Why Obama's inauguration will be like the Rio carnival

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, Buglers, and welcome to issue 59 of the Bugle for the week beginning Monday, the 12th of January, 2009, with me, Andy Zaltzman, here in the picturesque village of London and in New York City USA Mr.

John Oliver Hello Andy hello buglers andy this is your last week in that London studio it is last week you know we're moving studio next week so if Andy's half of the bugle sounds a bit different it's probably because he's had less free Rybina

but this week I'm fully stocked up with free Rybina so so it is an emotional farewell to unique and in bugle tradition when we finish using a studio we are going to torch it at the end of this recording just before I went back to work Andy my last few days off I went down to DC my only previous relationship with that city is upsetting people and being chased by security shouting you can't film here so I went down I saw the Lincoln Memorial which is fantastic and the Vietnam Memorial which is pretty overwhelming and not a good place I would argue for a work call which one man seemed to disagree with.

There are a series of statues of soldiers walking across a field with hollow eyes, extremely beautiful and they were joined in their painful tableau by a spectacular moron talking on his phone about the need for urgency in him getting December's sales figure sent to his Blackberry.

I guess we all have different battles to fight Andy.

He's just a different kind of hero.

I guess that's really what the victims of Vietnam would have wanted, the freedom for Americans to continue doing business.

But he was being far more patriotic as an American than you were, just standing there and crying.

It's Monday the 12th of January 2009, which means, John, it's the eighth anniversary of when there were only eight years and eight days left until George W.

Bush leaves the White House.

God, it doesn't seem like yesterday, does it?

Also, it means it's 41 years since Johnny Cash played Folsom Prison.

And also,

good stat.

Good stat.

What a gig.

Excellent stats.

Almost worth getting a ticket to that gig.

Yesterday, Sunday the 11th, obviously we were recording this on Friday, so when I say yesterday, I'll mean in two days' time.

It will be 440 years to the day.

since the draw for the first ever lottery in Britain, which for our American listeners is what the USA was still known back then in 1569.

Tickets cost £10, or in today's currency, 10 quid.

And ever since then, Britain as a nation has been besotted with both the idea of lotteries and of silver plates, which were the main prize for that lottery in 1569.

Because what finer expression of Britishness, John, could there possibly be than of spending some money and wondering if you might win a silver plate?

That's basically the tactic that won us two world wars.

But we do think that we would win a plate for winning the war.

That's what we do best.

Well, so the prizes included silver plates, more silver plates, a dose of plague for the personal enemy or unloved family member of your choice, the chance to go sailing with the promising young explorer and pirate Francis Drake, the right to set fire to any Catholic of your choosing, a bottle of aftershave and a soap on a rope, and much else besides.

Happy anniversary to

that system of broken dreams.

Yep, Queen Elizabeth I did a lot of great things for this country.

She single-handedly sank the Spanish Armada.

She showed that women don't have to put out on first dates.

She showed that to a fault, Andy.

In fact, to the end of a bloodline.

As always, some sections of the bugle are going straight in the bin this week.

You and your horse, a special section for those of you who were given a horse for Christmas, but didn't really want one and now need some ideas for what to do with it.

Don't just stick in the attic for a year and then hope try and give it to someone next Christmas.

That's the wrong thing to do.

There are only things you can do, train your horse to race.

The best way to do this is tie a carrot to a coat hanger, force the coat hanger over your nag's head and tell it the carrot just called it a donkey.

Sit back and watch in amazement as your horse charges after the carrot, harumping through its equine mega nostrils and swearing under its breath.

Alternatively, train your horse to fight.

Horse wrestling might not be mainstream, but it's great entertainment for all the family.

And don't worry it's not cruel, just like other sports such as human wrestling and horse racing, it's a total fix.

Train your horse with a couple of signature moves, make sure it can nay loudly at all times, buy it a spangly pair of horse wrestling briefs and let the fun begin.

Alternatively you could cook and eat your horse.

There's no law against it as long as you put on a French accent whilst you're doing it.

Or give your horse to a charity shop.

Make sure you give it a bit of a clean first and just leave it tethered outside overnight as a gesture of goodwill.

They'll probably make at least six pounds from it.

But if you can't get rid of your horse, we will tell you how to release it back into the wilds and give it the maximum chance of success.

The key is train it to eat meat.

If you're a horse in the jungle you've got to pose a food chain threat otherwise you'll find yourself looking up nervously as a hungry tiger puts his bib on and orders a glass of shabley.

Top story this week and presidency countdown.

January the 20th is fast approaching Andy.

Actually, I'll say that, but it's in fact approaching exactly as fast as it's always approached and always will approach, no quicker, no slower.

And in this standard procession of time, towards the 20th of January, Washington DC is preparing itself for what could be the biggest street party in the world.

It's going to be like the carnival in Rio Rio de Janeiro, except in sub-zero temperatures, so with almost no feathers and significantly less body-painted bikinis.

I've heard that's what Barbara Bush is going to be wearing.

Stop it.

What an absolutely horrifying image to place at the start of the bugle.

I didn't say that was all she was going to be wearing.

Why, what is she going to accessorise that with, Andy?

A Wonder Woman cape.

Okay, so I was in DC, as I say, just after the new year, Andy, and I can tell you that their preparation is largely taking the form of the city putting up some crowd barriers and gradually coming to the realization that its infrastructure cannot possibly handle the amount of people that are going to turn up.

Presumably, John, there are, taking the whole world into account, probably about six and a half billion people who'd quite like to be there to bid George W.

Bush farewell.

Yeah.

So that's what the Mayor of DC has now even started to advise people to stay at home unless they don't mind, and I quote, standing in freezing temperatures for many hours in the close proximity of strangers.

That is quite a party invite.

Can I get a plus one for that, Mayor?

I am actually going to be attending the inauguration, Andy, not as a guest, but as an irritant.

Aren't you the warm-up man?

Yeah, that's right.

I'm the hype man at the start.

Wave your hands in the air, DC.

Wave them like you do care a bit.

I'll be doing something for the show there, so I'll be ruining the experience for anyone unfortunate enough to be near me.

And it should be a spectacular experience.

What you've always done, best job.

Listen.

Listen, find something you love and then do it for the rest of your life.

That's my advice to the kids.

They will be spending an estimated $40 million on the celebrations, and what better economic time to be doing that?

It's going to be less an inauguration and more like an episode of MTV Sweet 16.

Obama is even getting Aretha Franklin to sing for him and gets a flashy car at the end of it.

I've not seen Sweet 16, John.

I mean, clearly, you're much more of an aficionado of that show than me.

It's basically morally reprehensible children of millionaires having the kind of parties that really foreshadow the end of ancient Rome.

Right.

Because we've got it's Matilda's second birthday.

Happy birthday, love.

And we're having a second birthday party for her.

But you don't think there's anything I could learn from watching Sweet 16 as to how to throw a party for him?

Because, you know, I'm in showbiz, John.

Yeah, you should.

As proved by the fact that I'm talking to you now.

You should get Lil Wayne to sing happy birthday for her and then buy a Hummer.

If I've learned nothing else from this country and I haven't, then it's that.

Right, okay.

When you come to inauguration, the key is to not to die as a result of the inauguration, as happened to Williams,

who ninth president, who in 1841, on a freezing cold day, decided to break the world record for the longest US inauguration speech ever at a soundbite-defying 8,444 words, taking almost two whole US hours.

He also broke the world record for the longest inauguration speech given whilst not wearing an overcoat on a freezing cold day before going on a parade whilst still not wearing an overcoat on a freezing cold day.

After thawing out for a couple of weeks, Harrison then went down with a cold and went down hard.

As hard as it's possible to go down with a cold, he died and then broke another world record, the shortest presidential term at 31 days.

Which doesn't sound a lot, John, but before you scoff, how many days have you ever been president for?

It's got to be a maximum of four.

Yeah, so that's one nil to Billy H.

Harrison, John.

Yeah.

And I don't think any bugle listener can beat him unless you are one of the 42 other cats who've sat on the American presidential toilets.

So in summary, and ignoring the fact that Harrison probably didn't actually die as a result of the inauguration, but from a bug he picked up later, keep your speech tight, bang, bang, bang, look like you mean it, and don't get your wanger out.

Simple.

All the presidents, in fact, gathered together for lunch at the White House this week.

Not all of them.

Not all of them.

All the living presidents.

Otherwise, that would have been a fairly unappetising lunch.

Well, they said that.

They sent out the invitations.

Only three of them bothered replying, Carter, Bush Sr.

and Clinton.

Some people get in a position of power, goes to their head, they get cocky and they forget their manners.

Yeah, no netty kit from their Evites.

They gather together to offer Obama advice, presumably on things like the Middle East and on how to get the White House boiler to work if it starts playing up in the winter.

And the current commander-in-chief really looked like a man who was really looking forward to not being president anymore.

You see, Obama's officially moved to Washington last Monday after a two-week holiday in Hawaii.

The island that was so named, in fact, after the noise made by ace British explorer James Cook when he became the first European to discover it when he landed on the beach and trod on a scorpion.

Bit of history for you.

Hawaii!

I would have loved to have been a fly-on-the-wall at that lunch, John.

I mean, what a lunch.

Well, I'm probably not a fly-on-the-wall, as then, as a flyer, I would have lacked the capacity to understand what those people were saying to each other, trying to avoid being slotted with a rolled-up copy of Baseball Monthly by the president, who regards flies as un-American, before finally being thwacked, falling unconscious to the the Oval Office carpet, being scrunched into it by a presidential brogue whilst Obama said, hey, treat yourself, grind it right in, this is coming up next week, before someone else said, hey, that's not the only time a flyer has come down in here, is it, Bill?

Bill?

Come on, we can all laugh about it now.

It must be strange and not a little awkward for them to stand there together in the Oval Office, especially with Bill Clinton standing there too, because there's a big elephant in the room there, Andy.

And that elephant being Ejaculated Seaman.

It must be be hard to work in an office which hosted the most famous blowjob in human history.

Tricky to focus.

I'd have thought you'd be too busy scrubbing things clean, like Lady Macbeth.

Of course, had the traditional presidential game of Twister.

A bomb won quite comfortably.

Jimmy Carter's not quite what he was as a twister player, although Clinton can still pull a few moves.

I would imagine they did spend most of their time sitting around awkwardly, tapping their fingers on the table, looking at George W.

Bush, and just going, Ooh.

Of course, the oath is really the key part of the inauguration.

That's the one that he really doesn't want to screw up and accidentally reveal himself to be an Islamic extremist, as suggested by the conservative media.

Would that be the worst time for him to do that?

Yeah, he's an inspirational figure, Obama, and I'm hoping this will lead to a great age in oath writing.

Because I don't think I make enough oaths, and I've decided to make more oaths.

In fact, I made one this morning where I said, I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of coffee maker and bread toaster of this breakfast, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, preserve protect and defend and eat my bacon sandwich so help me me any bugle listeners who want to submit their own oaths of inaugurate for inaugurate go and inaugurate yourself somewhere great idea send us what oath you have used or would use to thebugle at timesonline.co.uk

Other news now, and yes, there's going to be a new man in the second most important job in the world on the 20th of January, but there's already a new man in the most important job in the world.

It happened on Thursday.

England has a new cricket captain.

And John, this nation is in turmoil.

Andrew Strauss, 5'11 left-handed opening batsman and father of two from London with a South African father and English mother who's over 30 years old.

John is exactly like me.

I'm basically England cricket captain.

Anyway, he was hastily inaugurated at a press conference on Thursday after previous England cricket president Kevin Peterson assassinated his own captaincy career following a dispute with the coach Peter Moores and the England cricket boards who ended up sacking Moores and telling Peterson that if he didn't sack himself, they'd sack him.

Basically, he ended up with no one to do anything and appointed Strauss.

And John, the nation is in a state of total trauma.

This is worse than when the Queen Mother died, the Blitz began, and the English Civil War put together.

Wow.

And we haven't seen an abdication as dramatic as Peterson's resignation since Edward VIII told everyone in the country that he was secretly a Nazi.

Sorry that he'd fallen in love with a married Catholic woman.

Buglers might be interested to know that Andy was actually pitching for this to be the top story this week, and the best I could do was haggle him down to second.

The only thing that has really rattled you this week, isn't it, Andy?

Yeah.

I've had a tough, tiring few weeks, been very emotional, obviously, with the birth of on your child and pretty tired.

Well exactly, I'm a little, but we need a bit of stability in our lives, John.

And we look to English cricket to provide us with that.

And now this, I mean, I can't believe English cricket, after all I've done for it, would screw me around at a time like this.

Well, English cricket has always been a bellwether for current events, Andy.

As goes English cricket, so goes the world.

So this is bad news for Gaza at the moment, as has been proven.

How's the news gone down in America, John?

Well, it hasn't really gone down, Andy, because it's not been delivered, because people don't really have the capacity to understand what it means.

People don't understand cricket, but they find the fact that we like it inherently hilarious.

If the guys who wrote the ancient Greek myths, in other words, the ancient Greeks, if they'd written a myth about cricket in an attempt to illustrate an aspect of human life, it would have been this very story, John, because Peterson basically prayed for the coach to be removed from his job, and he was, but then so was Peterson.

And I guess the moral of the story is, don't make stupid comments to the media in an effort to get your own way.

I guess the Greeks would probably then ended the story with Peterson eating someone's children or being condemned to be given out to a dodgy umpire incision every day for the rest of eternity.

But English cricket is English, so the next step in the story was that England are going to go on tour of the West Indies with an interim coach, and Peterson's still in the team.

Not quite as dramatic as the Greek version, but I guess that's why we're still alive and they're not.

Only you, Andy, could imply that the current drama at the English cricket board is akin to Sophocles.

Can anyone actually deny that?

Yeah,

I can't hear anyone denying it.

Just because you've taken your headphones off.

Deadlines passed.

Gaza update now, and well, there's good news and bad news regarding Gaza.

Here's the good news.

And here's the bad news.

There is still almost continuous violence.

Over 700 Palestinians have been killed, as well as over 10 Israelis, and the whole situation is horrific.

There was finally an agreement to have a three-hour truce to to provide emergency medical supplies to Gaza.

Three hours.

Last week, Andy, we were laughing at the mortifying lack of hope in a proposed 48-hour ceasefire, but three hours.

You could barely watch the curious case of Benjamin Button at that time, which incidentally would not be a good use of your time, especially if you live in Gaza where you should really be focusing on medical supplies.

And even this three-hour truce was then jeopardised when Lebanon started firing rockets into Israel.

Oh, thank you, Lebanon.

Thank you.

You just managed to do the seemingly impossible.

You made this situation even worse.

Well, to be fair, John, they were quite close to a peaceful week.

I mean, if it only wasn't for those seven days of continued bombing by both sides, it was that close.

It's that close.

There's an old saying in war, Andy.

Sticks, stones, rockets, and mortar fire may break my bones, devastate my house, and foster lingering resentment for generations, but words...

they really hurt me.

And there have been some new technological developments in the war on words in this Gaza conflict.

The Israeli Defence Force have launched their own YouTube channel where you can watch various strategic Hamas locations get bombed, press conferences from the IDF, and what they claim is footage of some key Hamas leaders receiving demoralising nutshots.

And, you know, while I don't doubt that there's an audience for that, Andy, I just worry that it will encourage young disenfranchised men to want to avenge that nutshot.

But the Israeli government wasn't done there.

They announced also that they were going to hold the, and I quote, first governmental press conference ever held on Twitter.

Which makes makes sense, because I've always had a rule with press conferences.

Andy, if you can't say it in 140 characters or less, don't bother saying it at all.

That's what we've been going wrong with the Middle East.

We've been overthinking it.

You can get to the root of the problem with nothing more than emoticons.

Well,

is angry face, which makes Sahid sad face.

Why can't they just learn to happy face with hearts coming out of it?

One of the entries was, We have t the number two, protect our citizens, two, the only way forward through negotiation.

It was written, it was utterly, utterly ridiculous.

And David Saranga of the IDF said, I speak to every demographic in a language he understands.

If someone only speaks Spanish, I speak Spanish.

If someone is using a platform like Twitter, I want a tweet.

Going on to say, If someone can only communicate through aromatherapy, I'll get my candles out.

If someone can only communicate through the international language of breakdance, I will spin on my head and do the worm.

Bugle feature section now and well it's the one we've been promising you for about two months now it's the one the world has been waiting for it's the hotties from history feature section oh yeah

so uh well what an emotional uh roller coaster it's been John over the last year and a bit you run it down Andy we actually have had a spectacular amount of nominations for this

this has possibly captured people's imagination like nothing else we've ever done there's clearly a really latent part of people which doesn't want their kind of lascivious sexual feelings to be contained to the current generation.

And good for them.

Yeah,

are they wrong?

No.

No, they're not wrong.

No, I'm not wrong.

They're not.

How can it be wrong when it feels so right?

We've had presidents, presidents, wives, kings, queens, writers, artists, messiahs, prophets, not specific ones, of course.

Gods and goddesses, pharaohs and pharaohs, volcanoes, epochs, fossils, scientists, scientists, 150-foot-high obelisks, basically guys and gals from the entire spectrum of dead historical figures.

Seems amazing that just 12 months ago, you know, a sequence of offhand sexually loaded comments by you led to this phenomenon.

That's the story of my life, isn't it?

That's why I'm married with kids today, basically.

For me, Joanna the Mad really got my blood boiling.

I think that was when I first started getting interested in this.

I've not heard of Joanna the Mad before, and I've not been able to stop thinking about her since.

We are going to nominate the hottest hottie from history at the end of this section.

There have been some excellent nominations coming in recently.

Diana Payton nominates Marie Antoinette.

She was apparently so hot they cut off her head so that men would stop fighting over her.

I think that's right.

Whatever.

She's hot, says Diana P.

P.S.

You're right.

You guys are weird.

Normally I try and deny that, Andy, but we are in the middle of rounding up a hottie from history section, which...

It's weird.

I don't know about it.

It is weird.

This one came in from Fedor Kosakovsky from Los Angeles, who nominates Sar Ivan IV, better known as Ivan the Terrible.

As a little boy, he used to drop kittens from the top of his castle tower for fun.

He grew older and inherited the throne and a pretty stylish hat and ordered St.

Basil's Cathedral to be constructed.

When it was built, Ivan reportedly blinded the architect in charge so he could not make anything as beautiful ever again.

After his wife died, he went completely insane, got married six more times, getting rid of one wife in less than a week.

Ooh, hot.

He developed huge mood swings, and he quotes from an internet source.

In one week, he would swing between depraved orgies and praying and fasting in remote monasteries.

God, that's hot, John.

Even on his deathbed, he managed to stay hot.

Ivan was probably killed by his friends after they walked in on him, trying to get it on with his mentally ill son's wife, and were so scared for their own lives that they killed Ivan the Terrible instead.

Wow.

Finally, Fedor concludes, and most importantly, it's my 15th birthday on Saturday, December the 6th.

Hope you re-listen to my podcast as my present, because I know you're too cheap to get me anything else.

Well, true.

Well, belated happy birthday.

We waited until the January sales before giving you the free email.

There's a great Scandinavian nomination from Sofia Pakal Masowi.

And she says,

I dare you to try saying that.

Well, they're accepted and lost.

I have a hottie from the nomination for you from the proud, if somewhat important, delusional country of Sweden.

This being, of course, because I feel that the Swedes are being horribly unrepresented at the bugle.

I guess.

She says, I hereby nominated the one-eyed wonder of Swedish mythology, the god Odin.

Unlike most people with just one eye, Odin didn't simply lose it while playing with his famous spear.

No, he willingly removed it to dropped it in a well.

Nothing says manly more than a high tolerance for pain and an eye patch.

True, Sophia.

And as payment for his eye, Odin received wisdom.

So he's not just a hottie without an eye, he's a smart hunk of a one-eyed man.

But just an eye patch and some intelligence isn't enough to score my nomination.

A hottie from history needs to be manly.

How manly is this one-eyed wonder?

You may ask, and I'll tell you, this hottie is so manly that he made the earth pregnant.

That is an achievement, Andy.

That sounds like a defence to a public indecency charge.

No, no, Andy.

I just want to procreate with Mother Earth.

What can you please do it in your back garden?

This one comes in from Courtney Prothero, superb name.

And she writes, two buglords, three words, Sir Isaac Newton.

Oh yeah, you could have finished that email right there for me, Courtney.

But she doesn't, she continues as a mathematician and scientist.

The man spent his life studying curves and the movement of bodies.

Totally hot.

And as if that's one enough, some say that on his deathbed he claimed that his greatest achievement was dying a virgin.

That bold claim gives him that touch of mystery that every lady wants from her hotties in history.

Of course, as a victim of massive mercury poisoning, he's still got that crazy man charm that keeps them coming back for more.

Oh, the cascades of luscious, flying grey hair, the deliciously pointy nose, and those gorgeous toothbrush-like eyebrows.

With looks like that, he must have worked hard to stay virgin amongst all those promiscuous 17th century gals.

Let's just say Newton probably wasn't afraid to get physical.

Yours, afraid that a cold shower may simply not be enough, Courtney Prothero.

What are we doing?

I do think, Andy, that we and the buglers have been a bad influence on each other here.

I think one of my favourite nominations, which we've read out, but let's enjoy it again now, was from Ash Dunn, who says, salutations, chaps.

I would like to venture forth my nomination volunteers from history.

Marie Curie was a seriously saucy science seductress who must have been quite the between-the-sheets showstopper in the course of this Randy researcher's career she was exposed to so much radiation that she eventually died of a plastic anemia I mean wow what wouldn't she do

oh god

It would be the ultimate bargaining chip in the laboratory of love.

Come on, baby.

I know I might sting to do this, but you know, not as much as radiation sickness.

Remember, the safe word is polonium.

This lady is hot.

Radioactively hot!

Well, John, sadly, I've got some bad news for you because this email shows that even the most noble research projects like Hottish from History can be hijacked by rogue contributors.

And this comes from Paul Yakotta.

And he writes, Dear John and the other one, thanks, Paul, Paul Yakota.

You've got to move pretty fast, or I'm going to chin you.

I know where you live.

I will find you and I will chin you.

Anyway, he continues: like most buglers, I'm a rabid fan of 9th-century Hungarian history.

This starting well.

Accordingly, I'm personally offended that Hottish Mystery is yet to feature Commondor Puli, the mass-murdering, hair-fetishising third ruler of the Kingdom of Hungary and splendiferous sex symbol of the Arpad dynasty.

Commondor, of course, was both third chronologically, as well as third in terms of total Freudian units of insanity, or Freuds.

Although the Freud unit would not be invented for another thousand years, most experts, of which there are none, agree that Commondor would have clocked in at an unhealthy 895 Freuds.

Coincidentally, 895 was also the year that Commodore ascended to the throne at the tender age of 13 by overseeing a human sacrifice of his father, Almos.

Hart!

Almos was sacrificed to the gods.

Commodore went on to rule as Grand Prince and was known primarily for his fiscal conservatism and strong leadership.

That, and also for his habit of taking the women of defeated enemies as his concubines, then ritually sacrificing them when he tired of them.

Whilst this practice might seem cold, heartless, even Zaltzman-like to the casual observer, I can honestly say, John, hand on heart, I've never executed a concubine.

He continues, in the Commodore's defense, he never subjected any of his Hareen to an audio-cryptic crossword.

Hey, hey!

Writes, I'm coming to get this guy, Yakota.

Tom put me on the next flight to the USA USA and sourced me a cudgel.

In fact, he continues, deep down Commodore was quite the softie.

He was the best sort of hotty, one who was not afraid to show his sensitive sentimental side, which meant, in his case, cutting off the hair of his concubines before having them killed and storing it in a large sack on which he slept and did the royal nasty.

Not only was Commodore Pulu the single best candidate for hottie from history ever, in fact he may well be the best anything in the entire history of things, as well as his general awesomeness are made all the more impressive in the light of the fact that he was only recently made up by a 26-year-old American named Paul Yakotta.

Oh,

what a letdown.

Oh, boy.

What a letdown, John.

I mean, particularly when you think Paul has let himself down, he's let his fellow buglers down, but most of all, he's let history down.

Shame on you, Paul.

With so many incredibly hot people to lust after.

History hot people.

You've gone after an imaginary Hungarian lunatic.

What's wrong with real Hungarian lunatics?

Like this one, nominated by Tim Rosen and Tom Bruin, Urshabet Bathori, the Blood Countess, the humptastic Hungarian knew how to throw a party, particularly if this party involved mercilessly torturing, killing, and bathing in the blood of 600 young women.

What's wrong with that, then?

How are we going to close out the season for history?

I mean, it's been...

I guess we're going to probably try and pick the hottest hottie.

And I've drawn up a bit of a long list.

On that long list, you've got the...

This is from your nominations, Buglers.

Chinese warlord General Zhang Zhongchang, the dog meat general with a veritable museum of concubines, and quotes, the physique of an elephant, the brain of a pig, the temperament of a tiger.

Also, says the correspondent Doug Courtney from St.

Louis, who sent this in, popular myth gave him a penis as long as a pile of 86 silver dollars.

That sounds like a bit of a lie.

That is hot.

Then you've got Cleopatra, or she was known in the Egyptian prescription.

And a little obvious.

And I thought she was a bit full of herself as well.

Then of course you've got Hitler fancy Nazi filmstress Lenny Riefenstahl nominated by Richard from Sydney who claims that he met her when she was 92 and that she was still hot.

Wow,

whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Let's keep this abstract.

Diane Davis nominates Sir Cloudsley Shovel, an English naval hottie of the 17th and 18th century, who was so damn foxy that when a sailor on his ship warned that there were rocks approaching, he had him executed and slammed his entire fleet into those rocks, killing himself and 2,000 others.

You don't get much hotter than that.

That is the kind of level of self-confidence that everyone finds hot.

Another naval hotty, Horatio Nelson, described by no lesser source than Johnny from Milton Keynes, as being, quotes, nearly as sexy as the Queen.

Emma Crawford, a 19th-century American hottie, so hot there's a coffin race every year in her honour.

John F.

Kennedy, described by Sean Owen of Muswell Hill as the most priapic leader of the free world ever.

A man who makes Bill Clinton look like you two.

Well, oh come on, that's not a nice thing to say.

I've got more children than John and Bill Clinton put together.

Actually, Annie, you really don't know that that's the case with Bill Clinton.

Then we've also got ancient British tribal babe Boudica, or a Bodicea, nominated by Thomas Jura from Northern Virginia, the Queen of the Iceni, possibly the most and only ever good-looking woman from East Anglia.

Although Tassidus doesn't mention much of Boudica's physical features in his annals, we can only imagine how hot she must have been to lead an army of 100,000 Britons against the homely sausage fest that was the Roman Empire.

Several nominations, also for Australopithecus affarensis, also known as Lucy, including this from Steve Schwartz.

This M to the power 6442 ilf

was as smoulderingly sexy as an upright walking hominid could be.

Strutting her stuff 3.2 million years ago at a cool 3 foot 8 inches tall.

This prehistoric Hannah Montana from the savannah would spend her days foraging for beetle larva, avoiding varieties of saber-toothed cat and smashing the skulls of small woodland creatures so she could pick out their brains and eat them.

If loving a three-million-year-old, half-chimp, half-human, mutant thing that could be considered the mother to the entire human population is wrong, then I don't think I want to be right.

Good.

Well done, Stephen.

From Baltimore.

Very good.

We've had a nomination from Dan O'Brien for Blanche Dumas, the 19th century hottie boasting three legs, two fully functioning sets of genitalia and four breasts, of which two were ladies' hooters and two were men's whaps.

She has 1.5 times the amount of legs and twice the amount of genitalia as Florence Nightingale.

Points.

Wow.

That's right.

Wow, that is hot.

We've even had a nomination for Edward Powys Mathers, the inventor of the cryptic crossword.

For George Washington, we've Alcybiones, the ancient Greek omnisexual who pulled wangs off sacred statues for a laugh, nudist pioneers, Adam and Eve, Russian humpit or lumpit, scraggling enthusiast Catherine the Great, tiny leg, massive nagid, bone disordered, art dwarf Taluzlo Trek, German pointy hat, wearing moustache, behemoth Otto von Bismarck, mad as coconuts, medieval Spanish corpse hugger Joanna the Mad.

They've all turned heads, they've all turned stomachs from beyond the grave.

But John, who is the hottest hotty of them all for you

to pick one feels like an insult.

Instead, you want to have the kind of history orgy.

But if I had to pick one to settle down with.

You're basically talking about the X-rated version of Bill and Ted's excellence adventure.

That's exactly what I'm talking about.

For me, it's John of the Mad.

She lit my candle.

And also, you do know that after your death, she would carry you around in a coffin for several years.

That's right.

Anyway, I like the idea of that.

Well, for me, John, and I think you can probably guess where I'm going with this.

They say you never truly truly get over your first love.

It's flow isn't it?

It's flow.

It's flow riding.

Well it has to be for me it has to be Florence Nightingale.

So hold on we both picked the people we liked about 11 and a half months ago.

This now starts to seem like a gigantic waste of time.

And in the words of this special tribute poem stroke rap from the world's leading historical lust themed rapper Retrospects and in a duet with English poet laureates Andrew Motion in a tribute to Florence Nightingale, they've written this.

She might be living in a coffin, but I'd still be giving her a buffin.

Huh, I want more from the Crimean floor.

So it's back in time to make her mine.

Nipping back to 1860 to see if that nurse can fix me.

Tend my war wound, cause my head's ballooned.

Light my candle, poke my handle, cause a scandal.

Nazine girl, you put the wind in my sail.

She's tarry, she's a mystery.

She's a hara from history, so I'm gonna go with the flow.

Yeah, uh-oh, whoa, yeah.

Wow.

Do you know what?

What, mate?

This whole year was worth it for that, Andy.

Well, if someone, if someone doesn't remix that,

then I don't know what the world is coming to.

So does this mean, John, that we are now consigning hotties from history to history?

Well,

I think we're going to shut it down, Andy.

We'll find, just like the

audio-cryptic crossword, we'll find something else to waste our times with.

The buglers and we.

I'm just not sure I can let go, John.

I'm saying, keep it on.

Tom, Tom's saying cuties from current affairs.

He has spoiled his ballot paper.

So, I've got the casting vote.

I think I should probably move on for the sake of my marriage.

Bugle sport now, and it's been the Darts World Championships, John.

Both of them.

Two World Championships for Darts.

That's how great a sport it is.

It needs two championships and two champions.

Is it the greatest sport in the world?

No.

But it is good.

I challenge anyone in the known universe or elsewhere to find a better evening out than going childishly mental as a thousand people watch two men throw small pointy objects a small distance at a very small bit of quite a small board.

Absolutely.

We had a great night out at the Lakeside Country Club, didn't we, Andy?

Well, it's just not it's if you feel close to history.

I mean darts of course, is the game that's given the mathematics number such as 180.

45

and no score.

And phrases such as, Eric, you require 141.

123.

Of course, in the early 1990s, John Darts had a schism, eerily similar to when the Anglican church split from the old Catholics in the 16th century because Henry VIII fancied some chick or something.

And Darts split into two championships, the PDC and the BDO, or as they're more commonly known, the good one and the rubbish one.

And in the PDC championships that finished just off New Year, Phil the Power Taylor won his 14th world title.

And John, I think we can now say definitively, scientifically, that no man in the history of humanity has ever been quite as good at throwing small flighted bits of tungsten over a distance of 7 foot 8 and 3 quarter inches.

And for our American listeners, because I know Darts is illegal in America because of the War of Independence, Phil Taylor's coming up, the British equivalents of Joe Montana, Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky, Mary Lou Retton, the gymnast, and Tim Janus rolled into one.

Tim Janus, of course, the world record holder for burrito eating.

He ate 10 and three-quarter 18-ounce burritos in 12 minutes.

Is he still alive?

He's still alive, and he's quite thin.

He's medically incredible.

He's quite thin.

But Phil Taylor's like all of them, not just rolled into one, actually, but put through an industrial mincer, compressed, seasoned, and resculed to form one short, slightly portly, 48-year-old man from Stoke-on-Trent.

And that, John, that's a humbling thought for America.

Well, the other sports story this week, Andy, comes from the NFL.

And I don't think it's any surprise to buglers that, you know, I love what the NFL throws up in terms of stories.

You know, they're the ultimate entertainers.

What Plaxico has done this year has set the standards by which others are judged.

So, step forward, Pac-Man Jones.

Now, Adam Pac-Man Jones, Andy, is a lunatic.

I think he'd be the first to admit that.

He plays or played for the Dallas Cowboys until it was alleged this week that he was accused of arranging a hit on a man that he'd had a brief argument with in a nightclub.

What an absolute idiot.

Who does he think he is?

A 1920s gangster in Chicago.

He's been cut.

This is a man who has been in almost constant trouble his entire career and who had begged to be reinstated by the NFL this year saying I will mend my ways.

He did not mend those ways Andy.

If anything, he tore those ways even worse.

I salute you, Pac-Man Jones.

Just time to tell you to keep your emails flooding in, even if you're not allowed to submit any more hodies from history for everyone's sake, for the sake of the world's psychology.

Thebugle at timesonline.co.uk.

And also, we do have an audio cryptic crossword replacement this week.

We have a brain teaser, especially pre-inauguration brain teaser.

And it's this: if Michael smashes his television with his head every time George W.

Bush is on the news, up to a maximum of six televisions per day, and Michael watches an American 24-hour news channel all day, every day, how many televisions has Michael smashed with his head since Bush became president in 2001?

I can tell you the answer now, but

don't listen to it until you've worked it out.

So press pause on whatever you're listening to and only unpause it when you've worked out the answer.

And the correct answer is 17,490 televisions.

That's assuming he doesn't take days off for Christmas, Yom Kippur, or Ramadan.

But the good news is, John, 80 televisions to go.

The end is in sight.

And then finally, 80 televisions to go.

Finally, it will be worth having that operation to have all the glass removed from his face.

So that's it from the beautiful for this week.

Thanks to everyone at Unique here in London who've been so kind to us while I've been recording here and providing me with my weekly rider, which is a leg of Serrano ham and a sharp knife, a bucket of Bocconcini mozzarella.

Those are my basic bugling snacks, then a golden cape to make me feel more powerful, a tool kit in case John starts battering on about something I've never heard of and I fancy doing some DIY in the meantime, a guard dog, German Shepherd if I'm feeling vulnerable, Labrador for just wants some company, an antique Indian calf mahogany rocking elephant, a selection of spare shirts and ties in case I spill my milkshake, a selection of milkshakes, a wedgewood spittoon and a courtroom caliber polygraph to make sure I don't lapse into truth too often.

They've treated me well.

Thanks very much.

Bye-bye buglers.

Bye-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 us wherever you get your podcasts right now.