Bugle 188 – Gentlemen, start your engines!

This is a podcast from thebuglepodcast.com.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, bugles, and welcome to issue 188 of The Bugle, the universe's leading audio newspaper for a visual world, this week in stunning 1D.

Sideways, I think, is our allocated dimension this week, with me, Andy Zoltzman, in London.

And in New York, it's the Gandhi of Gags, The Mandela of Mirth, The Lincoln of Laughter, The Pankhurst of Putdowns, The Bieber of Badinage.

It's John Oliver.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Buglers.

Andy, I met the largest human being I've ever come into contact with this week.

I met Shaq, Andy.

Shaquille O'Neal, Shaqstradamus, a one-man walking Shaq exploitation film.

Most importantly, the star of the movie Kazam, a movie so bad, Andy, so bad, every time I watch it, I look for myself in it.

And apparently he also played basketball at some point too, but who cares about that?

He played a genie who appeared from a magic boombox.

Anyway, it was very exciting, but I tell you what, it was not nearly as exciting as, Andy.

Yep.

Seeing you in a batting cage a couple of weeks ago.

On Andy's last day here in New York, we spent the morning at a batting cage, having a machine throw 65 mile an hour baseballs at us and Andy when you held a baseball bat in your hand you looked like a combination of Babe Ruth and William Wordsworth

what I'm saying is you're a poet with that bat Andy in that you didn't look like you knew how to hold it

yeah it was it was a very difficult thing for a you know kind of British

British man and a cricket player to you know just goes against everything I've believed was was right all my life swinging in such a such a rustic way it's just it's not right, John.

Rustic.

Rustic and uncouth, John.

That's what you baseballers do.

I have crunched a couple into the bleachers, though.

So there we go.

This is Bugle 188, 188, coincidentally, the scores out of 10 that Newt Gingrich gives his three wives.

And this is for the.

He's surprisingly positive about number two.

This is for the week beginning Monday, the 2nd of April.

We're recording on the 30th of March.

So happy 50th birthday to rapper DIY enthusiast and three-time Embassy World Snooker Corps finalist MC Hammer.

And also, it's

170th anniversary of the first use of ether as an anesthetic in an operation.

So, in honour of Crawford Long's historic medical achievement, we will do our best to make this episode as painless as possible and suitable for use in amputations.

As always, the section of the bugle is going straight in the bin this week, given that Sunday is April Fool's Day, it's an April Fool's Day section, and we trace the origins of this great religious festival back almost 2,000 years to the Middle East in about 33 AD, I believe, when the prominent magician and raconteur Jesus H.

Christ pulled his I'm dead.

Ah, no, I'm not.

Got you, got you stunt.

This, of course, followed on from his classic, drink this wine, it's absolutely lovely.

It's Portuguese Cabernet Sauvigno I just got from my local offee.

Surprisingly mellow with a deep nose.

You like it?

Mmm, good.

Ah, it's my blood!

It's my blood!

You're drinking my blood!

Ah!

Oh,

I need a cup of sugary tea and a biscuit.

Right, story time, everyone.

When I say para, you say balls.

Para, oh, come on, lighten up, guys.

Right, Mackie, Matty, Lukey, style is already.

And off we go.

Once upon a time, there was this little Jewish wizard called Jaime Potter.

Honestly, this is going to be a really good one.

People are going to love this story.

Why are you guys so cross with me?

Too many pranks?

Hey, Judas, come and sit next to the boss man.

Let's talk it through.

Whoopie cushion, classic.

Oh, come back.

Come back.

He did not take that well.

He looked genuinely cross.

Who's next?

Also, of course.

Hellbound, Andy!

Gospel according to St.

Lionel, recently discovered in a dance.

That, Andy, is adding insults to Jesus' fatal injuries.

Well, I'm saying literally bang to rights.

This year, of course, also the 200th anniversary of one April Fool's tunt that went too far.

Napoleon Bonaparte, five-time European War Monger of the Year, and a renowned prankster from his earlier years, but one who could never let a prank go, most famously persisting with his sideways hatchstick, which had begun as an April fool in which he managed to convince people that scientists had discovered that your right ear was in fact the front of your head.

On the 1st of April 1812, Bonaparte announced to his generals that they would be invading Russia the following winter.

Of course, they all checked the date and then laughed at him when he showed them a fake weather forecast, saying it was going to be sunny all winter around Moscow and a steady 75 Fahrenheit.

They chuckled politely and said, good one, Napoleon.

But Napoleon knew deep down they hadn't fallen for it.

And when that happened, he just had to see it through.

Anyway, a few months later, 75% of his army is dead.

The course of European history has been altered for all time, and his own power fatally weakened.

Napoleon gathers his top brass in his tent, shivering with cold, and says, April Fool.

At which point, I invented a restriction on April Fools, only being valid until midday on the 1st of April.

That's all been traced in our section in the bin.

I wonder if, Andy, as those French soldiers died in the Arctic tundra of Russia, they thought, one day, this is going to be hilarious.

Top story this week, gentlemen, start your engines.

Now turn off your engines to save fuel a bit.

Holy shit, have you seen the price of oil at the moment?

Okay, gentlemen, pick a driving buddy.

We're going to be carpooling for the rest of this race.

At $4 a gallon, no one is driving their own car.

Gentlemen, start your engines.

Andy, fuel comes in many forms.

We can be fueled by a family's love, an energy bar, religious fanaticism.

Sadly, none of those energy sources can power a car, so they're all completely redundant.

If I can't pour you into my car's gas tank, Andy, and pump you through my engine to propel my vehicle forward, I'm not interested in hearing anything you have to say.

And I know you're going to say to me, but you can do that with me, John, eventually.

That's true, but not for millions of years, not until your body completely breaks down into oil.

I can't wait that long.

I need to go to the supermarket now.

Well, that's the problem with you, Americans.

You want everything now.

Gas tank, John.

Honestly,

hand your passport in and be done with it.

Let me address that, Andy.

You know, the UK and the US amusingly differ in what they call petroleum or gasoline.

In the US, it's gas.

In the UK, it's petrol.

Just like in the US, any rise in gas price is a fing disaster.

Whereas in the UK, it's a fing kerfuffle.

We have so many amusing differences, Andy, even when we mean the same thing.

Well, here, there's been panic buying as the nation has ground to a standstill because fuel tanker drivers might possibly go on strike in about three weeks' time.

This has shown Britain at its infantile worst, John.

And it is absolutely, I mean, it's an extraordinary story.

Tanker drivers from the Unite Union voted to potentially go on strike about safety terms and conditions.

Selfish little barters, not wanting their lorries to explode in fatal fireballs.

Do your fing jobs, you lay about.

If God wants you to catch fire, he will set you on fire.

Strike or no strike.

But this wasn't helped by various government ministers essentially suggesting that Britain should panic buy petrol.

And Britain needs no second invitation to start panic buying fuel.

That's right.

There's

only one thing this country likes more than queuing, and that is queuing for absolutely no reason.

Well, Andy, you know, I've been watching this from thousands of miles away, and I know that you've been panic buying fuel, Andy.

Is it not true that when you ran out of space at home, you actually just stuck the nozzle into your mouth and filled yourself up, thinking you could spit it into your car later?

Well, I mean, that's...

Is that not what's...

Is that not what you're supposed to do?

I know, I've got...

Well, I mean, I don't know.

It's not clear.

No, I don't know who you are.

The point is, it's not clear, so you're not in the wrong.

Yeah.

I mean, it's basically, isn't it one of your five fruit or veggie days?

It basically started as vegetable warmth, didn't it?

I think it's all five of them in one juicy splurge.

If you have it with a bit of vinegar and chuck a tomato down your throat, it's basically a salad.

I have to say, though, this news did also give me a slightly warm feeling inside, because sometimes I like to pretend pretend there's a worldwide tomato soup shortage just to make going shopping exciting.

I like to elbow people out of the way, scream all the way down the soup aisle, plunging a knife into someone's leg as I reach for one of 64 different available kinds of soup.

Just gets your heart pounding.

It does.

But Francis Mauds, the Conservative Cabinet Office Minister,

waded into the debate, advising people to fill up jerry cans

and

keep the notoriously flammable substance of petrol in their houses or gardens, essentially.

Merry spectacular.

It was quite spectacular and various other government ministers basically just hinted, you know, it's probably a good idea to hoard away some petrol.

But since it isn't the 1940s anymore, John, not many people have jerry cans and this of course led to panic buying of jerry cans.

And would you say it's a tough choice?

Do you panic buy your fuel or your jerry can first?

Or do you just fill yourself up with fuel, buy the jerry can and spit the fuel into it?

Or buy the jerry can,

fill it up and then drink the fuel.

I've got very confused, John.

I've got very, very confused.

Francis Maud, he also called for people to build air raid shelters, put their gas masks on and start poundering eggs in case the striking tanker drivers launched aerial bombing raids over towns and cities, Luftwaffe style.

So just to be on the safe side, John.

Better safe than soft.

That's right.

Also, Francis Maude's suggestion, Andy, is something that even a six-year-old wannabe fireman could tell you is a catastrophic idea.

Is he fing crazy?

He just made British garages Molotov cocktails.

Britain just became 100% more flammable.

Terrorists just need to smoke outside our garages, flick the butts over their shoulder and then sit back and enjoy the fireworks.

He said that a strike would risk people's lives and I guess that's he said that because he knew the other comments he was about to make.

Also, it probably didn't, the strike itself did not risk lives as much as his his comments making people risk electrocution by punching their televisions in frustration at the state of our democracy and its representatives or even turning up to a hospital and finding that his government has shut it down but still I think John the point is Maud just wishes he was a film star and could say people of Britain these are desperate times we must be strong this nation faces a deadly threat people's lives are at stake The future of the human race is threatened by the invasion of blood-sucking aliens and their mega virus of death.

And some tanker drivers going going on strike too.

Just cast me in anything.

I will do it.

I hate politics.

Also, I guess on the plus side that if there is complete panic buying of petrol and they reckon there's about two days worth of petrol potentially left if the supply stops which it might in about towards the end of April it does reduce the chance of people self-immolating which you know so it will probably balance out the number of accidental fire deaths with the reduced number of self-sacrifices.

So there you go.

The government did stop just short of urging people to shit themselves at the trauma of it all or lie quivering in a heap waiting for the inevitable hook of the Reaper.

But not quite as far short as would have been ideal.

Francis Moore just now, before we started recording, has urged people to buy coffins and canopies for their funerals, given that they will almost certainly die at some point in their lives.

Well, that's right, Andy.

England was faced with this potential strike and they opted to freak the f out.

Why?

Because that's what we do every time, Andy.

We're not emotionally prepared for these kind of strikes anymore.

We've become so comfortable as a nation that the restriction of anything we use even semi-regularly can turn us into flame-carrying psychopaths.

Just ask the French.

They're used to lorry strikes, so they can cope much better.

They just give it a Gaelic shrug and go back to mending their berets, which...

got torn when they fell off their bicycles while reading poetry, swerving to avoid a croissant, and the garlic around their necks failed to break their fall.

I presume.

I'm guessing.

That's just a high percentage guess.

Andy, French lorry drivers strike so often that 80% of the time they don't know what they're on strike for.

One French lorry driver was apparently on strike for 17 years until someone told him that he wasn't a lorry driver or French and he should return to his family in New Zealand as quickly as he could.

If only Dominique Strauss-Kahn had lived his life by your charming French stereotype, John.

France would be a much better place.

It would, wouldn't it?

Edmund King from the AA Motoring Organisation criticised the government, said, if drivers followed normal fuel buying patterns, there would be no fuel shortage whatsoever.

We now have self-inflicted shortages due to poor advice about topping up the tank and hoarding in jerry cans.

Whilst Brian Madison, the chairman of the independent retailers group RMI Petrol, accused ministers of making a crisis out of a concern.

and said that they should have sought industry advice weeks ago on how to avoid fuel shortages.

Now, John, these critics might have a point, but they Jews just do not understand how politics works, John.

What you do in a situation like this is you wait until the last moment and then maximise political capital by childishly grandstanding about the issue and turning it into a simplistic four legs good unions bad issue whilst diverting attention away for either from controversial budgetary measures or the taxation of foods that no one in the cabinet would even consider eating.

I think these guys should do their job and let the politicians do theirs.

Any strike, John, still remains potential.

It will need seven days' notice from the union.

And the Guardian newspaper newspaper reported the United Union threatening to hold a strike by the 23rd of April, which would be an absolutely lovely birthday present for you, John.

That would be great, Andy.

I would love that.

I'll act surprised when it happens, but I'm very touched by the sentiment.

So, the current panic buying at the end of March is very badly timed, John.

And the key with a panic is timing it right.

You know, panic too early, and you've relaxed and got complacent by the time the crisis arrives.

Panic too late, and you've just been eaten by a tiger.

So, you have to get it right, John.

You have to get it right.

American fuel news now.

And well American panic buying is a lot less fun, Andy, to be honest, because when Americans panic buy, people get shot.

There's no long lines of people waiting angrily but patiently to be served.

There's people diving for cover as they get caught in the crossfire.

When Americans panic buy petrol, Andy, it doesn't look like Merseyside.

It looks like Mad Max.

Which is not to say that they don't have an emotional trigger as well as a physical one.

According to a recent poll, which are now often so inaccurate, you'd think that they were actually getting the results by literally asking a poll.

But in a recent Reuters poll, more than two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the way that President Obama is handling high gasoline prices, although most do not blame him for them.

So they don't think that he bakes this shit pie, Andy.

They just don't like the way that he's eating it.

or serving it presumably oh no it's right you don't like the way he's prepared

the problem is that in the past month US fuel prices have jumped about 30 cents to around three dollars and ninety cents per gallon now I'm aware that that price would make most countries say it's dropped down to what yes that is unfathomably cheap let's just pour it down the toilet just because we can but you know things are a little different here you know people use their cars all the time both out of absolute necessity convenience, and astonishing laziness.

Some combination of the three.

Gas prices are so important an electoral issue here that Newt Gingrich, in the final Hail Mary, piece of campaigning, launched a $2.50 pledge, promising that if he's elected president, he will reduce the price of gas here to $2.50 a gallon.

A plan based on absolutely nothing other than total confidence or an intention to water down all gasoline and pumps by around 50%.

It seems slightly odd to blame Obama for this, John, rather than.

But I guess it's just easier than blaming the underlying causes, which are, I guess, essentially the unstoppable multi-billion dollar greed of the oil companies, the economico-political system that's fostered and encouraged that, and the horse-trading, short-termism, and geological misfortune that has led to oil becoming the global political football that it is.

But it's hard to vote out an oil company, John, or the Saudi government, or go back in time and redistribute carbon deposits more evenly around the world, or make electric cars less shit.

So I guess Obama is just in the firing line.

And the Republicans have helped the situation by blocking legislation to strip billions of dollars of tax breaks from the biggest American oil companies.

These tax breaks amount to around $24 billion

over 10 years.

Now you might think that's quite a lot.

But then you have to bear in mind that the top three oil companies, if they carry on at the current rate, will over those 10 years make $800 billion profit.

So they can probably afford it.

And I think they might like to whilst they're affording it just go and piss through every letterbox in america just to make their points

democracy news now and andy if you were to run into democracy in the street and ask how it was doing it would probably say oh fine fine i'm doing really well thanks for asking but if you were then to say no seriously democracy how are you doing it would pause for a moment and then it would burst into tears and you would back away awkwardly saying whoa sorry i asked come on pull yourself together democracy people start to stare it can't be that bad and democracy would say it is it is that bad oh god I'm so familiar Watching democracy in every country around the globe at the moment is like watching a game show.

You're hoping for the best, but you know, the chances are the country is going to be greeted with an

sound and a man in a shiny suit saying, oh, that's too bad.

Thanks for trying.

Better luck again next time.

The key problem with democracy in so many countries is money.

Really, notorious BIG said it best, Andy, when he said, mo money, mo problems.

Of course, Biggie also said they're going to be some slow singing and flower bringing if my bug alarm starts ringing.

But that doesn't work quite as well as the critique for global democracy.

It's still a good point from Biggie.

It's just a different point.

It's a point about home security and arguably about the limits of some intruder laws.

Well, in Britain we've had a bit of a democracy glitch in which the

Conservative Party co-treasurer Peter Crudus had to resign after he was caught by in an undercover newspaper sting basically hawking dinner with the Prime Minister and the influence it involves for £250,000 a pop.

Now in his defence John that was £250,000 for the dinner and at these dinners they do serve unbelievably expensive food John I mean we're talking

we're talking unicorn Carpaccio here John I mean that's that does not come cheap so what does that taste like I think it tastes like chicken.

But really expensive, pointy chicken.

That's right.

In the footage, he's heard to say, 200 grand to 250 grand is Premier League.

What you would get when we talk about your donations, the first thing we'd want to do is get you with the Cameron Osborne dinners.

And as you say, Andy, for a quarter of a million pounds, that had better be one hell of a f ⁇ ing dinner.

You'd better be, if it's not unicorn, you'd better be eating roast swan that has been wrestled to death in a pit in front of you by the Queen herself.

The government quickly hit back, saying the meals in Downing Street had not been provided at taxpayers' expense.

And on some occasions, David Cameron had actually cooked for his guests himself.

That, Andy, is not acceptable.

If I'm donating a quarter of a million pounds, I do not want a world leader cooking for me.

Or at the very least, it should be a world leader of my choice, and they should be topless.

Incidentally, I would pick Canadian President Stephen Harper, and I'd like him to cook a full roast chicken for me in his underpants, and I would like him to be crying the whole time.

Brings back so many memories.

Cratus is an interesting man, John.

He's a self-made multi-millionaire with an estimated value of over £800 million and he made his money...

Sounds nice.

Yeah, well, he left school with no qualifications, made his money on foreign exchange markets.

Basically, one of Britain's top gamblers.

He's a self-made multi-millionaire.

He's a former tax exile.

He's a large-scale philanthropist.

And he's a hawker of political influence for cash.

He's a man of contradictions, John.

He's both the kind of success story the Conservative Party wants to trumpet and the kind of total shyster they are getting slightly embarrassed about.

In the footage, he sold the value of attending this dinner by saying, you really do pick up a lot of information.

And when you see the Prime Minister, you're seeing David Cameron, not the Prime Minister.

But within that room, everything's confidential.

You can ask him practically any question you want.

If you're unhappy about something, we will listen to you and put it to the policy committee at number 10.

We feed all feedback to the policy committee.

Now, that does not sound good, Andy.

Even if you take that tape and play it backwards, it still sounds bad.

And a Tory Party spokesman said after Crudis eventually quit in disgrace that he's only been in that position for three weeks, but it's clearly gone over the top and well beyond anything that would be tolerable to the party.

It appears to be a case of him showing off.

That is burying the lead there, Andy.

The point is,

he was only in the job for three weeks?

That is a spectacular flame out.

I'm guessing that he spent the first two and a half weeks brainstorming.

What is the most incredible and damaging way that I can lose my job?

I could turn up to work naked, covered in a honey swastika, but that'll only really make me look crazy.

I need something that brings the entire British electoral system into question.

Hold on.

I think I've got it.

And then he nailed it, Andy.

He nailed it like a cocky Korean carpenter.

And

it gets even worse.

The newspaper claims that the offer was made, even though Crudus knew that the money would come from a fund in Liechtenstein that was not eligible to make donations under UK electoral law.

Three weeks, Andy!

Three weeks into the job, and he could do this kind of damage.

This story has caused people in Britain to take a long, hard look at the electoral process before gagging slightly, turning away to catch their breath, turning back, looking at the electoral process, gagging again and saying, I'm sorry, I just can't do this, and then slowly walking away.

Even conservative donors have threatened to stop writing cheques out of sheer fear of how their donations are now being perceived.

One donor said he was adopting a hedgehog approach and stopped giving altogether, saying, My cheque book has been put away, there is no possibility of privacy.

Oh, that's the hedgehog approach?

Please.

Earn that term.

I hope he at least curled up into a ball and then ate a saucer of bread and milk after saying that.

Another donor said that businessmen should be praised and not vilified and attacked for donating money to political parties.

And you know what, Andy?

When you hear it like that, he's right.

That's the thing about successful businessmen who spend much of their life in offshore tax havens.

The system just doesn't cut them any breaks.

Tory Top Brass was quick to say that these comments by Crowders were completely unacceptable and he resigned pretty rapidly.

But

it turns out, John, this was confirmed apparently on the flagship Today programme on Radio 4 by Francis Maud, the aforementioned cabinet office minister, that on the Conservative websites, they advertise that if you spend £50,000 to join, quote, the leaders group, then you get to have dinner with the Prime Minister.

So he was merely just raising the price, John, of the official going rates.

How do you fund elections without leaving politicians too open to corruption?

The short answer is, you don't bother who gives a shit.

That's the almost universal answer to that question.

But suppose for a second, hypothetically, that you do give a shit.

What then?

Because one thing everyone seems to agree on is that campaign finance is f.

What people can't agree on is how to unf it.

Well, the Committee on Standards in Public Life in the UK published a study last November entitled Ending the Big Donor Culture.

With a title like that, it's no wonder that the government had that report proofread first by their shredder.

But the committee, under Sir Christopher Kelly, recommended capping any individual donations at £10,000 and in return for that making up the shortfall with public funding to the tune of 50 pence per voter per year.

And all three parties in the UK were reportedly completely against that idea Andy.

I mean it does seem like a small price to pay for uncorrupting your potentially corrupt officials but believe me.

Just if you want to feel better about it Andy don't fix the problem just use perspective to make you feel better about the scale of the problem that you have.

Because these problems pale in comparison to here in the US, where the election this year is predicted to cost in the region of $6 billion, Andy.

$6 billion to choose between two people.

Does that sound right to anyone?

The cost of the US elections has risen steadily.

And this is, but this is...

Also going to be the first presidential race since the landmark Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which ended most restrictions on donations by corporations and unions.

Basically,

it is a financial cluster here, Andy.

And it's got so bad that when Obama was overheard talking to Medvedev and saying that they'd have to talk more about the nuclear defense strategy next year because he had an election coming up so he couldn't do anything this year, he was basically acknowledging that you can't do anything for the last 12 months of any presidential term.

Meaning, he's basically admitting you have three-year terms now, Andy, because

the whole part of your last year is just hemorrhaging money that you've taken from people.

It's f ⁇ ed, Andy.

It's so f ⁇ ed up.

He was basically saying with those words, what he was essentially saying was, I'm sorry, but democracy just doesn't work.

I cannot say what I mean because it is electoral kryptonite.

But the Republicans interpreted his comment saying after the election I'll have more flexibility as basically code for, Moscow, Moscow, this is the flaming pielikan calling.

the cat is in the liquidiser.

I repeat, the cat is in the liquidiser.

Do you read me Moscow?

Do you read me?

Pasty news now and this is all taking place with the UK also in the midst of a pasty storm after the new budget's confusing pasty tax for the VAT on a hot takeaway food.

Now for those non-British people who might not be aware of what a pasty, sometimes referred to as a Cornish pasty is, How would you describe it, Andy?

I guess I'd describe it as a bunch of stuff wrapped up in some shit, and that's it.

I'd say it's like...

I could say this is like eating the essence of disappointment.

It's like an American hot pocket, only fractionally less disgusting.

And I mean fractionally, like to the human eye, fractionally.

Under current laws, food in the UK is subject to VAT once it is heated to, and I quote, above air ambient temperature.

Now, what more delicious way of describing preparing food, Andy is there, than warming it up to above air ambient temperature.

My stomach is rumbling just thinking about it.

Oh, sorry, it's not rumbling.

I think I'm about to throw up.

You see it in all the flash restaurants now, served at slightly above ambient room temperature.

Oh, yeah.

And David Cameron has run into trouble when trying to present himself as a man who enjoys pasties, which he is palpably not, Andy.

Everything about him screams, I do not eat pasties.

His hair, his voice, his background, everything screams.

The only time I ate a pasty was when we were given one at school during a lesson on what being poor tastes like.

Again, Andy, it can be hard to understand any of this if you're not British, that the fact that our class divide is so broad that it even incorporates foodstuffs.

And the Chancellor, George Osborne, a childhood friend of David Cameron, admitted that he could not remember the last time he ate a pasty from Gregg's, a culinary atrocity of a bakery.

In response to this entirely unshameful admission, he was accused of having lost touch with the public, while Labour MP John Mann called him the Marie Antoinette of politics, happy to let the public eat cold pasty.

Wow.

Well, at least the French peasants got offered cake and the hypothetical cake, not cold pasties.

Marie Antoinette offered them cake and they beheaded her.

What What the f

would those French peasants have done if they'd if she'd only offered them cold pasties?

But accusing Osborne of losing touch with the public is, to me, like accusing a fish of not having legs anymore.

If he did ever have touch with the public, it is so far back in the evolutionary history of the Osborne family that the last known Osborne to have to have had it is currently on display in the fossil section of the Natural History Museum.

But David Cameron claimed that he'd eaten a pasty from a specific specific pasty shop in Leeds Station.

And it later turned out that this pasty shop had not been opened since 2007.

So what else is he lying about, John?

Can we trust this man?

Unemployment, he claims it's 2.7 million, but it might only be 30,000.

He could be just trying to appeal to Tory voters by talking it up.

The pasty has always been the honesty barometer of politics, Andy.

Bugle feature feature section now and Antarctica.

Well, we first wrote the Antarctica feature section to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Captain Scott reaching the South Pole.

It keeps being delayed because we just keep talking too much shit about other stuff.

And it's now reached the 100th anniversary of him dying on the way back from having reached the South Pole.

So, but it's about six weeks after he reached the South Pole.

And we've just been told that we're getting kicked out of the studio in London in eight minutes time.

So it's been shelved again, buglers.

At some point, maybe we'll find, I don't know, the 100th anniversary of

Captain Scott being slightly nibbled at by a penguin.

I don't know.

That's right.

So we're putting that off.

Instead, your emails.

Well, we've also overrun to the extent we can't do any of your emails, partly because you keep sending in really, really long ones that take months.

Good ones to read.

Good ones, but long ones.

Good ones, but long ones.

Now, we are the last people in the world to suggest that brevity is the soul of wit.

But feel free to try and keep them under 200 words.

Instead, sport

and John, the Olympics is...

Olympics countdown, Andy.

No, it's getting...

closer and closer like a deeply regrettable French teacher.

We're going to keep counting.

We're We're going to keep counting down.

Well,

that was an analogy born of experience.

We're going to keep counting down to the Olympics as a city that Andy lives in prepares to put on the greatest skeet shooting tournament in the world.

Yeah, God,

I love skeet shooting, John.

Andy, you've been paying taxes in London for years now.

Doesn't that basically mean that you own at least a piece of the floor of the Vela drone?

I think so, yeah.

I think I might own part of Victoria Pendleton as well, but

that's still going through the courts.

In Olympic countdown news, visiting Olympic athletes, coaches and officials will apparently be banned from marrying while they're in Britain because of Home Office concerns that they will exploit the games to try to claim residency.

And

that's part of the fun of the Olympics.

Come on!

We're cutting the balls off this.

Look back to the Soviet era when you just assumed that all the Soviet athletes were going to try to defect at some point.

That was the kind of atmosphere that everyone enjoyed.

I am going to the bathroom now.

Oh, yeah.

Sure, Pavel.

Yeah.

You go to the bathroom.

Do you want to take your suitcase with you when you go, though?

Yes, thank you.

I take suitcase with me to the bathroom.

Quality accent, John.

Yeah, that was

a bit of a swing in a mess.

That's for the years, too.

Yeah.

But surely, John, they should be banned from marrying because they should be focusing on their sport, John.

Although, I mean, some athletes find it an inspiration to get married.

But from a cricketing perspective, as soon as the Indian captain Mahendra Dhoni got married his performance just completely collapsed and the British tennis player John Lloyd when he married Chris Evert famously in the 1970s I think within a year he dropped down from the world's top 20 to about 400 so maybe this is just helping them this is just helping them focus well yes look

last year

Last year, two 16-year-old athletes from Cameroon absconded from Manchester Airport after competing in the Commonwealth Youth Games, whilst at the 2002 Commonwealth Games, also in Manchester, almost the entire 30-strong Sierra Leone team also disappeared.

And Andy, these defections are a good thing.

It's basically just us stealing great athletes from other nations for nothing.

Why on earth would we not be encouraging that?

We should be doing everything we possibly can to tempt them into defecting.

There's also been a food crackdown.

Illegal hot dog kebab and ice cream vans selling their wares during the Olympics will be impounded in special pens across London.

And clearly the Olympics, John, is a festival of sports and one of its legacies is to create a more active nation with a greater regard for its own health.

That is one of the reasons.

But the main reason is because the official food vendors, the likes of McDonald's, who are building one of their biggest ever restaurants in the middle of the Olympic park, do not want to lose money to some guy with a kebab van.

What the London Olympics wants, John, is Britain to get heart disease, but it wants it to get heart disease from large businesses, not small businesses.

That is the absolute, that is what the Olympics is all about, John.

That's it for this week's Bugle.

Thank you very much.

We are now being ushered out of the London studio by armed police.

There's nothing to see here.

Well, it is a largely audio experience, the bugle anyway.

Thanks for listening, Buglers.

We'll be back with Bugle 189 recording on Good Friday,

one of the greatest days in legal history.

In my book, everyone goes along with that.

Tough sentence under the laws of the day, Andy.

Under the laws of the day.

A tough sentence, but a fair sentence.

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.