Walls throughout the ages

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, Buglers, and welcome to issue 95 of The Bugle with Me, Andy Zaltzmann, here in London, and in a place where he probably shouldn't be, Albany, Oregon.

It's John Oliver.

Hello, Andy.

Hello buglers!

What that I shouldn't be?

Contractually that is just not the case.

I literally had to be here.

I'm in Albany, Oregon in a hotel room.

So we may be interrupted at any point Andy by someone wanting to clean this room because it's nine in the morning here and I couldn't find that little thing that says do not clean this room for the door.

Well, I'm just saying there may be a pause as I say, can you wait a minute?

Or you may just hear a vacuum cleaner in the background.

Just bear it in mind.

Are you likely to get any room service at any point of this, sir?

Well, I don't know, Andy.

Do you want anything?

Well, yeah, I wouldn't mind.

What's it, breakfast time over there?

How about some maple syrup and some pancakes?

Usually people say pancakes first, Andy, rather than focusing on the maple syrup.

Give me a bowl of maple syrup and just a bit of pancake to dip it in.

How were the recordings?

Andy did a radio show last week.

That's why we were not bugling.

They were quite good.

They went pretty well.

In the time that you were broadcasting, Andy, Serena Williams was a guest on the show.

I've always felt that you and she would be the perfect couple, Andy.

You know this.

Really, my friend.

Obviously, there's a couple of barriers.

You're Jewish.

She's Jehovah's Witness, and there's the issue of your wife and family.

But in another time, another place, I just can't think of two people better suited.

I'm sure E-Harmony would have thrown you two together in a flash.

She is perhaps the most successful tennis player ever to have lived, and you really enjoy watching tennis.

In fact, you should never meet.

You have a wonderful family and I just worry that the raw chemistry between the two of you would be so strong that you'd throw it all away.

Do you think so?

Serena Zoltzman, that has got a real ring to it.

Or indeed, Andy Williams, that have an even bigger one, but for different reasons.

I'm just not sure it'd work out though, because I just prefer players with one-handed, back-hands.

You can't mention that.

You can't mention that.

She's committed to the power game.

I'd just always be talking about how Justine was a more stylish player.

Not in front of your wife, Andrew.

Also, my sister was here last weekend, and I took her to a baseball batting cage up the road, which we are definitely going to next time you're here, Andrew.

It was a lot of fun.

They gave me a choice of pitch speeds.

Oh, right.

35 miles an hour, 45 miles an hour, 60 miles an hour, or 70 miles an hour.

Now, obviously, I couldn't pick the lowest one.

or indeed the next lowest one because that's too close to the lowest one.

So I was forced forced to go with 60 miles an hour for me and my little sister.

And let me tell you, Andy, that's actually pretty f ⁇ ing quick.

That's certainly what I was thinking anyway as the first one whizzed past my head.

The extra problem was there was a seven-year-old's birthday party going on right next to the cage.

And there was a bunch of mouthy seven-year-olds giving me shit for being a Mets fan.

That's right.

I was being heckled by a bunch of over-sugared seven-year-olds as 60-mile an hour pitches were hurtling towards me.

It was like a nightmare.

And I will say this: it is not easy being a Mets fan.

I was in Boston at Northeastern University on Thursday.

And when you can walk through Boston in a New York hat and not have things shouted at you, you know your team is in bad shape.

One guy in a Red Sox hat walked past me, and rather than shout, he just said, Tough year.

Hang me in there, mate.

Sympathy is worse than abuse.

That is certainly true at stand-up gigs as well.

That's true.

Well, it's interesting you should say that, John, because Monday, the 16th of November, 2009, when this bugle is going out, is the International Day for Tolerance, and I think that applies to suffering Mets fans as much as other persecuted minorities.

It does.

It was set up by UNESCO in 1995, International Day for Tolerance, after they got pissed off with a history of human intolerance dating back to the first first time a caveman saw another caveman wearing bearskin underpants instead of mammoth skin underpants.

Flash bastard.

I'm not sure about this day of tolerance, John.

I think it was clearly well-meaning but I think there's a number of things wrong with it.

One, having a special day for tolerance makes tolerance sound somehow special, as if you can cram all you're tolerating into one little day and then spend the other 387 days of the year being as racist or homophobicist or vegetarian as you like.

But I prefer to tolerate other people and their crackpot beliefs and behaviour for 364 days days a year and then let all my deep-seated prejudices and myopia come cascading out in a one-day avalanche of hatred.

A festival of pain.

Surely that is much healthier way to live than one day of tolerance a year, John.

Yep.

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

This week, a junior travel section on holidays for the under fours, including tricycling holidays in the Himalayas.

We tell you the risks of letting your child freewheel down an 8,000-metre-high mountain.

Club 18 to 30 months, club nights geared to the short attention span of the one and a half to two and a half year old.

and crawling safaris.

What's your child should do when it comes face to face with a crocodile in the Okavango Delta?

The key is, don't cry, it just winds them up.

Top story this week, walls

Everyone loves a wall, Andy.

You can paint them, hang things on them, and even dramatically throw dinner plates against them in an expression of domestic frustration in Oscar nominated movies.

You can't beat a wall Andy perfect for dividing things slap a roof on top of a few walls and boom you just got yourself a room a wall is also the only thing that humanity has built in our entire time on Earth that can be seen from space.

Congratulations to the Chinese on that one.

Phenomenal wall.

Even more impressive because it's a war that managed over thousands of years not to piss anyone off.

Apart from people who wanted to invade China at the time.

They were pretty miffed, to be fair.

Not only is the Great Wall of China visible from space, but actually, here's an interesting thing: the space is also visible from the Great Wall of China, unless it's cloudy or daytime, or you're blindfolded, or looking downwards, not into a puddle, or you're jabbing cabinets in your eyes, or you've been bundled into the back of a car.

This week was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a wall that, to put it mildly, people did not like.

That's the only thing that people like more than putting walls up, knocking them down.

We're still essentially overgrown babies when it comes to construction projects.

In 1987, Ronald Reagan had given a speech at the Brandenburg Gate, where he famously said, Mr.

Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

And Gorbachev, eventually two years later, did exactly that.

What Reagan didn't know was that Gorbachev had to grant Reagan a wish after Reagan had inadvertently rubbed his head during a summit meeting.

The tragedy is that Reagan could have wished for anything.

He could have even wished for 100 more wishes, but he ran his mouth off and asked for a wall to come down instead.

What a shame.

Gorbachev, incidentally, was the first fully qualified genie world leader since King Leopold of Austria, who mainly granted himself wishes, which involved killing people.

Bad leader, Leopold, but an even worse genie.

It is right that Reagan told Gorbachev to tear the wall down.

They did actually Hagon, in the end, come up with a compromise of knocking the wall down.

Just as a basic matter of practicality.

Oh, that's what he wanted.

He wanted Gorbachev alone to single-handedly get into training for the world strongman competition and physically tear it down.

That was unreasonable.

But it's one of those events, the Berlin Wall coming down, John, isn't it?

Where we'll always be able to say, I was there over there, bit left, left in through the front door on the sofa, in my house, watching it on the telly.

Momentous day.

Well, I don't know what time of day it came down, John, but I remember seeing it on the news.

I don't remember school being interrupted.

Really?

The type of school I was at.

It might have been soon.

Communism has been defeated.

The future of this place is secure.

Don't vote for Kinnock.

Don't he'll send you all down a mine.

He will.

Who will?

But it's interesting the history of the human use of walls.

The Berlin wall put up in 1961 after the ruptions following the divvying up of post-war Berlin rumbled on.

You know, looking at at walls, it does kind of prove Pythagoras's ancient theory that if you build a wall on someone's land without really asking them, they tend to get a bit angry.

Tom, you can testify, there's the Scots a still haven't really calmed down since Hadrian.

Ah, have they?

There's real genuine anger on the fair.

He's trying to dress it up as a joke, but I bet his heart rate just went up.

In the hype surrounding this anniversary, there were a lot of clips from nineteen eighty nine of hyperbolic journalists, as you were saying, standing on the wall pronouncing the death of communism and predicting that democracies would now thrive and that there would essentially be an end to all war.

And it does seem that their crystal balls were a little smudged that day because things didn't really work out that way.

There are still a great deal of very divisive walls still very much standing and dividing all around the world.

In fact,

on your list of top world walls, I mean you definitely want the West Bank wall.

I mean look if you judge a wall by how many people it can piss off.

It's one of the best walls out there.

It's only seven years old so it's still a rookie wall.

But it's had an incredible start to its career.

Only 15% of it built on the so-called green line, the internationally recognised border, meaning 85% of it is on occupied Palestinian land.

The reason being that Israel have argued that this was built from a blueprint dictated by God to his on-site foreman, Moses.

It's all there in black and white, John.

Yep, Moses was God's project manager.

So I'm giving the West Bank Wall a war rating of nine.

Nine.

Good war.

You criticise the failure to build it on the recognized border, John.

But But you know, planning permission these days, I mean, you just build it where you can, otherwise you just never get these things done.

That's right.

I mean, if nothing else you can say about the Israelis, they really cut through the red tape when building that wall.

But I think there's another wall, John, that really should be a model to a wall such as the Westburn, and that's the Botswana-Zimbabwe border wall, which was put up a few years ago as a protection against foot and mouth that

was running right through that region of southern Africa at the time.

Although because they didn't really finish it or remove any holes big enough for cows to get through, it hasn't really worked.

But I think this is the model for all political walls, John.

They should just say it's an excuse for stopping livestock moving.

Surely, sure, you know, the Palestinians couldn't possibly complain if the Israelis said, Oh, we just don't want your dogs to get our dogs' fleas.

And there you go.

Everyone's happy.

So, what wall rating would you give that one, Andy?

The Botswana wall?

Well,

one.

What really?

One?

Yeah.

That's not good.

Well, you know, it's hardly even worth it, is it?

Now, the most technologically impressive wall is the Saudi Arabian fence.

Saudi Arabia are building a high-tech security fence along its 5,500-mile border, which is apparently going to cost $3 billion.

But, you know, when you think about that, that's not actually that much to a country that lost the concept of the value of money years ago.

It will be a physical barrier in some parts, but in others, it will be a virtual barrier of airships, cameras, and radar.

Call me old-fashioned unbi, but give me a real physical barrier to throw stones at any day.

Where is the joy in throwing a brick into the air and having it picked up by satellites?

We're all rating a four.

They're also putting up a psychological wall, John.

So just have people saying, oh, you can't get across here, mate.

I don't think you've got the balls.

You've not got it.

That's fair.

You're not just a bit of mental disintegration, Australian style.

80% of walls are all in your head, Andvy.

That's not a fact, but it sounds like one.

Also, there's the India-Pakistan.

border barrier.

That's one of the most volatile borders on the planet.

Barbed wire, landmines, furious people either side.

A little more of a fence than a wall for my taste, but what they lack in bricks and mortar, they more than make up for in resentment and violence.

Well, we in Britain, we've been masters of the water ever since we put up the English Channel 10,000 years ago when the Ice Age finished and we wanted to stop the filthy Europeans coming over here and eating our wolves.

You're right, though.

We are very good at bounties because all of this is nothing compared to my favourite bounty, which was the Great Hedge of India.

Super, super.

2,000 miles

that were built from the 1840s to the 1880s.

Now, much has been written, Andy, about how brutal an empire the British were.

Let's not forget how weird we were to them.

A hedge.

Not even a wall.

A hedge.

We kept the Indians out of their own land with topury.

You can't argue with that.

I mean, yes, the Indians did argue with it, but we couldn't hear them because they were arguing behind a huge fing hedge.

And the sound of a large strimmer.

So well what has happened to all the main players from the time that the Berlin Wall came down?

Well we'll do a quick bugle where are they now section from the major players.

Eric Honecker, the former East German leader, he died in 1994 and now runs a clothing and stuffed animal boutique in Lower Manhattan.

And he said, I spoke to him over the phone last week, and he said, well, I had a whale of a time as the head of a Soviet bloc state, but after being let off my trial due to ill health and then dying, I thought it was a great opportunity to try something new.

I'd always been interested in retail, ironically for a raging commie you might say, so I thought why not run a vintage clothes store in New York City and I had a collection of 30,000 stuffed animals that Leonid Brezhnev had given me as a prank on my stag do so I figured I might as well sell them too.

Old Mickey Gorbachev, the old puffin who gave the World Perris Striker in Glasnost and bought the Soviet Union falling to pieces like a motorcycle pyramid on a very windy day, well he now presents daytime cookery programmes on Lebanese TV in between travelling the world on a moped asking people if they still remember him.

Now aged 45 Gorbachev keeps himself busy holding pretend nuclear disarmament talks at breakfast, using a coffee pot, cereal packet, and cartons of juice as pretend world leaders.

Helmut Kohl, the big fat German Chancellor known as the flying Aubergine for his habit of beginning cabinet meetings, dressed in a dark purple jumpsuit and diving full length down the cabinet table in the Reichstag, trying to high-five all members of his cabinet before his Aubergine-shaped torso skidded to a halt and the political discussions could begin.

Well, he's still doing that.

And Bodo Ilgener, of course, he was the German international goalkeeper at the time that the the Berlin Wall came down.

Ilgner went on to win the World Cup with Germany in 1990.

And sometimes you should imagine that he was the Berlin Wall in order to make himself feel more impregnable.

And after the wall came down, his goalkeeping was never quite the same again.

So Ilgner retired after fellow players started singing the Berlin Wall Has Fallen Down to Him during games to the tune of London Bridges Falling Down.

And he, in fact, bought a section of the old wall to put in his garden, the same shape and size as the football goal, and now spends eight hours a day making his kids shoot footballs at him and saving them from hitting the wall.

The great thing that walls do do, Andy, is bring people together when they're removed.

That happened in Germany.

The East Germans and the West Germans were not fond of each other.

Then they had a wall built between them, just waited for twenty-eight years, then removed it and just ran into each other's arms.

It's like a masonry magic trick.

Build a wall between cultures, knock it down, and all of a sudden people are happy to see you.

It's like a long-term cathartic game of peek-a-boo.

That's clearly what they're hoping's going to happen in the West Bank.

That's what they're doing.

Where are the Palestinians?

Where are the Palestinians?

There they are.

There they are.

Where are the Israelis gone?

Where are the Israelis gone?

There they are.

Here they are.

Now, you two play nicely.

Sounds like you're getting broody, John.

War news now, and this last week, Andy, the apparently long-awaited video game, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, was released and is now set to be the selling video game in history.

It's already reported to have sold 5 million copies on its first day and they're anticipating 10 million sales globally in the run-up to Christmas.

Apparently, people were lining up for special midnight openings in shops so they could run home, cool in sick at work, and shoot imaginary people all the next day.

That's pretty much the reaction my book had when it came out last year.

I've got no problem in essence with people wanting to blow things up in video games, Andy.

It passes the time.

My key concern here is: how disengaged does the population have to be with the wars that its country are very literally engaging in to queue around the block at midnight to spend a significant amount of money on something which claims to be the most realistic depiction of war ever?

Although, crucially, not, and this is important, not as realistic as the actual wars that are literally being fought at the moment.

They still have the edge in terms of graphics.

And this this game was released the day before Veterans Day and Remembrance Day.

Really?

There were definitely other days that you could have chosen.

Hundreds of them.

It must be strange for people in uniform who are working their asses over there at the moment to see clips of people back home outside a Walmart with actors dressed up as Marines providing the store with a not-needed sense of occasion.

And when I say strange, I mean f ⁇ ing annoying.

Just think of people back home sitting on couches, mistakenly watching the news with a joystick in their hand and saying, It's not working.

They're not moving the way I want them to.

Oh, this thing is broken.

Well, the success of this franchise does suggest a deep-seated human desire to be involved in massive catastrophic global conflicts.

So maybe this sort of era that we're currently going through of generally people in the world preferring peace to war is just a little fad will grow out of it.

Well, never has a population been so interested in virtual war and completely uninterested in the real thing.

And I know that during the World Wars, children in Europe would play soldiers with sticks for guns, but there are key differences there.

First, they were children, and secondly, they were sticks.

They weren't 42-year-old men setting the blood mode to extra strong while sitting in their basement in their boxer shorts.

Well, there's always been complaints, John.

And it was exactly the same when chess was invented.

Bloody Persian kids, no idea.

Don't they know there's a real war going on?

Do they realise how offensive it is for the soldiers of the Sassanid Empire when they're moving them around a square at a time and then sacrificing them to get the game finished in time for supper?

Well, I think it's a shame, John, with the Call of Duty, that the negotiations for a peace treaty on the franchise did not bear fruit and that the Call of Duty post-conflict reconstruction game has been shelved, featuring missions such as establishing a functioning democracy in areas torn apart by centuries of historic ethnic rivalries, helping contractors build working infrastructure at sizable profit and trying to ignore the concept of value for taxpayers' money.

This was after Gamers the World Over said, what's the f point?

You get caught martialed as soon as you shoot anyone.

You're taking all the fun out of warfare.

Would the Romans have bothered conquering the world if war hadn't been fun?

No, they would not.

Is there any way of taking this rules of engagement restriction off the game?

Because it's quite dangerous out there at the moment.

Human rights and shoot-em-up computer games just don't go hand in hand.

In real war news, Obama is facing a key decision now in the war in Afghanistan.

It's his war now.

Yes, he may not be the war's biological father, but he is raising it as his own, and the responsibility is now his.

He is the legal guardian of this war.

And he's facing what the White House are saying is four choices over Afghanistan.

And once again, this already starts to sound like a video game.

You have four choices.

Choose wisely if you want to get to the next level, which will probably be war in Syria.

Do you remember, Andy, when you got into that game civilization?

Oh, yeah, that's excellent.

It's interesting that your bloodlust only came out when ordering armies to invade.

You'd have been a terrible soldier, Andy, but a phenomenal dictator.

That's what I learned from watching you and that game.

It's good to delegate these things.

Very complicated Afghanistan.

I sat down with my wife and kids last night and we talked through all the options that we as a family had for resolving the conflicts in Afghanistan.

We came to the conclusion that it was bath time.

Really?

No, we weren't talking about Afghanistan.

We were giving the kids dinner.

But anyway, but I think there are four options.

One, offer the Taliban a draw, but then challenge them to a rematch on home soil because they don't travel well.

Two, troop surge, all the troops in the world from every country just wrestle.

Unarmed wrestle.

A population surge.

And I think this is the way to do it, John.

Because I was talking about troop surges, but I think what is needed is to win the Battle of Hearts and Minds.

And to do that, we need to make sure that there are enough pro-Western people in Afghanistan.

What we need to do is fly over 100 million randomly selected ordinary civilians from Britain, America, and the other countries involved, and just settle there.

John, that is a great idea, because that does seem the only way that a civilian population is going to engage in what's happening over there.

The other thing is that we need to take the world's mind off Afghanistan.

And we've been here before, so the obvious solution is to invade Iraq again.

It worked last time.

Yeah.

Just pull the troops out of Iraq and then send them straight back in.

It's not a terrible idea, it's a pretty bad one, but it's not terrible.

The options actually range from deploying 40,000 more troops over there, which is General McChrystal's plan, to overthrow the Taliban in the short term, all the way down to option four, which is just 10 to 15,000 more troops, in an attempt to frighten Karzai into getting off his corrupt ass cheeks and trying to defend his own country, which is a risky strategy, especially when we get the biopsy results on how corrupt those ass cheeks actually are.

Obama is being accused of delaying his decision, but if he is, it's understandable, because it's a pretty shitty decision to have to make.

That is an unappetizing dessert trolley of choices.

Oh, what shall I choose?

Will it be the shit sandwich or the donkey dump gato?

It's interesting that he's getting criticised for being indecisive after we've had eight years of a leader who appeared to do and say the first thing that entered entered his head.

That's the thing.

Colin Powell actually has praised Obama, saying that there's nothing wrong with thinking a decision through.

That's great advice, if only he'd issued himself with that advice seven years ago.

Some people have said that he's dithering, and we all put bad decisions off until the last possible moment.

But he does start to appear now like he's wondering if he can leave this decision for the next president, which would be a minimum of three years away.

At least when Bush ran out the clock, he was only a few months away from leaving power.

This is like taking the ball to the corner flag as soon as the referee whistles for kickoff.

That is a joke that Americans are going to be bemused by.

Power news now, and well, hard luck, John.

You've missed out on the Forbes top 100 most powerful people in the world again.

Again.

I know.

I just cannot break into that.

Obama, number one, who's in tow two, put in three.

Your big three right up there.

You say that, Andy, but Obama one, who's in Tau Two, those are not going to be that way around for long.

And when it does swap round, they are not swapping back.

Yeah, well, they said that with Federer and Nadal, and now Federer's back at number one.

That's a good point, but it doesn't apply to this.

There is something about this Forbes power list, which feels like a high school popularity list that no one is supposed to see.

People's feelings get hurt when you publish things like this.

You may as well rank them in terms of attractiveness and pumpability too.

In which case, Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg will get a lot of bonus points.

Boom!

Second bugle mention in the month for Jean-Claude.

Congratulations to the Lothario from Luxembourg.

Obama actually, as we speak, is in Japan, Andy.

And last night in a speech, he apparently called himself America's first Pacific President.

Look, relax, Obama.

It's getting annoying now.

The whole world is not just about you.

He made a similar comment at the Berlin Wall anniversary saying, few would have foreseen that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg.

Okay, leave it there.

Or, uh-oh, here it comes, that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.

How do you make yourself the subject of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall?

He's not even thinking about it now.

He's just instinctively throwing it into every speech.

This is a controversial list, the power list, partly because it's difficult to judge something like power.

And apparently Forbes considered a variety of categories categories before making the list, such as how many people each person had power over, the financial resources they control, and how many spheres they're powerful in, and if they actively use their power.

And I guess the first big surprise, as you mentioned, on the list was Vladimir Putin at number three, which has got to be a real slap in the face to President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who was at number 33.

The second slap in the face to Medvedev being that he was also one place behind Deputy Prime Minister Igor Seshin.

Wow, no one thinks Medvedev is running that country.

No one.

Putin must have got in not just for his political power, but I mean, his ripped torso as well.

Well, let's not forget.

Apparently, Forbes said that Putin scores extra points because, and I quote, he likes to throw his weight around by jailing oligarchs, invading neighbouring countries, and periodically cutting off Western Europe's supply of natural gas.

Well, at least your priority's in the right place there, Forbes.

I see.

This week, Putin apparently said that he's a fan of rap music.

He went to a Russian graffiti and hip-hop conference and said break dance is something peculiar.

This really is propaganda for a healthy lifestyle because it's hard to imagine break dancing having anything to do with drinking and dope.

Have you ever seen a rap video, Bladimir?

That's all it is.

Other notable entries into the top hundreds include Carlos Slim Hellu, the Mexican telecoms enthusiast.

He's number six, just ahead of Rupert Murdoch.

Go Bugle!

But Silvio Berlusconi at 12?

At 12?

Yeah.

I mean, how does he have time to be powerful in between being loathsome?

Avril Levine at 14.

Gordon Brown at 29.

That's so sad.

He's trying his best.

This is not a bad result.

Bill Gates is at 10.

One position ahead of the Pope.

He's going to be elbowing the Pope out of the way at the Pearly Gates in heaven.

Excuse me, holiness.

I think the big man is going to want to see me first.

Benjamin Netanyahu is at 46, one place behind Oprah Winfrey.

The Prime Minister of Israel is behind a talk show host.

That is a slap in the face to the promised land, Andy.

Osama bin Laden, 37, which is not bad for someone who's barely done a day's work for eight years.

And Mark Thompson, the director general of the BBC, has made this list at 65, which is pretty impressive for a man whose organisation currently broadcasts Hole in the Wall, a prime-time Saturday evening BBC One show in which teams of C to H list celebrities try to jump through a hole in a polis diarine wall.

That is power, John.

To be able to decide, I have this much influence over Britain that I'm going to put this on their televisions.

The kind of shit.

This is the kind of programme that used to be on Japanese television in the 80s, that there would be whole shows on British television taking the piss out of.

And now, this is what we've become.

Bugle feature section now, world records.

And this is a world record for the bugle, the most number of feature sections about world records ever in a bugle.

It's also the most bugles ever, as well.

So, you know, we're breaking records left, right, and centre.

Every single bugle is a record breaker.

It was World Record Day last week.

Amongst the records set, apparently, Alistair Galpin spat a Malteser, 11.29 metres.

Making it question me the Bob Beeman of Chocolate Gobbin.

Jim Lingveld peeled and ate three lemons in 28 seconds.

Good, good for him.

You know, achievement is achievement.

Joe Alexander broke a stack of 11 concrete blocks with his elbow whilst holding a raw egg.

On purpose?

Or was that just he did it and then he suddenly realised I'm not sure that's ever been done before.

And here's one, John.

There was a world record hug at St.

Pancro Station.

112 people hugged each other for a minute.

Now, 112, that doesn't sound like a lot for the world's biggest hug, particularly when you compare compare it with the world's biggest fight, World War II, which muffed a couple of billion people one way or another.

112 and a hug seems pretty piss-poor.

Maybe that tells you a lot about the human condition.

Well, the thing is, Andy, I don't think there is anything more inspiring in this world than Guinness World Records.

It just shows we as a species are inherently stupid in the best way.

It is truly humanity at its best, because it's easy.

to do something worthwhile.

It's a challenge that motivates itself.

It's hard to do something pointless that takes real determination that's what separates us out from the animals

there was an another record set in the uk the longest distance pulling a bus just with the power of your hair now i know that the most likely first guess there is any distance but no he successfully wrote the record and congratulations to the lad

I always think with records Andy, spare a thought for the adjudicators because traveling the world, having to watch people do the most ridiculous things, is either the most inspiring or the most suicide-inducing job in the world.

Probably both.

What bus route was it on?

I don't know.

Because that's the worst thing.

Just as you get ahead of steam going, someone says, I want to get off at the next stop.

Are you kidding?

Because it's the first foot that really hurts.

Yeah, because I was on a 159 the other day.

It was going pretty bloody slowly.

Maybe that was the guy pulling it by his hair.

You probably didn't help by getting on.

There have been a number of other World Records set recently.

World's most awkward conversationalist, Neville Sklinghaufen.

He said uh 38 times in a minute whilst talking to a librarian.

The world's clumsiest pass, Derek Junglords from Manchester, went up to a woman in a nightclub and screamed in her face for three minutes before saying how about it.

The world's most magnetic dog, Luscombe a Pogisher Terrier, came home from a walkies with 231 ball bearings stuck in his fur.

The world's fastest Waz, Grandwick McUlysses, 2.5 seconds.

The tree that looks most like Hillary Clinton was a bay laurel in which it's arm.

That's non-topiaised as well.

Anyone can make a tree look like Hillary Clinton with a pair of seconds.

Most non-connected minor injury sustained in a day, 354 by Renton Wohl.

Although 280 of those were toe stubbings.

That does start to look deliberate.

And the world's longest growl, 12 hours and 43 minutes.

by a woman from Canada.

The world's wrongest news bulletin, the Spanish news agency Huevos Manchegos, reported that Canada had launched a nuclear strike on itself, then reported that Miley Cyrus had been charged with war crimes in The Hague relating to incidents in the Rwandan Civil War before a special feature on the world's biggest diletto shoe at 324 meters worn by a woman lying underneath the Eiffel Tower.

I'm done.

Last one was right, Andy.

It truly is a wonderful world.

Emails now, and this one comes in from Robert Thompson, who writes, Almighty Podmasters.

That's a pretty good way of addressing us, I think.

Yeah.

In a quick survey of total holdings of US debt, I noticed that China only holds about 8.5% of all US Treasury securities.

This leads to a couple of questions.

First, why was China willing to buy our debt?

And second, where is the rest of those 10 trillion dollars?

Turns out, almost 50% of all US debt is held by the government and owed to the government.

My question to you is simply this: what the f

I mean, that is a good question.

That is a question that I, in a very real sense, do not have an answer to.

Other than this.

You're right, mate.

What the f?

I'm a published economist.

And I would say to that, what the f?

We have an email here from Andrew Corliss, who says, Dear John, Andy and Tom, in that order.

First off, John, being a hardcore fan of Transformers, I found your reference to them in The Last Bugle highly inaccurate.

First off, if this EU total collaboration comes through, it will be more like the Constructicons who would combine and form a much larger larger transformer demonstrator.

I already don't know what you're talking about, Andrew.

In which case he says it's probably best that the Czechs do not join, otherwise we'd have a f ⁇ ing huge ass robot on the rampage of which only the Japanese could probably stop, putting us all in their debt while they become the new leaders of the world.

He makes a convincing argument within the terms of that analogy.

Then he also says, secondly, seeing as how the bugle is now becoming more and more of an online dating service, I would like to say I'm a 20-year-old business student looking for a girl.

That's all.

There you go.

He says, Yours truly, Andrew Triple Mipple Corliss.

So, there you go, ladies.

You slightly misquoted in this.

You said, I'm a 20-year-old business student looking for a girl.

He actually writes, I am a 20-year-old business student looking for girls.

Oh,

but it sounds altogether more sinister.

So, do keep your emails cascading into the bugle at timesonline.co.uk, and we will read out all the emails that have ever been sent in next week's bugle.

I like making promises I've got absolutely no way of keeping.

That has become painfully clear.

Fancy making any more just to give people hopes up.

I'm inviting you all to Mind for Christmas dinner on all 6.8 billion buglers in the world.

Round up Mind for Christmas Dinner.

Bugle Sport now, and Britain has another boxer who's good at smashing people in the face.

Britain's David Hay from London, the world heavyweight champion, after overcoming what I think was the biggest weight differential in professional boxing history to beat the gargantuan Russian giant Nikolai holy nuts, he's enormous Valuev last weekend.

David Hay, also the brother-in-law of a comedian friend of John's and mine.

So I felt I put a personal bond to him as he smashed this great big Russian in the face.

Did you see the fights, John, or not?

I didn't, no, I didn't.

Now, basically, he just danced a lot, David Hay, and Valuev was too slow to hit him.

And he won on points, and it was an impressive display.

And as the Queen used to say in her days as Commonwealth middleweight champion in the late 1950s, boxing is as much about not being smashed in the face as it is about smashing people in the face.

Valuev, of course, the star of the award-winning Russian film Stonehead, that's a fact.

There's clips on YouTube of Nikolai Valiev acting in a film about a boxer who's lost his memory.

But he's also renowned for being unseasonably big in terms of bigness, but also for eating a live bear at the end of each round of boxing.

But Hay at 6'3 and 15 stone overcame value of 7 foot 2 and 23 stone.

The St.

Petersburg Man Mountain, widely reported to be the biggest man in history, tipped the scales at 27 stone before the fight and the 7'5 inch Enormo lump.

Just didn't have the pugilistic skills to beat the tiny 5'7 inch Londoner, who at just 11 stone is the smallest boxer ever to beat a man of value of his extraordinary 32 stone weight.

Scuttling out of his corner at just 8 stone 4, Hay all 5'1 of him managed to avoid the lumbering 8'2 inch 250 kilogram massive man with a dazzling display of slippery defensive skills.

Avoiding everything the three-metre-tall 50-stone behemoth could slug at him.

Hey, just 30 inches long with a weight less than a pineapple, returned home to London in a handbag, whilst Value F looks set to resume his previous career as a shipyard.

So that's it for the bugle this week.

We are back next week.

The pattern of Fortnitely bugles is over for now.

I think we're off the week after because you've got to go do Thanksgiving, haven't you?

Thanksgiving, Andy.

Yeah.

You're giving thanks for your green card.

Of course I am.

Get down on my knees and thank them.

But we'll be back next week.

There is no forecast.

That page of the newspaper has been ripped off.

It's just been torn in the bin.

I think a ferret got to it before it was posted through the letterbox.

Bye-bye, Buglers.

Bye-bye.

See you next week.

Have a lovely seven days.

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.