I think there's only two possible explanations for this.

One is that Bin Laden knew he was finished.

He knew he was a busted flush.

The only way he could make himself irrelevant and powerful anymore was by on the hour, every hour, getting six freshly laid eggs and crushing them in his bare hand and saying to himself, You've still got it, Aussie.

You've still got it.

That's what he was reducing.

The only other explanation, and I don't know how to break this to you, is that Osama bin Laden was holding a chicken fighting competition.

Oh, no.

Now, he wouldn't do that.

Well, I've done the maths on this, John.

I think with 150 chickens, it was most likely a seven-round knockout, Wimbledon-style.

Now, that, of course, would require 128 chickens.

But he probably thought there'd be some fatalities amongst the victorious chickens.

So he had 22 backup chickens to parachute into the draw

in the event of one of the winning chickens dying.

But the problem with this, John, is that you could end up with one of the chickens winning the whole competition, only fighting in the final.

If the winning semi-finalist died, and

that's just obviously unfair.

Yeah, that's flawed, aren't they?

But I guess he wasn't really a fair man.

You know, that probably didn't even occur to him.

And that shows you what kind of monster we were dealing with.

Well, Andy, you put a lot of thought into that.

No one can take that thought away from you.

The one-year anniversary is, of course, the paper.

anniversary so as if to acknowledge that the US released a huge dump of documents taken from the bin Laden compound last last year.

17 letters totaling 175 pages were released from the documents dating from September 2006 to April 2011, just before bin Laden popped his obnoxious Crocs.

Now, that's a lot of pages per letter, Andy.

That's over 9.2 pages on average per letter.

No wonder Bin Laden was America's penemy number one.

He knew his way around the art of the handwritten note.

There are letters written to him and by him, and the correspondence show a leader who was revered but also sometimes ignored by field commanders who dismissed him as out of touch even as he urged them to keep attacking US targets.

Now out of touch seems a little harsh a criticism to throw at the big man Andy.

If I could just leap to bin Laden's defense here and there's a phrase I never thought I'd hear myself saying again

being

Being out of touch was entirely understandable for the man you once memorably described as the Torah Tora Bora law ignorer.

You'd be out of touch too if you were the most wanted human being on the planet.

Yes, I'm guessing he could probably come across as a little aloof, but I'm also guessing that that's because every person he met, he instantly wondered whether they were going to justifiably shoot him in the face or not.

He did probably have some emotional walls you had to break down.

Apparently, he signed all his letters though, the I of Bin Laden, he signed with a little love heart.

Oh, that's lovely, something he picked up from his mother.

In a letter from 2000, he wrote of, quotes, starting a new phase to correct the mistakes we made.

Arguably too little, too late, but

at least a step in the right direction, John, correcting these mistakes, albeit having sprinted a marathon in the wrong direction whilst dressed in a lunatic outfit.

And I mean, I guess it is certainly true that al-Qaeda did make mistakes.

You know, certainly the whole slaughtering innocent people shtick, that has to go down as a PR-own goal.

It was a snafu.

Yeah.

And he also said, in doing so, we shall reclaim, God-willing, the trust of a large segment of those who lost their trust in the jihadis.

Now, the key word there are God-willing.

It turns out that God was very much not willing.

And

seemed to sign off on that contract.

Other papers suggest that Bin Laden ordered his militants to look out for opportunities to assassinate President Obama or General David Petraeus during any of their official visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

That's hardly surprising, as a piece of advice, Andy.

That's like Lionel Messi telling himself to kick the round thing into that neck contraption before every game.

More interestingly, he warned militants not to bother targeting Vice President Joe Biden because, and I quote, Biden is totally unprepared for that post of president, which will lead the US into a crisis.

Wow, hold on a second.

Al-Qaeda seems to be explicitly stating that Joe Biden is worth more to the global jihad alive than dead.

That has got to be a hard chimachanga to swallow for JB, Andy.

Surely also that does pave the way for Obama for the sake of America and world peace to ritually sacrifice Joe Biden live on national television.

It's election year Andy.

Can he afford not to do that?

Yeah.

I mean I know it would be a bit of a publicity stunt but I mean these things really hit home with the electorate these days.

So let's be absolutely clear about this.

If Biden was ever confronted by an Islamic militant with a gun pointed towards him, that militant would then lower his weapon and say, I'm sorry, Mr.

Biden, but you can do more damage to the US yourself than me shooting you ever could.

Has not been targeted for assassination ever felt more insulting than that?

How's Joe Biden supposed to respond to this news?

Yo, you know what?

Good.

Good.

I'm glad you're not going to murder me.

I'm glad you actually, forget that.

F you.

I'd be a great person to assassinate.

Put me on the list.

I demand that you put me on the f ⁇ ing list now.

So it could be that that situation would result in Biden and the terrorists wrestling around on the ground trying to get control of the weapon for Biden to shoot himself to prove how worthy he is as a politician

In the letters some of the branches of al-Qaeda are looking for funding from bin Laden and some are looking for legal advice from him.

Now surely his legal advice would be relatively simple just

yeah what you're doing is still illegal.

There's no loophole that anyone can find that means you can legally kill lots of people other than drone strikes.

The US somehow seems to have made them fine now.

One of the documents found suggested that bin Laden was concerned about the branding of al-Qaeda, especially as he feared the brand was getting a little tainted.

One document suggested that the name al-Qaeda had lessened Muslims' feelings toward the group as it lacked any religious connotation.

The name, which is Arabic for the base, was first used to refer to some of the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets in the 1980s.

And the document then proposed a variety of possible alternatives with Islamic themes, including monotheism, jihad group, Muslim unity group, Islamic Nation Unification Party, and Al-Asqua Liberation Group.

They seemed to think these were great names, but Andy, those are objectively terrible suggestions.

And

at risk of helping the global jihad, which I cannot overstress enough I do not wish to do,

here are some suggestions off the top of my head that I think would instantly be better.

The boom squad,

the flying douches,

the bang brigade, the pull my fingers.

That's just four off the top of my head, Andy.

Off the top of my head.

He criticised the Pakistani Taliban for what he described as vile mistakes.

including indiscriminate attacks on Muslims.

That reflects quite badly on the Pakistani Taliban.

When Osama bin Laden is criticising you for your standards of behaviour, you need to take a long, hard bath with yourself and think about what you're doing.

Well, in another letter, the bin Laden advisor urged him to disassociate their organization from al-Qaeda's spin-off operations in Iraq, known as AQI.

And bin Laden was trying to warn other terrorist groups not to repeat the Iraqis' mistakes.

So, you know, bin Laden was concerned about the Iraqis going slightly over the top with their terrorism.

And maybe

he was horribly out of touch after all.

Did no one tell him that the entire planet had an image of al-Qaeda and himself as a bunch of platinum-grade assholes?

I'm not sure that he knew exactly what people thought about him, Andy.

Bin Laden also said that he was proud of the security measures that kept his family safe for many years.

He apparently boasted that his family adhered to such strict measures, even precluding his children from playing outdoors without the supervision of an adult who could keep their voices down.

Wow.

It turns out it was even less fun than I thought it would be to be a bin Laden kid.

Can I go outside and play, dad?

No, absolutely not, and you know why.

Yes, because of the Zionists and the West want to have you killed.

Can I at least have a snack, Dad?

Ask one of your mothers.

He apparently died with his TV remote control in his hand as well, which I guess is possible justification for killing an unarmed man.

He might have switched over to strictly come dancing.

He was basically a Victorian parent.

He wants death to America and a return to the values of Queen Victoria.

Apparently, there were two conflicting stories over what his last words were.

One suggesting that he saw the American military lined up in their uniforms in front of him and his last words were, I suppose it's too much, I hope that you guys are stripograms.

And the other is that, you know, he had this remote control in his hand and he said, hey guys, you'll never guess what I'm watching the hit Danish drama series The Killing that's pretty ironic isn't it not really Mr.

Laden other than the coincidence of the name structurally the killing in the killing came at the start of the series this killing of you that we're doing is more towards the end you hope said bin Laden can I see the end of the series before you shoot me how many episodes have you got left four

Nah sorry it was the dad that did it I knew it no it wasn't got ya another fail beardy boy bang bang bang

but not only have they found his last words, but also the US government this week has released a computer simulation of Bin Laden's final thoughts as a conscious human being.

And we at the Bugle have got exclusive access to this exclusive coverage of Bin Laden's final conscious thoughts.

Well, summer, the game is up.

I, the self-styled rowdy Saudi, the Torah Bora Lorignora, I'm done for.

Slice me into into soldiers and dip me in an egg.

I am toast.

Just a few moments to assess what I've done with my life.

There are so many things I haven't done I really wanted to do.

I never quite fully got around to destroying America and all it stands for.

Oh no, that was career goal A.

I haven't even come close.

Maybe with hindsight I could have gone about it differently.

The whole acts of mass violence perpetrated on the Inushin stick didn't really catch Western public imagination.

Still, if I've learnt one thing from that, it is never trust a focus group.

Or at least, never trust a focus group made up entirely of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.

Live and learn.

Maybe we should have tried to convert people door to door, Jehovah's Witness style.

Hello, have you ever thought about indiscriminate slaughter, institutionalized misogyny, and destruction of civilization as we know it?

Okay, I see you're busy right now.

Should I come back next week?

There's no need to slam that door in my face.

Ah, hindsight, Schmeinsit.

Never got around to wiping his hell off the face of the globe either.

Never fulfilled my lifetime ambition of breaking the 755 mile-an-hour barrier on a unicycle.

I guess when I look back at things, I have to say, I've never been very good at setting achievable goals.

Oh, well, that's the 21st century for you, I guess.

So hard to make time for your career these days, particularly when you got a wife and kids.

And even more particularly when you got six wives and 22 kids like I have.

Silly, silly, Aussie.

I shouldn't have burdened myself with such a big family if I wanted to be so focused on my own career.

How was I supposed to destroy the West, Israel, and capitalism if every other finging weekend, birthday party?

I guess that's genetics.

And like my dad, 22 wives, 57 children.

An indecisive man, but a randy one.

Maybe I've been in the terrorism game too long.

Should have moved jobs.

I could do loads of other stuff.

Sure, I'm getting on a bit, but I have proven organizational and communication skills.

People might quibble with what I've organized and communicated, but still, a good employer should look beyond that.

My lifestyle has felt so restricted recently.

My life insurance premiums are absolutely fing ridiculous.

They're cooking their triggers.

Man, I could really do with some quality me time right now.

There must be a way out of this.

Think, Ozzy, think.

Aw, shit, these aren't real wings.

I'm never buying anything off eBay again.

Right, come on, Osama.

At least go down with some unforgettable last words.

To the south.

No, just kidding, the west.

Oh, you guys.

No, I want something people are going to remember for eternity.

To look back on in centuries to come and say, what an unbelievable thing for a man to say as he departed this world.

Something like, There was an old man from Nantucket who dangled his bolt in a bucket.

No, no, no, that's not really me, is it?

How could it?

Don't shoot me, I'm allergic to lead.

If you shoot me, it's health and safety violation.

No, it might work.

Right, go round defiant or some are looking at where they're aiming.

This is gonna be, at best, a career-ending eye injury.

Clear your head now.

One final thought.

Oh, oh dear.

No, no, I cannot die with this in my head.

I can't die with this tune in my head.

I, Osama Bin Dan, the baddest bastard in the world, can't die with this tune going around my head.

Why now?

I gotta stop watching Kid Steeve.

If anything good comes out of this, it's that.

Bloody Western infidels, think of some.

Think of another tune.

Think of any other tune.

Think of something else.

Oh yeah, I can tie to this.

That's a no, no, I don't really like moving it that much.

No, no, no, no, something else, something else.

That's completely inappropriate.

No, no, no.

Grudging respect, but uh no no no no no no no no

Well that's even worse.

No, I'll take Fifi in the flower tops.

I'll take Fifi in the flower tops.

Okay, that that will have to do.

Okay, I'll reconcile myself with that.

Okay, one final conscious thought before meeting my presumably quite unimpressed maker.

Oh,

Pepper.

Oh, Pepper.

Wanna be wife number seven?

Oh, what way of firing that?

What way of firing that thing?

My house!

Oh, not a squeaky duck.

Have you no compassion?

Ow, Peppa.

I'm gonna miss you too, Squeaky.

Come on.

Got him.

Yes, that's out.

What are you doing here?

What, Andy, for a start,

this is for you.

For me, John.

Scoop.

For me, John.

Congratulate the Pentagon.

They're the ones that got it.

What?

You got hold of it, Hank.

I don't know how you did it.

I'm guessing the fact you did get it is a huge crime.

All I'm saying is, me and Condoleezza Rice go back a long way.

Newt Gingrich news now and well sadly this week as he promised Andy Newt Gingrich finally dropped out of the campaign for the Republican nominee for US president after finally being defeated by facts, numbers and a complete lack of interest from the Republican base.

And that very nearly brings us to an end of the Republican primary season, Andy, with only Ron Paul left hanging around.

And just look back at the names that have been and gone, Andy.

Perry, Bachmann, Santorum, Gingrich, Paulenti, Kane, a Mount Rushmore of names that you'd never want carved into the side of a mountain.

Newt Gingrich dropped out with a speech as short as it was gracious, by which I mean it was f ⁇ ing long and completely graceless.

He spoke as if he had a medical condition whereby he could only keep living if he continually heard the sound of his own voice.

Like a linguistic version of the movie Speed.

He was flanked by his grandchildren so they could take part in the moment when their grandfather tacitly admitted to the world that he was a colossal crushing failure.

He was supposed to endorse Mitt Romney during the speech Andy, but that wasn't easy to do, partly because he didn't want to, and partly because of the terrible things that he'd said about Romney over the the last year.

So Gingrich just strapped on his black belt in verbal jiu-jitsu and went with this.

I'm asked sometimes, is Mitt Romney conservative enough?

And my answer is simple.

Compared to Barack Obama, you know, this is not a choice between Mitt Romney and Ronald Reagan.

While then going on to say, because if it was, I would vote Reagan.

And

I mean Reagan now.

I would choose the corpse of Ronald Reagan over Mitt Romney.

But, as I'm denied that choice, I will go with Romney.

Because this is not a choice between Mitt Romney and a boiled egg.

If it was, I would take the boiled egg.

Gingrich added that Mitt Romney knew about 60,000 times more on the subject of job creation than Mr.

Obama, showing the attention to detail and reason that he's known and loved for.

But he wasn't going to leave, Andy.

He wasn't going to leave that room or the presidential campaign without some advice for the children of the future, especially his grandchildren standing right next to him in earshot.

He said, and I quote,

I happen to think that math and science is a better future than methamphetamine and cocaine.

Although it might be worth pointing out that math and science can actually be appropriately used in the manufacture and marketing of either of those products in what has historically been a high-reward, if high-risk, business model.

Just in case his grandchildren were either not embarrassed or not confused enough by what angry granddad was shouting at the assembled press, he went on to refer to his widely mocked moon colony idea saying, I'm not totally certain I will get to the moon colony.

I am certain that my grandchildren, Maggie and Robert, will have that opportunity if they want to take it.

And I'm guessing his grandchildren then muttered to themselves, oh, thanks so much for using our actual names there, granddad.

There was a chance for a second there that we weren't going to get badly bullied for the next 10 years, so thanks for clearing that little grey area up.

And he closed his thoughts by saying, I think their generation will look back at the olden days when people didn't have holograms at home and they will live in a very different world.

Wait, holograms at home?

I didn't realise that was part of his platform, Andy.

Get him back in the race.

If he can produce an affordable rocket book, I'm going to be in DC screaming his name as he swears into office next year.

Well, I mean,

it's very hard to know what to say on such an emotional occasion as the the death of Newt Gingrich's presidential ambitions, but

God rest their mortal soul.

Rupert Murdoch news now.

And, well, MPs in Britain have found that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company in an official government report, albeit an official government report that was not agreed on by the people who were reporting it, basically strictly on party lines.

And it just goes to show that no issue is too important for it not to be reduced to infantile partisan gameplaying in British politics.

We'll have more on this next week.

We've got a slightly short record this week because John's got to go off for a photo shoot, presumably in another Sutu.

And we started our recording a bit late here because I had to follow Alexandra Burke into the studio.

Now, I've absolutely no idea who Alexandra Burke is.

I'm informed that she's a singer, but given that she was not dead before I was born, I've never heard any of her music.

So, but anyway, but clearly what she was saying was very important.

So the bugle slightly curtailed this week.

So we'll have more on Murdoch next week.

Yesterday, John, in some elections news, we had the London mayoral election and local elections across Britain, for which there was a 32% turnout, the lowest since 2000.

Of those 32%, 28% of people who did actually vote had to be taken to hospital after stabbing the voting pencil through their hands in frustration at the state of British democracy.

I went to the polling station, John.

I saw grown men and women openly weeping on their way out.

I saw a dog barking at a pile of rosettes.

And just as George Washington's ghost got stroppy in America a couple of weeks ago, so in Britain the ghosts of Gladstone and Disraeli were seen wandering around the streets of Westminster, empty vodka bottles in hand, consoling each other, saying, it's just a phase, honestly, it's just a phase.

And I stood in the ballot box looking at the options to vote for, thinking about the British political landscape.

And I felt It's hard to express how I felt.

I guess the way I felt was this, that if you doodled a pastel drawing of me in in the ballot box, you could have sold it at an auction in a hundred years' time for about $120 million.

It's been pretty depressing.

William Haig, the Foreign Secretary, reacted to disastrous Conservative results by blaming the coalition government and saying that the coalition restricted the ability of the Conservatives to achieve what they wanted to achieve.

No, Mr.

Hague, let me correct you on that.

It was not the coalition that did that.

It was the British electorate that restricted the ability of the Conservatives to achieve what they wanted to achieve by deciding at the last election that they didn't f fing want the Conservatives to achieve what they wanted to achieve.

So I guess his subtext could have been when he was saying that Labour had done okay but not as well as they could have done, his subtext was, we are ks, we should have done worse than we have.

There were elections to decide whether or not other cities should follow London and having an elected mayor.

Nottingham, Manchester and Coventry voted no to having an elected mayor.

Now with the 32% turnout as I mentioned, it does seem that once again at the ballot box the people of Britain have spoken.

And what they have said has been,

nah.

Nah, mate.

Nah.

Your emails now, and we have an email here from Brad Newton saying, dear Andy, John and Chris, I was listening to Bugle 190 when you mentioned a cricketer who played for the Philadelphia side named John Thayer.

Being from the city of Brotherly Love, I thought it was worth a trip to go to Wikipedia to learn more about him when, much to my surprise, I learned that he's my great-great-uncle through marriage, and my sister is named after his wife.

That having been said, and now finding out that John had insulted a dead relative of mine, his final statistic, caught and bowled iceberg, I give you a hearty f you, John.

There you go.

Some insults travel backwards through time.

So, actually, I should point out that Chris is not here this week.

We have a stand-in stand-in producer, Ben.

Hello, who's here?

Hello, Ben.

Thanks very much for stepping into the breach.

Chris is, in fact, at Ped's wedding.

So that's, you know, our two frontline producers out of the game.

Ben's stepped in and has already copped some fuck you, Bens

from Twitter followers.

I have.

And, you know, learning to deal with that.

I mean, that's what comes with, you know, the honour.

of producing the bugle.

You've got to take the flip side of it as well.

It's a warm welcome.

You know, it was an honor to boxers when Mike Tyson punched them in the face.

And it's the same kind of honor here.

You're being punched by the best there is.

This email came in apparently from a Deardream McKellips who writes to her an email address that I didn't entirely recognise.

But anyway, I am in search of a prince.

What's up?

With no apostrophe between the what and the s and no question mark after the up.

I noticed your own photo on Facebook.

I'm keen on on you a lot.

We should communicate.

I'm a female and only attracted to a man.

That was it.

I mean, I think I made it quite clear.

I think, you know, we both made it clear on this programme that we're married.

Clearly, Deirdre McKellips is

not going to be put off by that.

She is a female.

That is certainly one of the qualities I look for in a romantic partner.

Yeah, and they certainly attracted to a man.

Tenacity, she's got that too.

Tenacity and

an extremely unimpressive grasp of the English language and a willingness to use camouflaged email addresses.

Anyway, thanks.

Do email us again, Deidre, if you're really serious about this, and I'll see if I can negotiate a timeshare.

Do keep your emails coming in to the info at thebuglepodcast.com.

Don't forget, you can listen to us on our SoundCloud page.

Soundcloud.com slash the hyphen bugle.

Bang!

Nailed it!

First time!

And Chris isn't even here to hear it.

Not even here to hear it.

I was prepped to check that was going to happen.

Oh, right.

Yeah, I absolutely got the landing as well.

So that's about it for this week's bugle.

Next week we'll have a special Olympic section as Britain gets military on the potential threat.

Yes.

So we've installed a warship, John, in the Thames.

A warship HMS Ocean.

docked at Greenwich today to protect the Olympics from any invasions up the Thames by the massive and heavily armed navy that al-Qaeda have been building up in the mountains of the Hindu Kush.

So we'll be finding eight links helicopters armed with snipers that can be launched at a moment's notice to bump off anyone who looks like they might beat a British athlete in a final.

That's what it's all about, John.

So our military are going to earn their cure on this Olympics.

We'll have more on that next week.

John, enjoy your photo shoots.

I won't.

Just work the camera, John.

I will.

Yeah, we know you'll love it.

I have to.

You are contractually obliged to love the camera.

Thanks for listening, buglers.

We'll be back next week.

Goodbye.

Hi, Buglers.

It's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast, Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.