Bugle 183 – Bugle Lady Special

This is a podcast from thebuglepodcast.com.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 183 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world with me, Andy Zaltzman, live in London, where I benched 250.

Sorry, I'm reading my gardening catalogue.

One bench, 250 pounds.

Well, that's a bit steep.

And in New York City, it's John Oliver.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

Well, since I talked to you last week, Andy, I have been to Africa and back.

Basically around the world.

I've been like a lightning quick filious fog, but with access to hot towels and mid-range meal options.

I was in Gabon in West Africa for a couple of days shooting a piece for the daily show.

And while, you know, I can't talk too much about the piece until we finish it, I will say that I had a strange moment at airport security in Gabon Airport early yesterday morning, Andy.

Now, they speak French in Gabon, an unfortunate product of colonialism.

Sadly, they don't speak English much at all, which would of course have been a far superior unfortunate product of colonialism, albeit with fractionally less fancy words.

I only had carry-on baggage as I was there for just two days.

And

while I'm shooting, Andy...

It does sound like you only had baggage that

would just immediately make people make double entendres and run around with big breasts.

While I'm shooting, I have to carry makeup with me because the show's now in HD.

While you're shooting, John.

What I'm trying to tell you is that one of the security guards pulled my makeup out of my bag suspiciously and asked me what it was.

I managed to say in broken French that it was makeup pourment visage.

And he was perfectly happy with that answer.

Only I then, for some reason, felt compelled to try to explain to him in increasingly shattered French that I actually worked for a television programme and that was why I needed it, not for leisure use.

I may have even attempted to say the phrase pasca h day at some point.

It was a linguistic low point for Jean Olivaire Andy.

I'm not going to lie.

I butchered the French language like the French butcher cows with finesse and reckless imagination.

So this is Bugle 183 for the week beginning Monday the 20th of February.

As we we record, it's the 17th of February, a year to the day since the Libyan protests began.

I won't tell you what happened in case any of you have got loads of recordings of the news stored up on your TV and don't want to know the final score.

Also a year to the day since Bloody Thursday in Bahrain, where today protests and violence are still going on.

And yet Bahrain still found the barefaced bulls to join the Arab League in urging Syria to stop being such an insufferable dick to its own people, which I guess either shows, A, quite how much of an insufferable dick Syria is being, or B, that the Bahrain government has the self-awareness of a dinosaur in a fishing chip shop shouting, you're dead, ah, at a piece of haddock.

Or possibly even that the C, the Bahrain government, just has an incredible sense of humour.

I mean, cringe comedy is not really my kind of thing, but you kind of have to admire it.

As always, the section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week, part one of a new Safety in the Kitchen Do's and Don'ts audio series.

And part one is a don't.

Did I turn this on?

Ah!

Ah!

That's a don't, Andy, right?

That is a don't.

That is a don't.

That's a don't.

Okay, I was just worried you were suggesting that was a kitchen do at some point there.

That's a kitchen don't.

Okay,

top story this week.

All the women independent, throw your hands up at me.

Ladies round up.

Andy, what a week for the ladies it's been, or pour le femme, as you might say, if you were trying to explain what makeup was to a French speaker before explaining that it was actually, interestingly, also pour la homme in many situations as well.

Now, first, some good lady news.

Ladies are still very much the democratic majority on earth.

51%, Andy.

They've got us numerically outnumbered.

That's a math fact.

Sadly, not all the other lady news is quite as good as that.

Egypt lady news now!

And Egypt is a country in transition, but they're going to have to decide what kind of country that they want to transist into, especially lady-wise.

Do they want to be lady-friendly?

Or not lady-friendly, Andy?

Egypt is a country with a general attitude to the equality of the sexes, only slightly less ancient than their pointy buildings.

In Egypt, only men are accepted as natural-born leaders, as they believe that only men possess the necessary talent to lead in the form of the entirely coincidental ownership of natural-born penises.

And

let's be clear.

It's not like either Britain or the US has a particularly stellar record in political equality.

America itself has still not had a female president.

It's like a key part of any presidential inauguration is still, please place your hand on the Bible and your penis on the podium.

Britain has only had one.

female prime minister, but we did have her for 11 years.

Now you might say, that doesn't seem that bad.

Margaret Thatcher is so pretty and charismatic.

You're thinking about Meryl Streep.

You're thinking about Meryl Streep there.

Now, we also had Tony Blair.

Also, in real terms, John, Margaret Thatcher was an ox.

And the closest America ever came was probably Calvin Coolidge on his Feminine Fridays, but those have largely faded from history now.

Now, we also had Tony Blair for 10 years, and you might think, well, how's that relevant?

He's not a woman.

Besides, he was so talented and seemed to be able to play whatever political part was required of him.

You're thinking of Meryl Streep again.

You're thinking of Meryl Streep.

That's your mistake.

You're right in saying that Britain and America are not particularly good when it comes to gender equality in politics.

The UK has the 49th equal highest proportion of women in the lower house of parliament, level with Eritrea and Uzbekistan, whilst America is 71st equal.

That's a level with Turkmenistan and 1% ahead of North Korea.

Holy shit, is that true?

Yeah.

So things are not going quite as well as they could have been in terms of Mrs.

Pankhurst not getting increasingly stroppy in her grave.

I'm not saying all women should be MPs, John.

But what I am saying is that 30% of all male MPs and male representatives in whatever America calls its lower house should be randomly selected for sex change operations.

I think that would also weed out those who weren't fully committed to their political beliefs rather than personal aggrandisement.

But that's not the point when it comes to Egypt.

The point is that the promise of a new free Egypt post-revolution does not seem to be getting extended to women, despite the role that they played in the revolution itself.

Even at the height of the protest in Saharia Square last year, when women bravely bucked the conventions of society and turned up to join the demonstrations, some men yelled at them, go back home and feed your babies.

To which the natural human response is, f off and don't be such an asshole.

But sadly, in some societies, women aren't allowed the joys of using such elegantly crafted comebacks as those.

In the new Egyptian parliament there are only nine women MPs out of some 508 seats.

That sounds pretty bad, but it sounds even worse when you find out that under Mubarak there was a legal quota of at least 64 women MPs or 12% of parliament.

You really don't want to be less good at something than a man who was just hounded from office and is on trial for human rights abuses.

That just does not look good.

And it's true in some of the other Arab Spring states as well.

Tunisia, traditionally very liberal when it came to women's rights,

has elected an Islamist government, a moderate Islamist government.

But a lawyer and activist in the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, Saida Gara, says that she has never been so worried about women's freedoms as she is now.

In Libya, a senior lecturer in Middle East politics from the University of London said, I think where the Islamic laws will eventually bite is in the rights of women.

They've already declared in Libya that polygamy rules will be relaxed, and who knows where that is going to go.

John, this does not sound like quite the utopian revolution that we all got so excited about in our armchairs here in the West after

trying so hard to create the conditions where an appalling leader like Benali could be overthrown by tacitly keeping him in power for 25 years, so that he became so complacent and therefore unprepared for the homegrown revolution that we indirectly helped to create by not doing anything.

Oh, God, we're such long-term strategists.

We're always thinking 400 steps ahead.

It's like chess.

We're like Gary Kasparov, but more so.

Part of women's problems in Egypt seems like it might be women themselves.

Last year's parliamentary elections suggested that Egyptian women simply don't vote for women.

So are women their own worst enemies, Andy?

No, men are.

Men are women's worst enemies.

But women might be their second worst enemies.

No, sorry, wrong again.

That's alligators.

Alligators are their second worst enemies.

But women are their third worst enemies, Andy.

That's the point.

And Gaddafi, he certainly had his flaws as a leader.

He had a lot of flaws.

I mean, he was the Empire State Building of Leaders in a Manhattan of despotic dickwads.

Oh, Andy, hold on, hold on, hold on.

You don't just breeze over a sentence like that.

You stop and enjoy it.

You've just served up a linguistic dish of excellence there.

Don't wolf it down and then take a swig of Coca-Cola.

But he was, by some standards, something of a feminist.

Not by all standards.

Back that up.

Back that up by one standard.

Well, I mean, he had a Ukrainian nurse.

He had, you know,

he used positive discrimination in choosing his bodyguards.

Uh-huh.

Okay.

I mean, he's not quite the Libyan Mrs.

Pankhurst.

But

actually, no, I mean, I mean, he doesn't have a, he doesn't really have many legs to rot on currently.

But, um,

well, John, this raises another issue, the fact that there are only nine women in a 508th strong Egyptian parliament.

You know, if women want equal prize money at Wimbledon, then they should have the same number of MPs in the Egyptian parliament.

I can't help thinking that the women and women's champions only get nine, five hundred and eighths of what the men's champion gets if that's all they're going to contribute.

Well, I think that's I think you might want to to run for chairman of the All-England Tennis Club, I think.

Well, technically, of course, it'd be 9,499ths if you're doing it that way.

Okay, all right.

You've made your point, Andy.

Well, so the average male smoker gets through 14 cigarettes a day.

Women only smoke 13.

Women should smoke more, John.

This equality has to apply across the board.

Political power.

Thank you, Billy Jean King.

You've opened this can of worms.

Political power in Egypt, as you mentioned, Andy, has shifted into the hands of the Islamists.

The Muslim Brotherhood and the ultra-conservative Salafis control more than 70% of the seats in parliament, and a prospect that worries women who are seeking equality on social matters such as education and divorce.

The ultra-conservative Salafis have said that they're more than happy to grant women divorce, but rather than the right to divorce their husbands, the Salafis will be divorcing women from their rights instead, citing irreconcilable differences between the two.

Egypt is in a real mess at the moment.

It's in a high-grade pickle tourism has slumped uh local authorities cannot even pay for rubbish collection and the country is currently literally festering in a pile of shit dumps of garbage are being left alongside the sides of uh roads and in one cairo suburb piled up into 10 meter 32 feet high mountains of filth those egyptians andy even in the worst of times they can't help but stack things into massive pyramids

also you have to think john i mean i don't know a lot about Sphinxes, but when they dump, they really dump.

It's good luck shoveling that out and using it as mulch.

One Egyptian woman said: the problem facing women here is very grave.

Politics is controlled by male muscles.

And not just male muscles, Andy, but increasingly ludicrously juiced up muscles covered in a Jerseyan amount of spray tan.

Afghan lady news now.

and well Afghan women have got it pretty sweet Andy where access to heroin is concerned.

Unfortunately where everything else is concerned they are in an oppressive whirlpool of pain.

While things have certainly improved for women since the Taliban ran the country, well, you know, not they didn't run the country so much as they gripped the country in a fist and squeezed it until the pips came out.

But unfortunately, regarding the Taliban and their attitude toward women, there are fears that that particular reactionary rooster may be coming back home to roost.

The Taliban attitude towards women is literally prehistoric, as we all know, in that they think women should live in caves and be beaten with sticks.

And their moorish misogyny is rearing its bearded head with the news that the Afghan government has requested that female television presenters don headscarves and avoid heavy makeup, which has pissed off journalists who argue that the move is proof the authorities expect the Taliban to regain a share of power when the Americans leave.

There is a slight angle on this story, John, in that apparently female television presenters in Afghanistan were already wearing headscarves and avoiding heavy makeup.

Right.

And it was really, this is suggestion that the government is just pandering to the Taliban.

It's not as if Afghan lady newsreaders had been coming on telly looking like Joan Collins in Dynasty.

They'd be pretty much keeping things under control.

I mean, it's just,

I've never really liked the Taliban, John.

I mean,

I don't want to offend any

Taliban fan.

I don't think I'm going out on too much of a limb here, but I would personally wouldn't vote for them unless they promised me at least a 2P in the pound income tax cut.

And that, for someone living in a Western democracy, that is about as hostile as it's possible to get.

But they just don't seem like the kind of guys, John, who would be much fun on an evening out in the snooker club, the Taliban.

They just sit there in the corner complaining about how colourful the balls were and then casually leafing through a catalogue of global artistic monuments and circling the ones they'd most like to knock down.

Just not my kind of people, John.

As the old Frank Sinatra song goes, Taliban and women's rights go together like a horse in a French restaurant.

If I'd had your vocal range, I could have sung that, John.

I just don't understand why you didn't.

It's not about singing it well, Andy.

It's about singing it loudly and with confidence.

There have been many, many examples of pressure on the press in Afghanistan over the last year, including throwing acid on a veteran Afghan journalist and preventing a Turkish soap opera from being aired.

And presumably, those are the two ends of that particular suppressive spectrum.

Preventing a soap opera from being on TV and throwing acid in someone's face is a situation escalating very quickly.

India Lady News Now and in the Karnataka State Assembly,

the Minister for Women and Child Development has been caught watching pornography on a mobile phone during a parliamentary session.

Now, that is.

In that job, John,

it is hard to pass that off as research.

Hard.

Yeah.

Not impossible, but hard.

Certainly difficult.

It's a high degree of difficulty, that particular swan dive for power.

He and two other politicians were caught.

They've denied they were deliberately looking at the cyber growth, but it is.

But

it just looks bad, John.

It really, really looks bad.

No, so hold on, hold on.

Their argument was that they were not deliberately looking at pornography.

It was an accident, was it?

Maybe they were looking up some statistics online and instead ended up watching a seven-minute clip of Edward Penis' hands.

It happens, Andy.

It's a very simple mistake.

And they were probably watching to the end of the clip of Edward's Penis hands to see if the statistics were there at the end of it instead of just a man's grimacing face and some credits starting to roll.

And we do know that Ron Jeremy's latest film was entitled A UN Report on

Childbirth and Infant Mortality Rates in Southern India.

We know that.

It's easy to make these mistakes.

I think that was the only available porn title left in the world now.

But also, Andy,

let's give them some credit.

That is a way to,

okay, that would be phenomenal.

A series of porn based around UN debates.

Major pieces of legislation.

That's a whole spin-off there.

What

political fetish porn.

But the point is, it's a pretty impressive way to go out, Andy, watching pornography in Parliament.

That beats a resignation speech any day.

That really beats some bullshit about how I want to spend more time with my family.

In fact, I don't think any politician should ever be allowed a press conference to announce a resignation from now on.

They should instead have to sit in Parliament, watch porn, and then let nature take its course.

It'd be a tremendous system.

A parliamentary debate going on, then suddenly the sound from someone's mobile phone of squeaking and moaning, and a journalist saying, Oh, it looks like the congressman is not going to run for a third term next year.

Well, that squeaking and moaning.

All right.

Turned out it was just him watching a Christina Aguilera video.

Boom!

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

And early to mid-2000s music slam.

Sorry, not I'm not quite up with it I'm surprised it was that contemporary

oh yeah actually you're right we should be focusing on that that was alarmingly up to date it was 21st century yeah that's right I should have gone with Aretha Franklin

American lady news now and America's actually a pretty good country to be born a lady Andy until a few things happened last week that have made that significantly less the case.

In fact, no one could blame American women here if they all suddenly decided to leave the country saying, that's it, we're f ⁇ ing out of here.

This is complete bullshit.

There has been a debate on contraception the last week, so ludicrous that part of me was wondering whether it was in fact a performance art piece to make us all question how terrible it would be to live in a country where something like this could actually happen.

Either that or it was an ambitiously elaborate practical joke just to wind women up with everyone showing almost superhuman commitment to the bit and

not one single person suddenly bursting out laughing and saying, oh, I'm sorry, I can't do this.

It's just the look on their lady faces.

They're so angry.

And understandably so.

What we're discussing here is almost the brand new definition of myopic.

Now, here's what's been happening here.

And if you're a woman, you may want to board up the inside of your windows before you listen to this so that you'll bounce back into the room when you try and throw yourself through the window in frustration.

The battle is over whether religiously affiliated institutions should be mandated to offer full contraception health insurance coverage for female employees.

Now it's worth noting that actual religious institutions, actual houses of worship, are exempt from this, but affiliated institutions such as charities or universities are supposed to provide any employees with insurance that provide birth control.

It's worth noting as well, their employees don't have to use that.

This is not about force feeding Catholics the contraceptive pill, funneling it down their mouths.

If you're against the use of contraception, you don't have to use it, Andy.

It's just providing people with the choice to...

Oh boy, there's that word that gets Catholics so angry.

There's that, not the choice, and the option.

It's the option to use it should they want to.

It's giving a woman right to option.

Yeah, but that's a slippery slope, John, isn't it?

Right.

Because,

you know, you give women a right to option stuff, and then, you know, within a couple of years, they're carving tits into Mount Rushmore, aren't they?

We've all seen it happen.

I think that's basically the concern.

Is carving tits into Mount Rushmore back.

Is that one of those UN porn movies again?

Oh God.

There was a congressional hearing on this with a congressional oversight committee chaired by Darrell Isa, who is a medically diagnosed arsehole.

That's not an opinion, that's a scientific fact.

And it featured an all-male panel.

All men.

Not a single woman, Andy.

And that thudding sound you hear is hopefully American women bouncing back into the room after trying to throw themselves through their newly boarded up window of frustration.

Pick yourselves up ladies because I'm not done.

The board also called witnesses to testify absolutely none of which were female.

Zero.

There's that thudding noise again.

Good work ladies.

You boarded those windows up real good.

To be fair though John, I mean men can see both sides of this because men began inside a woman.

True.

And then they've come out as men.

Whereas women have just spent their whole pre-life and actual life

on the feminine side of the fence.

So

what perspective can they possibly bring?

God,

that is a far, far better point than came up in any of those congressional hearings, actually.

Rick Santorum, who's proving to be quite an entertainer, has some.

He's a ladykiller.

He's indeed.

He's come up with a kid.

He's a lady killer in the sense that he likes to kill the souls and belief in human nature of anyone with an X chromosome.

He responded to the the Susan G.

Komen Foundation's decision to retract funding from Planned Parenthood for breast healthcare services by saying, I don't believe breast cancer research is advanced by funding an organization that does abortions where you've seen ties to cancer and abortions.

Now, I mean, aside from the

grammatical nonsensity of it,

you do have to slightly question

Mr.

Santorum's scientific qualifications for this, bearing in mind that the scientific community has concluded pretty much unanimously that abortion has absolutely no link to breast cancer at all.

On that side of the fence, you have the World Health Organization, the US National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in Britain.

And on the other side, you have Rick Santorum, whose qualifications as a medical research scientist include that he once went for a donkey ride with a grape in his ear to see if it would affect his balance.

And when suffering from a cough, he growled the Steppenwolf classic Born to Be Wild five times over in his kitchen using a baguette as a pretend microphone to see if it would clear up his throat.

It did, but he then suffered tonsillitis as a result.

I mean, that isn't true, John.

In fact, he has even fewer qualifications

than this.

That's worse.

He didn't do either of those things and make you even less qualified.

Wow, that is chilling.

Now, let's be fair, though.

Rick Santora is a strong supporter of a woman's rights.

Santora,

You've just made him plural, John.

That's right.

He's a strong supporter of a woman's right to shut up and let other people decide about what she should do with her body.

He's very much pro-choice in terms of them choosing to shut the f ⁇ ing up.

Santorum's website states every American should have access to high-quality, affordable healthcare.

with healthcare decisions made by patients and their physicians.

Now that might make a woman say, hold on a second.

Rick Santorum doesn't sound that bad wait ladies wait

let the full santorum come blasting through because he is a staunch supporter of abortion even in the case of rape even in the case of rape telling cnn recently that a woman in that case should and i quote make the best out of a bad situation and accept the gift from god

Wow

I think I think women should say the same thing to Santorum, Andy, after from now until the end of his weasel life, they see him in the street and kick him in the finging balls.

Please accept this gift from God, Rick.

This pointed chewed gift to your plums.

Why are you rolling around on the ground crying, Rick?

Please make the best out of this bad situation.

In fact, rejoice, because I believe another lady is coming over to gift you with another high-velocity nutshot.

Praise be, Rick.

God is graciously raining gifts into your groinal area, you fing douche.

God does seriously need to look at his present buying strategy.

Having advised

women to make the best out of a bad situation, in this very bad situation, he has also

today advised murder victims to look on the bright side and remember that they will have a real conversation stopper for St.

Peter at the Pearlie Gates.

And you know what was most funny about it, St.

Peter?

I just bought exactly the same chainsaw the previous weekend.

Talk about ironic.

I guess this goes to show, John, that two wrongs don't make a right, but they do make a right-wing policy.

And in other Republican science news, Stacey Campfield, a Republican member of the Tennessee Senate, said in January, and bear in mind when I say January, I mean January 2012, he said, most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community.

It was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men.

It was an airline pilot, if I recall.

If I recall.

If I recall.

He continued to say, my understanding is that it is virtually, not completely, but virtually impossible to contract AIDS through heterosexual sex.

And the people of Africa might slightly disagree with him on that one, John.

Unless

I've just been in a country that's

doesn't really back up those scientific findings that he's recalled.

Unless the 12 million women with HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are in fact all gay men which if it were true would go down as arguably the most logistically impressive hoax of all time it might even beat Catholicism to that title

now I'm not saying Catholicism is the only religion that's a hoax I'm just saying it's been the best organized one

and most profitable

Mr.

Campfield who must wake up every day in hysterics at the irony of his own name later quoted the odds of heterosexual transmission of AIDS at 1 in 5 million.

Medical experts say the odds of transmission heterosexual sex between an infected male and a female are, in fact, between 1 in 500 and 1 in 1,000.

So Mr.

Campfield was merely between 99.98 and 99.99%

wrong.

Or very charitably, only very slightly right.

Here's an interesting

coder to this lady's section, John.

Amongst the the best performing economies in the world currently, Norway, Sweden and Denmark also have amongst the highest proportion of women in parliament.

Rwanda now has the highest, with I think about 56% of women are parliamentarians.

That's the highest percentage in the known world.

And they seem to be having...

slightly fewer abominable civil wars involving the unbridled slaughter of women and children than they did when the guys were running the place.

So I guess it's harder when you look at these things to indulge in the kind of reckless, damaging, short-term dick-swinging politics and economics that have left so much of the world in such a mess when you don't physically have a dick to swing.

A lesson for us all, sisters.

Booze news now and Monday is the 79th anniversary of Congress proposing the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution.

Now that, John, is a lot of amendments considering it started with seven paragraphs and a preamble.

Sounds like George Washington might have been passing around some contraband grappa when the founding daddies, sorry, fathers, been spending too much time with the kids.

When they were scribbling it down, ten amendments were proposed eight days after they'd finished it, John.

That is a classic sign of some major hangovers wearing off.

Oh, what?

Did we forget freedom of speech and trial by jury?

Oh, balls.

I am never drinking TJ's homemade slive of its again.

I've lost four whole days.

TJ.

Anyway,

Amendment 21 was in effect D-Amendment 18, which had prohibited booze in a successful effort to boost the struggling gangstering industry.

And there have now been 27 amendments and in tribute to the late great American detective Lieutenant Frank Colombo.

Any further amendment will now be prefixed with the words, just one more thing.

But in American booze news, an American Indian tribe in South Dakota has sued some of the world's biggest beer firms over the alcohol-related problems in its community.

In the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, one in four children suffers fetal disorders caused by alcohol abuse.

And the lawsuit names the nearby town of White Clay in Nebraska

in its suit.

Now, in White Clay, Nebraska, there are four beer shops, John.

And in 2010, between them, these four beer shops sold nearly five million cans of beer.

Now, the population of White Clay, Nebraska.

Did you say there were four beer shops?

Yeah.

Wow.

Now,

any guesses as to the population of the town of White Clay, Nebraska?

Well, I'm guessing it must be...

It's millions.

It's got to be millions, Andy.

Well, according to this internet report, it's described as having about a dozen residents.

Now, assuming that they all like a dozen.

It must be the...

The drunkest place on earth.

Twelve smashed residents.

Assuming that it's f ⁇ ing great living here, isn't it?

It's great.

We need a fifth shop, though, I think.

Because the line out of the door is ridiculous.

Assuming they all like a tipple, and why wouldn't they, coming from Nebraska?

That works out at 1,140 cans of beer per resident per day.

Well, and also, Andy, presumably four of those residents are working in those shops as well.

So they've got to be pretty hammered on the job passed out at the till.

One for you, one for me.

A lawyer representing the tribe said we cannot sell 5 million 12-ounce cans of beer and wash your hands like Pontius Pilate and say that we've got nothing to do with it being smuggled.

I guess you might have thought it was for an art installation.

Who knows about the dangers of excessive beer consumption.

But I guess you can see it from the point of view of the

American Indian tribe.

They've lost their lands, their livelihoods, and in many cases their lives in exchange for epidemics, Christianity and casinos.

It is no wonder they have hit the source, John.

In fact, if it wasn't for a massive drinking problem, they would be probably starting to get a little bit cranky about stuff.

And in British booze news, the Prime Minister David Cameron set to call for bars and supermarkets and the drink industry to do more.

to help ensure responsible drinking, which are two words that do not go happily together on this fair island of ours, John.

He said that the scandal of drunkenness and alcohol abuse cost the NHS £2.7 billion

a year.

But the flip side to this is in 2009 to 10, alcohol duties raised £9 billion for the exchequer.

And that is a net profit of £6.3 billion, which suggests to me that government should be prioritising alcoholics for liver transplants.

They need to get them back on their feet.

indirectly funding mainstream society again.

They shouldn't be giving MBs and nighthoes to bankers and charity workers and sportsmen.

And two of those three are true anyway.

They should be giving them to drunken tramps who have sacrificed everything for the good of our economy, John.

Not to mention the heroic efforts of our pissed-up teenagers to help control immigration.

Because people immigrate here because it is nicer than the shit pits they live in.

And if we can show them that our shit pits are just as bad as theirs by vomiting all over our town centres in an aggressive manner, they will think twice before they come here with their skills and their work ethics.

These people are patriots, John.

Patriots.

On the subject of immigration, the government has called recently for all asylums wanting to move to Britain to be tested on their knowledge of British history, which should be quite simple for many of them.

Question, why do you want to move to Britain?

Answer, British history.

In you come.

Your emails now, and well, it seems that the Charles Dickens puns from last week have rather split the crowd.

Didn't split me, Andy.

I was 100% clear about where I stood on that.

Yeah, but you can be 100% clear and still be 100% wrong, John.

This email came in from Ethan Lake, who writes, Dear Andy, John and Chris, in order of pun crafting finesse.

Then my great ex-picked A-Shins, I'd like to thoroughly congratulate you, Andy, on the creation of such a magnificent pun.

Oh, no, don't do this.

I very much doubt that another pun will ever be written to trump this one.

You have my sincere admiration.

Your humble servant, Ethan, from Salt Lake City.

Ethan?

I'm guessing that's Ethan, Anthony, not Ethan.

I don't think it's short for ethanol.

Well, we don't know.

We don't know.

We just don't know.

Let's not let's let's let's hedge our bets on that one.

There's a great email from Judy Blail under the subject of please get the hell out of my dreams, which I believe was a Billy Ocean song at that point.

And she says, Dear Jolliver and Drippiness and f Eucharist.

Oh, that is a very, very very good start.

Having made the mistake of downloading all of the archive bugles from the RSS feed, I've taken to listening to them during every moment of my life.

That is a huge human mistake.

At first, this was a lovely way to pass time walking to and from classes, but recently things have taken a turn for the worst.

For last night, I was plagued with a terrible dream.

In this dream, I was walking around my college campus eating undercooked noodles.

Suddenly, a wild John Oliver appeared, cradling what appeared to be a baby wrapped in the bastard love child of the British and the French flags.

Like any fan of Dick Pants of Vanity Smurf, brackets, oh god, why do I know that?

Close brackets, I walked over to see him.

Alas, my joy was short-lived, because when John opened his mouth, he did not produce those sensual British vowels, but instead honked like a goose and threw the baby thing at me.

I looked down to see what the infant looked like, and it was a small, innocent, soft baby with Andy's head screwed on top, complete with an alarming amount of orange hair.

It helped, and I woke up in a cold sweat with a migraine that caused me to miss all of my classes that day.

What the actual f ⁇ , guys?

Which is

that's an excellent phrase and question.

Have I contracted some kind of bullshittic parasite that has latched onto my brain bits and are now poisoning my once-pure mind?

Save me, please.

Sincerely, Judy from Iowa.

Well,

that's that's pretty impressive, Andy.

Yeah, pretty impressive.

Yeah,

it's good to haunt a few people's dreams.

Yeah, that's that's good.

Shows that we're doing our job.

You are asleep right now.

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

And you can follow the Bugle Twitter feed at HelloBuglers, which this morning retweeted some exchanges between David Cameron and Mahmoud Armadinajad.

Oh, that's nice.

Yeah.

Whose Twitter hook is Armadina Jabber, apparently.

So,

sport now, and this from our marginal sports correspondent, Wool.

Semi-finals time at the World Bullittling Championships in Australia here at the Melbourne Doridodome.

You join us as a second semi-final has just ended.

Great Britain have besmirched and disparaged their way to a sensational victory over much fancied Australia.

All this despite the scofferoos opening strongly as Scott and McGonagall pulled off a technically risky disparagement of the highly rated dead British playwright Shakespeare.

The young Melbourne slagger star casually dismissed the former dramatist renowned play Hamlet as, quotes, an elongated monotony of vapid predictability about a spineless, self-important prick.

But GB skipper Alwina Stranch, fresh from a big money transfer from the Manchester Deprecators to Deprecatio Milan, responded by dismissing number one ranked Spanish artist Pablo Picasso as a glorified cartoonist and assisting Chappell as a reasonable bit of graffiti, alright, I suppose, if you're into nudie men wagging their fingers around and that kind of thing while shrugging our shoulders and looking at our fingernails.

And Britain clinched victory when Australia's Russian-born superstar Darren Oleg Spovinichenkov Minogue from the NBL franchise the Portland Zing derided British physics with Sir Isaac Newton's theory of gravity as quotes the kind of half-assed schoolboy science that Einstein could have pissed out in his sleep and was penalised for excessive denigration.

The jubilant Brits who ecstatically describe their victory as nothing to write home about go on to face reigning champions the USA for whom NBL all-star Juliet Mondigo was in scintillating form.

The Detroit downpeggers historic scorner tilted the American semi against France their way by passing off the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War as, quotes, nice if economically neither here nor there, before landing a four-point downplay by describing the moon landings as like throwing a screwed-up bit of paper into the only bin in a sparsely furnished office.

Team USA's victory was confirmed when Preville Chicken Jr.

of the New York Sneer saw off France's Foul Jean Jean Bonner of Rail Madrid in the personal belittling showdown, passing off Jean Bonner's impressive operatic baritone as a spirit-sappingly, irritatingly nasal whine reminiscent of an asthmatomatic Fiji, before the stunned Jean Bonner could only respond by calling Chicken a loser and questioning his personal hygiene.

Referee Salmilian Kalchuk adjudged the comments to be an outright insult and awarded Chicken a penalty sneer.

The snook was there to be cocked and Chicken, not for the first time in his illustrious career, cocked it.

He called the defenceless Jean Bonner morally worthless, spiritually squalid, and unfit for whatever purpose he presumes to grant himself, before finishing him off by pooping the Frenchman's ability to juggle seven oranges as a sub-schoolboy micro skill.

All set for a terrific final on Sunday.

Back to you in the studio.

And there'll be more from our marginal sports correspondent, well, probably in about 18 months' time.

That's it for this week's Bugle.

That's it.

That's it.

Setu, setup.

Thanks, Rue.

You must have blended in seamlessly.

In every way.

About as seamlessly as I blended in in Bangladesh a year ago.

Thanks for listening, Buglers.

We'll be back with Bugle 184 next week.

Goodbye.

I'm Biento!

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.