Bugle 180 – The truth about lies

This is a podcast from thebuglepodcast.com.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, Buglers, and welcome to issue

108.

Oh, hang on.

That one missed.

Oh, so do the other two.

What's five add five add one?

Uh, eleven, right, I better keep going.

Oops, still eleven.

Thirteen, cover shot.

Ooh, 40.

24.

31.

Yes, 83, less than 100 to go.

That's psychologically crucial.

84.

Might as well try it with my eyes shut.

Ooh, 108.

174.

179.

come on Andy nail it

still 179

239

ah better start again

I'll sod it right I'll just stick them in manually

121 oh nuts

welcome to bugle 180

I'm Andy Zultzman live in London and in New York City it's the Copernicus of the cutting the Wittgenstein of Waspish, the Archimedes of Arch, the man who puts the PA into ex-PAT.

It's John, the drill bit of destiny, Oliver.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

And to non-British buglers, that has to be the most inexplicable start to a bugler.

You've ever seen.

Basically, there's a sport called Dart in Britain where 180 is the top score.

Any more explanation of that is going to take up the rest of this bugle time.

First and foremost, Buglers, thank you so much for your contributions to the bugle so far.

You are all now shareholders in the bugle.

Shares that are financially, morally, and emotionally worthless.

You're shareholders anyway.

And from your support so far, we are guaranteed to be able to keep going for a few months at least.

So the bullshit can flow freely for the time being.

You've helped us build a high-octane bullshit pipeline straight into your ears.

That came out slightly more disgustingly than I'd have liked, but the point stands.

It's all about pipelines.

Everything in the world is about pipelines.

So, yeah, thank you.

I would like to add my thanks to that, Buglers.

You're all heroes, other than those of you who have not yet contributed, in which case, you are merely potential heroes.

Also, I've got to say, thank you so much for the messages that some of you have added, along with your support.

I don't think I've ever read such an inspiring, profane, stupid, moving, factually inaccurate, generous, and downright insulting selection of sentiments in my life.

You've not read my book then, John.

And finally, I have to say, one of the most uplifting moments of support was that Chris sent me and Andy an email and said, open this email before recording for inspiration.

And I opened it up and it was a photo of Hulk Hogan.

I thought, oh, that's always welcome.

a photo of the hulkster.

But he's holding up a piece of paper in this photo.

Oh, hold on, I thought.

There's some writing on it.

What does it say on there?

I thought.

Holy shit, I thought.

It says, save the bugle.

It's like Hulk Hogan himself has delivered a running leg drop to the idea that the bugle will ever die.

And you've got to upload that to the Twitter feed.

You have to do that.

I will do that.

People deserve to see Hulk Hogan holding up a sign of paper of a message he has no comprehension of the content of.

Very brave from Hulk Hogan, but I guess he's a brave man.

Yeah, for all he knew, the bugle might have been some far-right fascist group.

Yeah.

So, bugles,

if you can find any other ridiculous celebrity to hold up and save the bugle sign, good luck to you.

Yeah.

And that's not including John Oliver himself.

Star of stage and screen.

So this is for the week beginning Monday, the 30th of January, 2012, Bugle number 180.

It means it's 363 years since King Charles I picked up his career-ending neck injury.

And 351 years.

Oh, yeah, I think I might be out for, I don't know, between 50 and 50 years in eternity with this physique.

I reckon it's quite a bad one.

And 351 years since the man so instrumental in that head-high axe tackle on King Charles, Oliver Cromwell, was himself executed.

Now, history fans amongst you might think, well, hang on, didn't Oliver Cromwell pop his stroppy clogs in 1658?

Yes, he did, but they dug him up and executed his corpse two and a half years later.

Is that true?

That is true.

I didn't know that.

Must have surely been a deterrent to other corpses.

Take that, Cromwell.

Better late than never.

Once the monarchy was restored, they dug up Cromwell's body and hung, Drew, and quartered it, then threw its dismembered bits into a pit, apart from the head, which was then displayed on a pole in London for the next 24 years.

Oh, that's nice.

I guess the subtext of that was, Cromwell, we are really, really cross with you.

And last year, to commemorate the 350th anniversary of Cromwell's corpse accusation, the celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal announced that he would be serving Chicken Cromwell at his flagship restaurant of Fat Duck.

The dish, which has to be ordered 27 years in advance, involves a chicken being slaughtered, interred for three years, dug up, slaughtered again, humanely, of course, then butchered before the jointed carcass is marinated in a pit for 24 years, and the severed chicken head left on a kebab stick by the bins outside the back of the restaurant.

The dish is served with a miserablet of joy-starved carrots, an aubergine dour flagellated in its own convictions, water walnuts, which incidentally was John's nickname at school, all doused in a republic bou bouillon garnished with sparse scrapings of seafood austerity with an orange on top.

And as always, a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin this week.

A finance section, including features on hedge funds for the criminally insane, pension or crime spree in your early 60s.

We tell you how to ensure a secure and stable old age.

And I was so poor I burgled myself, and now I'm an emotional wreck and in jail.

How one man's battle with a credit crunch led him to take desperate action.

That's in the bin.

Top story this week, great British bullshittery.

Andy, a couple of studies came out this week, which seemed to claim that Britain is becoming a nation of liars.

But having said that, the studies did come out of Britain, which apparently is full of liars, which could mean that their stats are bullshit.

But hold on, if they are, does that not strengthen their case even more?

I'm already confused.

But there might be something to this, Andy.

Let's look at the facts.

You, Andy, are almost a human case study in lies.

I think about 60% of what comes out of your mouth in any bugle has absolutely no DNA relationship to fact whatsoever.

That simply isn't true.

You are, there you go.

Boom, another piece of proof.

You are a black belt in fact foo, Andy.

You kick facts in the face and karate chop accuracy in the throat.

You're able to not just bend the truth, but to cut the truth into pieces, melt it down, and turn it into a shiny pair of golden bollocks.

Can I put that on my poster, Nick?

Yeah, exactly.

That's a pull quote for you.

What happened was a research study from Essex University claimed that British people are becoming less honest and that the entire nation might be headed for an integrity crisis.

An integrity crisis, Andy?

Do we historically have any integrity left to have a crisis over?

Did we not tap out our integrity well around the time that we started the slave trade?

Is it possible to have any integrity to lose after that?

Or did it just did that well just naturally fill up again after we heroically stopped stopped the slavery that we'd started?

I don't know how it works.

Yeah, apparently lying, adultery, drug taking, breaking the speed limits, drink driving and handling stolen goods are all now seen as more acceptable than they were just 10 years ago.

Which, I don't know what that says about.

about a modern Britain.

And I guess we can do a kind of controlled experiment because John, you are, of course, a former British person.

You've now been in America for five years, whereas

I've stayed here as a dishonest Brit.

And am I right in saying that you've actually handled far fewer stolen goods since you moved to America than you used to when you were here?

Well, I think that's factually true, Andy.

British people have always been more than happy to receive stolen goods at the start of not just this century, but the last century too, as the contents of the British Museum can testify.

That's right.

We've had a serious problem with lying ever since the seventh Earl of Elgin walked around the Acropolis, saw the Parthenon marbles and said, they're mine.

They're definitely mine.

I'm taking them home now, back to my home where they used to be before you Greeks stole them from me.

If you manage to do that with that certain British swagger, you can get away with it.

Yes, true.

You can get away with it.

And I think, I always say,

I always thought, I can't remember if I said this on the bugle or not, but I definitely think those summer riots last summer were

misinterpreted.

People looting those things.

It was give it a couple of months, there will be a Croydon Museum of Electrical Goods.

This patriotic learnt behaviour.

Yeah, the problem is that the people at the top have not really been setting a particularly strong example for us, the British underlings.

There's been all kinds of scandals, the parliamentary expenses scandal, the media scandal, mentioning no former host of the bugle as being involved.

The Prime Minister who appointed us his press secretary, the former editor of the News of the World, the no-time winner of Britain's most scrupulously honest newspaper award.

Government telling us lies in campaign adverts, ludicrous irresponsibility in the financial sector.

It's hardly surprising, John, that the people are kind of picking up this lack of integrity baton and smashing themselves in the face with it.

And when it comes down to a question of

is it dishonesty or stupidity in, for example, the financial markets?

Personally, I would prefer dishonest.

Because as the bankers' bonuses saga shows, if you're dishonest, then you can be bribed to be more honest.

Whereas if you're stupid, you're just stupid.

Oh, God, that is a chillingly good point, Andy.

Corruption, risk-taking, kind of ludicrous acquisitiveness that drive our democratic economic well, they are curable diseases, curable with money, which is best earned by corruption, risk-taking, and acquisitiveness.

I think that's basically the last hope for Afghanistan, that we're going to be able to bribe them back into becoming a functional country.

But anyway, Andy, is it...

any wonder that we're a nation of liars.

Our national anthem is based around a musically turgid fib.

God saved the queen.

God's never saved the queen Andy or any of her ancestors.

That's why she's queen now.

In fact technically, God has systematically wiped out her entire extended family and she is very much next on his kill bill list.

If the queen wants to keep her signature entrance music Andy, she should have to prove it.

Set an honesty tone for the rest of the nation.

Full transparency.

She should climb to the top of Nelson's column, set up a pit of hungry lions at the bottom and throw herself off it.

If she lands softly on her feet, climbs onto a line and rides it back to the palace, I will sing her ditty at the top of my voice every day for the rest of my life.

John, the way I see the financial crisis, the political expenses scandals, media wrongdoing, things like that, I would say as Aristotle himself once said, it is better to be hit on the head with a frying pan by a man who is being paid ludicrous amounts of money to hit you on the head with a frying pan than by a man who thinks hitting you on the head with a frying pan is the right thing to do because he either thinks that's the best way to get a mosquito off your face or because he thinks you're a tennis ball.

God, Aristotle, what a mind, Adam.

Yeah.

What a mind.

As true now as it was then, by which I mean not true.

So how did this study work?

Well, researchers asked a sample of the population whether they thought deeds ranging from exceeding the speed limits or failing to report minor damage to a parked car to knowingly buying stolen goods.

And other categories included avoiding pay for public transport, keeping money found in the street and throwing litter.

And they were asked to rate their approval on a four-point scale with one as never justified to four as always justified.

Integrity levels were slightly higher among women than men, but most significant variation was by age, with noticeably higher tolerance of dishonesty among the young.

And the report's author said, It appears Britons are growing more and more tolerant of low-level dishonesty and less inclined to sanction activities which would have been heavily frowned upon in the past.

That's great news, Andy.

In the cutthroat world of capitalism, we cannot afford to have our young people possessing any integrity, morals, compassion, or honesty whatsoever.

It's just going to hold them back.

If we can remove all of those, either surgically or just by crushing that spirit out of them through human experience, we may yet have the thriving economy we somehow feel entitled to.

Vote for John.

Vote for John.

Well, at least

you'd assume all that was true, but the report also said, Empirical research suggests that societies in which trust and integrity are strong perform perform much better on a range of economic and political indicators than societies where they're weak.

Come on now.

If you go to any board meeting at any major investment bank or hedge fund, it would be hard to make that argument.

You would not be looking at a mahogany table around which there were paragons of virtue.

Let's put it this way.

I would bet that if you checked, everyone sitting in that room had at least a day pass to the arsehole convention.

Well, this has been quite an issue this week, John, with the bonus for the boss of the RBS Bank, which is 83% owned by the taxpayer.

And its boss, Stephen Hester, has been given a bonus worth around £960,000.

And this comes after politicians have been calling for responsibility and the Bank of England boss Mervyn King called for moderation.

And it appears that top-level banking bosses have responded to these calls by essentially hiring the red arrows to fly over Britain and leave vapor trails reading, suck my balls.

I'm not saying Stephen Hester has done that himself, but

he might as well have done.

People are understandably a little bit knocked, thinking that £900,000 might, for example, be more profitably spent on other things, such as not making hundreds of thousands of people redundant.

The government has confirmed that Mr Hester will receive his £2.2 million salary plus bonus, but...

Given that he is 83% state-owned as a man now, he will be deployed as a peacekeeping force in Afghanistan.

The government stated that economically he's worth more than 100 soldiers to us, so we might as well get our fing money's worth out of him.

The concern is, John, that if Hester was not paid this massive amount of money, he might just FRO to another bank or another big job overseas.

So what we are basically paying, John, given that the RBS's share price went down and Hester seemed to miss quite a lot of the targets he'd been set, what we're basically paying is for the privilege of not having someone a bit shitter in charge of RBS.

It's basically protection money to keep someone who will only f things up so much.

The problem is that no matter how well deserved this bonus may or may not be, within the quirky frame of reference of top-level banking, it just

looks bad from a taxpayer's point of view when so many people being laid off.

And if saving money to the public purse was the sole criterion for paying public servants, then Harold Shipman would have been on about £1.8 million a year for saving on all those pensions bills.

I'm not saying that's what he should have been on, John.

I'm just saying that if I worked in the financial sector, I would have been saying that's what he should have been on.

Well, when he was asked the author of the report why young people are becoming more dishonest, he said, well, we think it's because their role models are not very good.

Footballers who cheat on their wives, journalists who hack people's phones.

Now, I get the point he's trying to make, Andy, but what young person has a tabloid journalist as a role model?

If any kid does, they have have much bigger problems to deal with there.

If you walk into your child's bedroom and they have a poster on their wall of an overcaffeinated 45-year-old man with a notepad ripping through the bins outside of Mila celebrity's house, then you need to very quickly try and get them into Marilyn Manson or hooked on drugs or something bit healthier than that.

There does seem to have been a decay.

In in the year 2000, 70% of people in the study said that an extramarital affair was never justified.

That's now fallen to just 50% in the more recent study.

50%?

That is not a wedding vow, Andy.

That's wedding vow-ish.

At least make it clear during the ceremony.

Have the priest say, Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife, forsaking all others?

And have the groom say, Yes and no.

I tell you what, darling, let's flip a coin to decide.

Head or tails?

Tails?

Okay, here we go.

Oh, shit, it's tails.

Oh, best of three.

The little insight into John's wedding back in

President's talking news now.

And Andy Presidents love to talk almost as much as they love to answer the phone in the Oval Office by saying, Paolo's pizza parlour, how can I help you?

It's just a bit of harmless fun until it's the president of China on the line complaining about where his large pepperoni pizza that he ordered 45 minutes ago is.

Except then it somehow gets even funnier.

The point is.

This week, President Obama delivered his third State of the Union address.

Now, State of the Union night used to be a relatively simple affair, Andy.

You had your main course, the speech itself, followed by a rebuttal dessert from the opposition.

A simple meal that the media could digest overnight and then comfortably dump out by morning.

But no more.

Now the evening has become a procession of multiple official rebuttals after the speech, along with anyone who has access to YouTube account releasing their own rebuttal, usually in the form of remixes, auto-tuning puppets or kittens.

The Tea Party Express have their own rebuttal tradition now, started last year when Michelle Bachman stared an eerie three inches away from the camera and made America feel like she was addressing a country just over its shoulder.

She was like the opposite of the Mona Lisa.

Wherever you were in the room, it was like she was not looking at you.

This year it was Herman Kane, the PETA CEO and strong contender for the most ridiculous presidential candidate of all time.

He was the star speaker.

And look, the Hermanator knows his audience, Andy.

And when he's in front of a Tea Party crowd, he's going to give that Tea Party crowd something for them to hold their lighters up in the air over.

And so he'd come with a bag of historical catnip, which led to one amazing moment when he said, you know, it was 1773 when the colonies got fed up of old King George and the Brits.

Two years later, we had the start of the American Revolution.

Eight years later, we won.

We can do it again.

I thought,

holy shit.

Is he suggesting that America fight another war against the British?

Is this his thinking out of the box plan?

So I did what I had to do, Andy.

I put on a red coat, I pulled my musket out from underneath the bed where I've hid it, and I took to the streets.

I handled our business.

You're a hero, John.

Let him be easy with the post.

Obama called for higher taxes for the wealthy, which I guess in context is a bit like asking Henry VIII to have one fewer wife.

I mean, he'd still have loads of wives.

Maybe suggesting politely that Donald Rumsel gives away just a couple of those golden statues of himself.

He'd still have 68 golden statues of himself.

And it gave Republicans the opportunity to take a break from slagging themselves off to slag Obama off instead before returning to slagging themselves off and complaining about being attacked by themselves whilst attacking themselves for attacking themselves.

Long live democracy.

It's absolutely awesome when it's on form.

The speech itself was a fiery defense of the last few years in power, combined with an attack on the inactivity of Congress and a call for a fairer tax system.

Perhaps strangely, President Obama opened the speech by saying, for the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country, to the cheers of everyone in Congress.

And I thought for a moment that that might be it.

He might just say, for the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country.

Before dropping the mic, or in this case, picking up the podium and then dropping that podium, saying, that's it from me, see you next year.

I mean, that probably should have been it, Andy.

Yes, the economy is a mess.

Yes, America is still involved in a quagmire of a war, but he did kill bin Laden over the last 12 months.

And if he'd done it closer to the state of the union, perhaps that would have been all he had to say.

Fellow Americans,

hands up, who killed Bin Laden?

Just me.

I thought so.

Obama out.

As fireworks came flying out of the podium and Death Leopard were lowered from the ceiling, singing, Pour some sugar on me.

That's about 15 shows you've sung in a row, John.

I

What a streak.

An interesting side note to the State of the Union is that one member of the government in power traditionally always has to stay back in the White House just in case anything happens in the 90 minutes or so that it takes to deliver the speech.

And it's got to be quite a nervous time for them, or I suppose, quite an exciting one.

And this year, the responsibility fell to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

And I think it's worth checking the Oval Office security tapes because there's absolutely no way that Tom Vilsack was not walking around the Oval Office in his pants pretending to be president the whole time.

Vilsack ran for president in 2008.

There is simply no way that he didn't put his feet up on the desk in the Oval Office, close his eyes and talk into an imaginary camera saying, people of America, it is I, President Vilsack, the greatest president in the history of this country.

Your words, not mine.

I'd never say that about myself, but I guess that's one of the many things that you love about me, President Vilsack.

I was talking to my wife, the first lady, Charlize Theron-Vilsack, yesterday, and she said that I was the most handsome president in the history of the world, with the biggest muscles and the coolest hair.

Anyway, that's all I wanted to say.

Please get back to enjoy your movie, Indiana Jones and the Torpedo of Pain, starring myself, Tom Vilsack.

God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

What?

What?

What?

What?

I'm taking my feet off the desk.

Okay, I'll leave.

Please don't tell the president I was in here.

In other president-speaking news, some tapes of John F.

Kennedy's last few days in office have been released.

He apparently recorded around 248 hours of stuff secretly in the Oval Office.

And he must have been

preparing an absolutely hilarious mashup from that lot, John.

He must have been putting together something that made Lyndon Johnson sound like he was saying, I'm sexually aroused by libraries.

Also included footage of half an hour of hoovering apparently.

It's not specified if that included John F.

Kennedy singing I Want to Break Free whilst doing so.

Contains no audio footage that irrevocably proves that Marilyn Monroe was a Soviet agent nor does it explicitly rule it out.

And it also includes an hour of JFK and Lyndon Johnson dicking around on the Oval Office swivel chair seeing how dizzy they could make each other and on one occasion during the Cuba missile crisis involving LBJ goading JFK to spin spin himself around 30 times then straight away call Nikita Khrushchev.

Fortunately Khrushchev did not answer the phone as he and the rest of the Politburo were involved in an unusually competitive game of Twister at the time.

I just want to be clear to buglers that Andy used the term hoovering there.

That's sort of British colloquialism.

He means vacuuming, not what hoovering means here, which is picking up Jaya Gerhoover by the ankles and having him eat the dust on your carpet.

Sorry, little.

But just bridging across the Atlantic.

Would Jaya Gehoova do that if you asked me?

He'd do whatever he did.

He would if he felt it made America a safer place and if his overbearing mother told him to.

The latest tapes featured JFK getting frustrated during a briefing about Vietnam that offered two different accounts of what was happening.

At one point, Kennedy said to the people briefing him, you both went to the same country, right?

I mean, how is it that you get such different...

This is not a new thing.

This is what we've been dealing with for three weeks.

On the one hand, you get the military saying the war's going better.

On the other hand, you get the the political opinion that with its deterioration of affecting the military.

What is the reason for this difference?

I would like an explanation as to what the reason for this difference is.

And there's been a lot of reporting about how testy he sounded but how else was he supposed to sound Andy?

They were telling him about Vietnam and it was a total f ⁇ ing disaster.

I think he's entitled to get a bit sniffy about it, seeing as, you know, he was the president and he was overseeing a war that would later become the touchstone for quagmires.

What is amazing is that these recorded conversations were made at all.

They were made deliberately when he was president, often captured in the Oval Office or the cabinet rooms and kept completely secret.

And that will never happen again, Andy.

No president will ever want to leave that kind of evidence behind.

I guess the concern now is going to be their email records in the future.

So in the future, we'll be waiting to hear about the latest batch of Obama emails being released showing arguments over Afghanistan, responding R-O-T-F-L after hearing about a Rick Perry speech and forwarding a YouTube video of a panda sneezing to his economic advisors.

In would-be future President's Talking News, Newt Gingrich has proposed to colonize the moon.

Yes.

What a

Gingrich 2012!

He now has the Bugle's full and unconditional supports.

Because, I mean, not only would it clearly boost the economy in Florida, which I believe was what he said was

the main idea behind it, to boost the Florida economy.

I think he might even have been in Florida when he said that.

That's the incredible coincidence.

I mean, it is the first refuge of the politician running short of ideas, you know, Moon Colony.

You just get every time.

The world facing economic, ecological, social problems, moon colony.

You know, spend billions of dollars establishing a colony and perhaps the most useless place in a 25 million mile radius of where he was standing at the time.

Moon colony, John, and it's the way forward for America.

Mitt Romney responded by saying that if a business subordinate had brought the moon colony idea to him, he would fire him.

Although on the evidence of Romney's career shutting down companies and putting people out of work, A, he'd probably have fired him anyway, and B, he'd have f ⁇ ing enjoyed it.

Fictional presidents talking news now.

And the Australian politician Anthony Albanese was caught plagiarising speech lines from the 1995 Michael Douglas film The American President.

Now, you might think, oh, I'm sure it wasn't that close.

I'm sure it was just a coincidence.

You'd be wrong about that.

Listen to this.

In Australia, we have serious challenges to solve, and we need serious people to solve them.

We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them.

Unfortunately, Tony Abbott is not the least bit interested in fixing anything.

Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it.

He's only interested in two things.

Making Australians afraid of it and telling them who's to blame for it.

He is interested in two things and two things only.

Making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it.

That is not good, Andy.

That is not good.

Now,

it's a chicken and egg situation, isn't it, John?

Which came first, the film or the Australian politician?

That's a fair point.

I mean, you can't answer that other than by looking at the historical timeline.

It's not in the clip, but Anthony Albanese later went on in the speech to talk about how much he wanted to bang Annette Benning.

So I don't know how he thought he could get away with that part.

He's not the first Australian politician to say that.

When he was called out over this, after the video hit the internet, he tweeted, Don't, thus instantly plagiarising Homer Simpson as well.

Does this man not have an original thought in his head, Andy?

Because if so, that's fine.

There are plenty of other fictional presidents he could quote.

He could quote the president from Independence Day and scream about how he was going to go climb into a plane and kill some aliens.

I think that might play well with the Australian voters.

Or he could go the other way and just plagiarise other Michael Douglas movies instead.

So next time a journalist asks him a question, he could quote Michael Douglas in The Wonder Boys and say, trust me, James, when the family's pet's been assassinated, the owner doesn't want to hear one of her students was the trigger man.

Then say no more questions and leave.

I guarantee they'll be so confused they won't know what's hit them.

Or if an opponent criticises him, he can quote Michael Douglas in falling down and say, we are not the same.

I'm an American and you're a sick asshole.

At this point, point voters sure might start getting a bit suspicious Andy so when he's next up for election he should end his final election night stump speech by quoting Michael Douglas in basic instinct and say number one I don't remember how many times I used to jerk off but it was a lot number two I wasn't pissed off at my dad even when I was old enough to know what he and my mom were doing in the bedroom number three I don't look in the toilet before I flush it number four I haven't wet my bed for a long time number five why don't the two of you go f yourselves I'm out of here now I don't care if you agree with him Andy you are gonna vote for that man if only to see what comes out of his mouth next

other news now and Canada and Canada's defense ministry was criticized for ordering 20,000 orange stress balls it's not entirely clear what the criticism was based on whether it was the cost or what the f ⁇ Canada has to be so stressed about

but perhaps that's a smart idea, Andy.

Make sure that your Defence Department is always calm.

Put decaffeinated coffee in the machine, use soft lighting, set the temperature in the building to cozy, and make sure there are plenty of stress balls.

Orange ones, to be specific.

Apparently, the most effective colour of stress ball.

And thus, you'll ensure that your defense department never gets you into any unnecessary wars.

Well, I guess, I mean, the obvious conclusion to draw from this, the Canadian Defence Ministry ordering 20,000 orange stress balls, is that someone was planning to build a stress ball statue of Wayne Gretzky dressed as an orange.

What is going to threaten the Canadian Defence Forces other than the sense of its own futility?

Unless an ice hockey match really kicks off, John, the closest they're likely to come to being invaded is if a celebrity polar explorer gets pissed, solar's his compass, and ends up riding a polar bear onto Baffin Island shouting, Am I getting warmer or colder?

But you do wonder how history could have been different had certain members of the, say, Bush administration had orange stress balls surgically implanted into their hands and mouths.

I think we might be living in a happier world by now.

Think of what would have happened if Neville Chamberlain had said, I have in my hand a squeezy stress ball.

I gave one to Herr Hitler as well, and he loves it too, and has promised to calm it the f

down a bit.

I've done some research into this, John, and I think 75% of all wars would have been stopped by the pre-emptive application of orange stress balls.

Yeah.

Including the First World War.

All right, Carter Wilhelm, keep your spike on.

Squeeze this squidgy brat first.

You'll feel absolutely fine in no time.

But 20,000 orange stress balls airdropped by the Canadian Air Force over the Middle East would do more for the situation there than a year of peace talks or even than Tony Blair and his magic donkey of reconciliation.

That is a fact.

The worst it will do is the same amount of good.

Now, I think you're right.

I think the Canadians are really onto something here.

This brilliant plan for world peace is also apparently nothing new in Canada, as according to a newsletter in October 2010 on International Conflict Resolution Day, soldiers at 8-Wing Trenton in Canada were encouraged to stop by a kiosk on the base to, and I quote, pick up a stress ball and partake of the cake that will commemorate this auspicious day.

I've got to tell you, Andy, Canadians love maple syrup.

They love ice hockey, but they f ⁇ ing love stress balls.

But there is bad news.

because when Canadian Defence Minister Peter McKay found out about the lace disorder, he cancelled it with a statement from his spokesman saying, as soon as Minister McKay was made aware of this contract, he instructed officials to immediately cancel this unnecessary expense of taxpayer money.

Are you f ⁇ ing crazy?

You can't just cut Canadians off from the one thing that's keeping them from being bilingual bloodthirsty killing machines.

You have to wean them off.

You can't go cold turkey.

They're going to be frantically squeezing anything vaguely round or orange in the hope that they can get rid of some stress without having to launch a nuclear missile.

And if that object doesn't squeeze, Andy, so help us, they are going to kill every man, woman, and child in a 5,000 mile radius.

We need to airdrop stress balls over Canada now and for God's sake make them orange because apparently that's somehow important.

Because, and let me reiterate this to the world, just in case you don't understand how serious this story is.

The Canadians love beavers.

They love Avril Levine,

but they fing love stress balls.

May God have mercy on our souls.

Well, it's good that they're taking stress

seriously in the Canadian Defence Ministry, John, because as Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself said, the only thing we have to worry about is worry itself, before being advised to ratchet up the rhetoric to get a bit of media traction.

Okay, Franklin, we've heard back from the focus group.

Could you go with fear instead of worry?

Okay.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

And Winifred the Man eating crocodile, and treading on upholstery pins, and bits of meat that might be past their best, but look and smell just about okay.

And the Mexicans and their heavy food.

Can you.

And the unexpectedly rapid rise of the Nazi paddy in Germany.

And spiders.

And

the missus when you've left your socks on the floor.

The fellas know what I'm talking about.

And Eleanor's roast chicken.

She could overcook a volcano.

Sorry, I'm going off topic.

The point is...

You're just going off topic.

You're going off accent now.

I don't have your level of dramatic training, John.

I just waited so long to hear you say that.

For 20 seconds, I thought Stantonio was back.

Feature section now and auctions.

And you might recall that Queen Victoria's underpants were auctioned off last year.

And at that point, I fairly confidently thought to myself, Andy, well, that might be it.

That might be the stupidest item that humanity has ever been asked to bid on.

But I was wrong.

Saddam Hussein's ass news now.

Wow, that sentence was fun to say, Andy.

Boy, oh boy, those words tasted nice in that order.

The buttocks of a statue of Saddam Hussein came up for auction recently.

And not just any statue's buttocks.

Andy, the most famous Saddam statue of all the one that was torn down in Baghdad in 2003 before having an American flag quickly put on its head before having the American flag even more quickly taken off its head before having an Iraqi flag put on his head instead before having everyone hit the statue with shoes

Yeah, a man has been arrested for trying to sell a bit of one of Saddam Hussein's butt cheeks.

The arse chunk, which is not actually part of Saddam's real arse, but is a fake bronze arse from the toppled statue of the eight-time World Shit of the Year, was put up for auction in England.

And it came, as you said, from the statue that was famously toppled in 2003 as the Bush regime put into action their plan to use potent symbolism to overcome catastrophic shortcomings in long-term strategic planning.

Sadly, it didn't entirely work.

But the two-foot-tall arse section, which looks quite like a random bit of bronze that could have come from anywhere, failed to fetch its reserve price of $375,000.

Possibly because people thought that the novelty of owning a big bronze buttock might wear off after a few dinner parties possibly because it just didn't look enough like saddam's arse it could just as easily have been george bush's arse or burt reynolds' arse or golfer nick faldo's arse or even from certain angles one of south african president jacob zuma's many wives many arses

or possibly because the law states that all cultural property seized in iraq must be handed over to the police and John, if that law had existed throughout British history, you could fit the entire British Museum in a Tupperware lunchbox.

It was taken by Nigel Eli, a former SAS soldier who happened to be there as a journalist.

And he used a sledgehammer and a chisel to remove a piece of the statue as a souvenir.

And, you know, of course, what piece of the statue do you remove first if you get that opportunity?

That's right, the penis.

You remove Saddam's penis first.

But presumably that had already gone, in which case, his arse is a good fallback option.

That's a solid plan B.

You go with the rump, Andy.

And as we all know, Saddam had back.

Little in the middle, but he had much back.

How do I know this?

Well, as you mentioned, the arse at auction was two foot wide.

Good luck squeezing that into a massive metal pair of swimming trunks.

His arse would not quit, Andy.

It literally would not quit.

His arse was repeatedly asked to quit, it refused, and it had to be forced from power, tried, and executed.

That's how little it would quit.

But maybe this is how all wars are going to be forced in the future.

Next time a statue is pulled down in victory, an army of speculative souvenir hunters are going to descend upon it like vultures and it'll be on eBay by that afternoon.

That was a war fought between Russia and Finland in the late 18th century over one of Catherine the Great's whaps, I believe.

Nigel Eli said, it's been with me all these years, but I decided it was time it did some good.

And as you mentioned, tragically, the dictator's derrière did not make its reserve price, so it wasn't sold.

The highest bid came from a telephone bidder in New York.

Who could that have been, Andy?

I mean, I'm in New York and you know, I don't want to brag, but I do own a telephone.

I also have a place in my apartment where I think Saddam Hussein's gigantic metal ass would look great.

And that place is anywhere, anywhere in my apartment.

The bidder offered £21,000.

Okay, it wasn't me.

It wasn't me.

I think that's now numerically clear.

Although, if there's a Smurf to Andy,

I'm going in hard on Hussein's haunch.

And he had,

as you say, he had a reserve price of £250,000.

And he wanted to use the money from the sale to give to a charity helping injured ex-servicemen from the UK and the US.

He is the Robin Hood of Dictator's Massive Arses, Andy.

But where's his inexplicably popular Brian Adams song?

The World Isn't Fair.

Your emails now, and thank you for all your emails and comments through Twitter and the websites.

And this email comes in from Dariush in Tehran.

That's right, the Tehran in Iran.

The remaining prong of the Axis of Naughty.

Hello, Andy, John, and Chris.

Brackett's in order of likelihood to, due to irresponsible use of puns, cause a military confrontation in the Straits of Hormuz.

I'll take that as a compliment.

Dariush from Iran here.

I've been a listener of the bugle for years now.

In fact, I discovered the bugle whilst doing the

18-month obligatory military service when a mate lent me his iPod, and I've been listening ever since.

See, the Iranian military isn't all bad.

They are also mostly childish.

We're going to have to make a very difficult decision

who to back if it all kicks off, John.

Anyway, being a true bugler, I naturally wanted to help out in the future survival of the best audio newspaper, but I'm unable to donate to the bugle because of the sanctions the EU and the USA has imposed on us.

PayPal will simply not allow Iranians to use their service or engage in any transactions that go through the Iranian banking system.

The bugle has officially become a victim of the sanctions.

Feel the boot of Western sanctions on your throat.

Feel it.

Yours truly, Darius.

Oh, Dariush.

Darius, that is absolutely magnificent.

But I tell you what, at the end of that email, Andy, it says, PS, keep up the good work, Chris.

You're the best.

Ooh.

well i know this is that kind of all of a sudden it gets very suspicious well this is just the kind of mad cap rhetoric we've come to expect from iran i think he was being ironic

oh well thank you so much darius for uh for uh listening and uh trying in uh in response to various queries about uh the contributions to the podcast uh people wanting to set up recurring contributions that will be available in a couple of weeks time as will an alternative to PayPal but thanks to those of you who have already helped save the bugle many many thanks

so do keep your emails coming into info at thebuglepodcast.com follow the Twitter feed at hello buglers and of course the websites thebuglepodcast.com and also our soundcloud page which is soundcloud slash the bugle is that correct Chris that sounded like a guess the way you said it Andy I think it might be an under guess it was both it was both a guess and wrong

It's the hyphen bugle.

The hyphen bugle.

But do check the SoundCloud page.

Should I do that again or not?

No, Andy, just this is great.

It feels much more real.

John, I don't have your experience in professional broadcasting.

I'd love to hear you do a Pepsi commercial, Andy.

Drink Pepsi.

I've not...

Do you have a drunk it?

I think maybe it was Coke.

I don't know.

They taste the same, don't they?

Or don't they?

One's a bit more watery.

Is it the Pepsi one?

Anyways, drink Pepsi.

It's the choice of a new generation.

Oh, that's the old one.

What is it now?

Oh, it's a little sugary.

Anyway, I probably shouldn't say that.

Mmm, delicious.

I feel like I need to burp.

Pepsi.

Well, that's it for this week, Buglers.

Do keep supporting the show at the Support the Show page on the website, and we will be back next week with Bugle issue 181.

Goodbye.

Bye.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

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

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

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