The Gargle - Alexa | Toilet snake | Robot pizza chef

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

Tom Neenan and James Colley join host Alice Fraser for episode 19 of The Gargle - the weekly topical comedy podcast from The Bugle. 📱 Get fired via an app🗣 Alexas sue Amazon🐍 Dick-biting toilet snake🎸 Half-naked guitarist arrested🍕 French robot pizza chef🚙 Stupid flying carThis is a show from The Bugle. Follow us on Twitter.This episode was produced by Ped Hunter and Chris Skinner. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's producer Chris from The Bugle here. Did you know that I have a new series of my podcast, Richie Firth Travel Hacker, out now? It's the show where Richie Firth and I talk about how to make travel better in our very special way. In this series, we discuss line bikes, Teslas, the London overground, and a whole bunch of other random stuff that possibly involves wheels

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Acast.com. This is a podcast from The Bugle's Serious News Business audio paper for Visual World. And the fact that I've just called the Bugle Serious News shows how far from reality you can drift in these algorithm-driven, truth-siloed, confirmation-biased times. Your contributing editors this week are Tom Neenan and James Colley. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

So let's have a look at the front page this week. Our front page this week, our cover model is Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston in blue suits at Wimbledon. The headline reads, and also some people played sport. Other headlines include Sha'Carri Richardson, any opinion you have will be a manifestation of American cultural imperialism or racism in some way, maybe both. And Free Britney in every edition.

Yes, the Britney conservatorship is minting NFTs so you too can know what it feels like to treat an artist as your personal property. The satirical cartoon this week is a pile of sexy climate scientists dripping crude oil on themselves with the headline, Things are heating up. And the sub-headline, What if we try this now, does this work? One of them is using both hands to mime eating out a flaming hole in the ocean. And that brings us to the inside of the magazine. Number one section this week is our tech section.

This is our first story is how you can lose your job via an app, a necessary prerequisite to the ultimate state of affairs where your Apple Watch will buzz you when your wife has left you. Tom, have you been following this story? Yes, with great interest, because I think we can all agree that Amazon employees have had it too good for too long. They've got everything. They've got a job that has a lot of physical exercise and a lot of them even have their own bottle to pee in. So to be honest, now they're just now they're just complaining about anything. And what they're complaining about is, like you say, this app, which will let them know when they've been fired. I don't know what it's called, the app, but if I haven't thought of Sack Chat, then I'd be furious. When I was a temp, we didn't have an app like that.

We just had a lady called Julie and she would like spy on you, basically. She would check on you, like time you while you're in the toilet uh and so on my last day i got my own back on julie because rather than saying i was leaving for the day um i said just popping to the loo um so i hope she's still there to this day timing me and waiting for me to come out that's my final revenge um yes it's example of how we're living in a dystopia right now and it's not it looks quite nice outside but yeah this is definitely a dystopia yeah yeah absolutely uh james collie yeah i i remember being a kid and back then the idea that robots were going to do all of our jobs was a good thing i don't understand how we got to this point

where it is so very very bad I do feel this is appropriate payback for all the times I texted in that I was sick because that is a new level of lazy when you can't even be bothered making up the voice for the oh I just feel so crook today call but it's horrifying to me to imagine a robot middle manager like a robot program to be rapidly balding but trying to hide it a robot that can only feel one emotion and it's an inappropriate and unwanted longing for a colleague that is the scariest terminator i can imagine oh all the terminator wanted was hugs that film would have been over a lot quicker judgment day is done in hr yeah speaking of persons and robots

a bunch of Alexas have sued Amazon because of Alexa James Colley, do you know this story? I mean obviously Siri's answering because the only Siri I know is Siri Cruz who's the daughter of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise and she has more serious issues than people asking her for directions to the nearest gas station but how do you feel about this Alexa situation? Well, this actually really hit home for me because... I'm not sure I understand.

Well, sit back and I'll let you know. This really hit home for me because, as you know, my partner and I are expecting our first child in a few months. And I had always wanted to name my firstborn OK Google. it's my grandmother's name I believe it's polish it means she who takes your data but this this story has given us real pause so we've settled on our second choice prime it might not be ethical but we'll get an express delivery which is all you can want uh it's all you want when you're giving birth these days snappy quick and snappy uh let me connect with the infinite chain of motherhood back into eternity, ideally in under 12 hours and with access to medication.

Tom, tell us your thoughts on Alexa. We've seen all this before, obviously, you know, back in the early 2000s with all the kids called Jeeves. And now it's come around again. Obviously, it's tricky. So my advice would be if you um if you're worried about sort of giving your child a name that then becomes you know mematic is that the word uh then i just say name your child after something that's already gone out of fashion uh thinking bibo uh pog or uh you know go the whole hog covid um that way look quibi is safe forever

exactly call your child little quibi it's a little quick bite and uh it's gonna it's gonna have a lovely life i bet you and it'll probably hopefully it'll survive longer than quibi did yeah it'll be a short life but it'll be powerful yeah i can make those jokes. I wrote on a Quibi show for eight seconds. So yes, I've earned the right to make fun of it. And there is a breaking news story in our tech section. And it's a breaking news story, mainly because I think I might have manifested it into the world via the process of writing jokes about it.

And that is Yandex and Grubhub. Yandex is a Russian company and Grubhub is an American company are launching food delivery robots on 250 US college campuses. Essentially, these little drone bots are going to bring your food to you. It's basically a lunchbox strapped to a Roomba driven by Russian military technology. And it's given me an existential crisis. Have either of you boys been following this story at all? I love this story.

I think this is what happens to a washed up Mars rover when it comes back to Earth and it can't get any work. Like it's a celebrity for a month that goes on James Corden and fires a laser into his chest. But soon there's a new flavor of the month. And it's struggling to pay for the jacuzzi it bought when it thought the good times would last forever. I think if these are to exist, they should come with one proviso, which is their fair game. If you can catch them, the food is yours. Which is a rule that I also have with delivery drivers, but it's much more morally questionable. Although I have watched enough American screwball comedies to know how this ends it's the robot starts out studious wanting to do deliveries in the big city excited to go

to college gets picked on by a big fraternity hangs out with the nerds shows up the big fraternity in a series of escapades that go from morally questionable to outright crimes and then parties the night away until tragically its first sip of beer fries all of its circuits if this is indeed what happens to a mars rover when it returns home it is a true manifestation of the american system's inability to deal with its returning veterans and as such i do want to watch that movie i must say it's absolutely delightful though but like as someone who regularly is not proud of their food orders,

I am going to welcome a delivery service that does not come with judgment. As someone who has genuinely once ordered 12 poppadoms and four onion bargees and nothing else. And to see the person handing over the bag, look at me like, you are disgusting. The fact that there will now be no judgment attached to your deliveries, I welcome this. And I salute our new robot overlords.

Tom, can I tell you the worst thing I've ever done in my life? Oh, no. Which was early coming into, I had just moved. I was living alone, bachelor life. I was drinking alone as well because things were going great. And I ordered far too much delivery. And as a joke, wrote in the special instructions in all caps, don't look at me.

And then there's a buzz at the door. And someone is working their way up the stairs with their arm over their eyes holding a bag out. And I felt like garbage. But I was also like well that is very convenient I can't compete with that but I did once I got carried away with myself and a delivery driver um handed over the food and it came to uh 16 pounds I handed over a 20 pound note and said uh k the c and the delivery driver was like what does that mean and I was like I just for some

reason I've made up some slick slang for keep the change. And now whenever I order food, my friends will go, are you going to answer to K the C now? So yeah, once again, I think we're on very, yeah, we're going to get along. This is a very similar approach. Particularly if it's KFC. Yeah.

That's just another layer of confusion. K the C, I'll keep the F. I mean, food deliveries without judgment are a bit of a long call because it's not just the drone delivering your food that can judge you. It's also the number of utensils they leave in the bag when you've ordered what you think is enough for one and they think is enough to feed a family of four chopsticks. Well, that's all the time we have for our tech section today.

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Section 2, animal section. This is the most plumbing story we have. A snake in the plumbing jumped out of the plumbing to bite someone on the plumbing. James Colley, tell us about this classic snake meets dick story. Mm-hm, it's a classic boy meets snake on his privates, yes. Well, this happened to an Austrian man, and as an Australian, it took me about four reads

to accept that this happened to an Austrian man. Does this sound like cultural appropriation to anyone else? That is absolutely our thing. I was also surprised to discover this was a python, and pythons aren't really the bitey type. They're the constricty type, which I imagine would be a much nicer feeling until it's absolutely not, and then the next thing thing you know you're having to come up with an excuse

the vet will believe also this man apparently kept 11 snakes and a gecko in his house or should i say 11 snakes in their breakfast yet couldn't be identified for the media so if you are in this tiny town in austria it's probably the other guy you know with 11 snakes and a gecko. And the other detail I really, really enjoyed in this story was that it was an albino snake. So there is every chance it wasn't so much an attack

as the snake was overjoyed to finally meet another of its kind. Well, this isn't the kind of story you expect to read in the city of Graz in Austria. But this man, the victim of this reptile crime, he sat, the story that, the bit of the story that bothers me is that he sat down on the lavatory shortly after 6 a.m. And to me, there's something wrong with that. Like, at what, has he gone for a walk?

Has he had a coffee? At what time did this man wake up? I mean, it's not the first thing you do in the day. I don't know if it is. Maybe it is. I find this confronting, and not just for the snake bites dick part of the story. Tom?

The detail I found sort of most intriguing was the quote that he said, which was he felt just a pinch in the genital area which i think is showing off it's like oh i barely even barely even i think anyone else would be like this this enormous creature wrapped its fangs around me to him it's it just feels like a pinch so i think i think that's showing off personally also i'm sorry i'm just going to come out and say it this man's neighbor is trying to kill him like his neighbor owns venomous snakes

and they somehow found their way into the plumbing and somehow ended up in this man's toilet i think i think we're going to hear more stories about this this 65 year old from uh from austria and all the attempts on his life by his neighbor i think that same snake is going to turn up in his fridge it's going to turn up in his bath um I'm scared for him, I'll be honest. Clearly this is an attempt on his life and he's just treating it like it's a novelty story. I wish him well. Well sometimes the questions that they ask reveal the answer in the question. The police force made a statement about this attack that the animals in the reptile fan's home generally, quote, live in terrariums and drawers that the man installed

himself, going on to say up to now it is unclear how the snake was able to escape. It's because the man built the bloody terrarium. No one can build a terrarium. No one can spell terrarium, let alone build a hermetically sealed terrarium that your albino python can't crawl out on when

it's a bit nibblish for dick. And also, you're acclimatizing it to underwear if it's staying in drawers all the time it's going to end up in some drawers i really hope that man gets burgled and the burglars get some really unfortunate surprises when they're rifling through his cupboards james i have to applaud you for being the only person in this uh podcast who hasn't lived in England. That was the most lame attempt at British-like naughty pun, Panto style comedy that I've seen. You're a native.

There is another animal section story here. James, you're our correspondent for nude guitaristing. Can you tell us a bit more about this? So this is a story of Australia once again making international headlines as a half-naked guitarist in South Australia was arrested shredding his guitar in his driveway. There's an artist beautifully named Sublet Hammer who went out to his own driveway and played a rhapsody

that his neighbours enjoyed so much they decided to invite the police along to listen to it as well. I at first had a lot of sympathy for Mr Sublet Hammer because I thought, well, we're in lockdown right now and maybe he is in lockdown as well. I can see this being quite a kind thing, going out, playing some music for your neighbours. And then I realised South Australia is not in lockdown as well, I can see this being quite a kind thing, going out, playing some music for your neighbours. And then I realised South Australia is not in lockdown.

This is just a South Australian being South Australian. That said, I have, as Alice, you have as well, performed in South Australia a number of times. And if I could get seven people showing up to my gig, even if they're all police, that's quite a good showing for me. Well, this is an incredible story because uh the headline reads half naked man and you've got to assume uh that they mean topless man but if they mean topless man why don't they say topless man which half is naked yeah the risk of the half naked i i think the worst case scenario is down the middle right

clothed down the middle um but no this i think he was only also from the pictures which i've studied uh uh not too intently he is he's only wearing pants so i'd say that's like he's he's 10 clothed personally i think half is is generous yeah that is that is more than half naked that's that's 90 naked almost entirely naked uh and if you're if you're wearing your guitar at the right angle then it looks like you're naked until you turn sideways I once saw a lady on a bus who I thought was nude hiding behind a big backpack but she was just wearing a boob tube and short shorts but I spent about 25 minutes trying to figure out why there was a nude lady

on the bus and why no one was worried about it i am so envious of this man's like pure confidence and selfishness to some degree because like again like we're in lockdown right now i had considered getting myself a basketball hoop so i could have some fun to play out the back of our place and i was like well that would cost the sanity of everyone else within a two mile radius whereas this guy's like you know what screw it I'm taking the amp onto the driveway and you are going to listen to me whether you like it or not. Well, I sort of, I don't know if this is something that you can relate to because I'm in lockdown at the moment.

I've just been noticing a lot of men sitting alone in their cars and I feel like either I'm under some sort of level of surveillance or there's a lot of men in lockdown who just need a minute in their car. It's a really comfortable seat, got your tunes, got aircon, wonderful place to sit. I wonder if Sublet Hammer will ever upgrade to Freehold Hammer. You have to look at the terms of the original lease to see whether that's even allowed. He actually does need a bond right now too.

Football. That's very funny, James. That's all the time we have for our animal section now because now it's time for our reviews. Both our illustrious co-editors on this episode have brought in something to review. Tom, what have you brought us today? I have brought in running.

Oh, delightful. It's great for getting fit and getting away. And I've experienced it recently. Now, sometimes it's known as jogging or fleeing. And as far as I'm concerned, it can't be beaten in terms of you know going over a distance quickly without any kind of external propulsion there are sort of upsides and downsides obviously uh running uh on a treadmill releases endorphins uh whereas running on the street releases outdorphins anyway um and running in street fighter releases herd orchids all true all true um there are downsides it can be hazardous i was out running

this morning and i was nearly run over uh which is when someone steps out in front of you and says this run is now over and you have to walk home in sweaty shorts um but overall i think it's good um obviously a run as well is something the only thing you can do to both a bath and a company just think about that you can you can liquidate both as well but anyway i i've just tried running you could be nude in both as well that is true and sexually inappropriate as well but you probably last longer in the bath and the company but that that is true that is 100% true I enjoy it I'm going to give it I'm going to give it four stars excellent and James Colley what have you brought us in to review I've brought in the German language being in lockdown I decided to

pick up a new hobby I want to learn a language which is huge for me because it took about 30 years to get any kind of a grasp on English so I've got one week to really work this one out and I thought you know what's an unproblematic culture for a young white man in isolation to delve deeply into and I picked German I've been reading a book about the history of Germany and I'm only about halfway through but I've got to tell you they're going from strength to strength this thing is really picking up and so far I only know the only parts of language i understand is i know how to book a hotel which i can't because i can't leave the country and book into a restaurant which i can't because i can't leave the house but there are bits

of it that i love i love that to say the time you say a number and then oh ah because it sounds like you're cheering on each hour ah and i love that the word for bill at a restaurant literally translates to the reckoning because that's how it feels to me. Can I please have the reckoning for what I have just done to your fine establishment? So I would say German, four stars, so far, so good. Dankeschön.

What does that mean? That's all the time we have for our review section because now it's time for our food section. This food section is the triumph of a robot chef. The new Disney movie that's going to come out within the next four or five years. This is a French robot pizza chef who can turn out 80 pizzas an hour uh tom neenan you've

said you've ordered too much takeaway tell us about this story yes uh as you pointed out obviously most of the work isn't done actually by the robot but the the tiny rat that lives underneath the robot's hat uh this big french um but no it's it's it's exciting exciting. I'd be very surprised. From what I understand, it's a piece of technology that was created by the evil Dr. Oetker, him of the frozen pizza fame. And I think they'll be missing a trick if the tagline for their robot pizzas isn't uh just like motherboard used to make um i'm doing the uh i'm doing the sort of italian chef uh fingers there but um but yeah no it's a great story um it resonates for me because obviously french pizza robots was the name of my scar band um and uh it was a very exciting story until i found out just now that it's been sacked by the Amazon app. So sad.

Yeah. So sad. But I mean, this is a really interesting story because, again, it's an intersection of cultures that you don't normally expect to work together. You know, you'd sort of expect a food production robot to be somewhere high tech like, I don't know, Japan. It's the kind of thing that that would happen there. But in France, it's happening. And you'd imagine that the culinary culture of France with its high art cuisine would be outraged by the introduction of a robot chef. But this is a robot pizza chef, and no one gives a f*** about cheap pizza. So, I mean, this is the thing. Nobody is really wanting the human touch on their cheap pizza. You know, if you're an establishment that makes 80 pizzas an hour,

the last thing you want is the kind of person who would make 80 pizzas an hour touching your pizza. I have a friend who used to work in a Domino's pizza place, and he would go surfing, and he told me a story once that he'd been surfing in the morning, and he'd gone into work at Domino's, and he was stirring the dough the dough and he leaned over the dough and a bunch of salt water came out of his nose and he just kept stirring the dough but slightly less salt so i feel like that is the kind of incident that a pizza robot would prevent james i think he nailed him one i i do love that this is a french robot that makes pizzas because that feels like a diss, doesn't it? You know, like our cuisine requires the greatest chefs and years of training.

Your cuisine will build a Furby with a spatula attachment. A robot pizza chef cranking out 80 pizzas an hour is a game changer, specifically for me, because it used to be when I was prank calling pizza places with a massive fake order you could only do one a night now every other hour mr ip freely is having a get together and needs 80 pizzas and a small diet coke the part of this i hate is that i think firstly i think the name pazzy p-a-z-z-i is an absolute waste particularly as my favorite mathematics fact is that a pizza of depth a and radius z has a volume equal to pi zza and why would you not use something like that in the robot world and also this doesn't solve the central problem with pizzas what we need is a robot that can see 80 people and get one order no jerry you can't go half and half be decisive for once in your life

this is why margaret left you i always thought the central problem with pizza was the middle bit's a bit squishy. Does it still deliver the tiny mouse tables that come in takeaway pizzas as well? Otherwise, there's no point. Is there a robot that can make garlic bread? Because I'm going to need both. This is the thing. I feel like pizza is one of these interesting cuisines where like the best pizzas are made with like this great intensity and labor of love and the worst pizzas are something that you would wish on your worst enemy the worst pizza

I think I've ever had there was at my university there was one there was a pizza place in the halls of residence and it was it was the worst pizza any of us had ever eaten, and yet there was nowhere else to go. So over the course of about two years, our standards gently lowered to the point where I think we would have eaten your friend's nose salt pizza after that and thought it was the finest piece of food we've ever eaten in our lives. Don't worry, we're not friends anymore.

We're now enemies. Because that was your pizza, right? That's all the time we have for our food section. Now we have a brief pull-out section. Celebrities with massive age gaps that will surprise you. Is Harry Styles' rumoured fling with long-dead Egyptian lady pharaoh Hatshepsut

an expression of his impeccable feminism? Or as problematic as the age gap in Twilight. And you've got within you atoms from the Big Bang. How does it feel to be f***ing the universe even when you're not thinking about sex at all? And that's all the time we have for our pull-out section because now it's time for our auto section, Flying Cars News.

James Colley, what is happening with this story? Oh, I hate this story, Alice, if I'm honest. This is the one I really do not enjoy. Look, they are purporting to have a flying car. This is Honda. They say it will be out there by 2030. It's done its first test flight. Now, this thing is only good for a plot device in a Fast and the Furious film. And we need to stop with this madness.

We have flying cars. They're called planes. This is not a flying car. It's an ugly plane. This looks like a forbidden romance happened in the back of a hangar. I don't understand what this fixes. People imagine that a flying car will be the trick to beating traffic. But you forget that other people have flying cars too.

You're not beating the traffic, you're making it three-dimensional. I hate this car, I want to ground this car. Well, I mean, you know how bad road rage gets. Can you imagine air rage? I just feel like adding an extra dimension to road rage would only worsen matters. Just being dive-bombed by f***heads who think you're in their way. You think the rivalry between bikes and cars is bad wait till you get witches and air cars tom have you been following this story i have my my only concern is that does that mean that you

that you have to clap every time it lands um because doing that on your own will be a very sad uh very sad activity indeed yeah no I mean I suppose we sort of have been prepped for this I don't know if you've ever ordered an uber and then the app has sort of updated and it's sort of for a moment the car sort of drifts the little icon car that you get sort of drifts over the map and appears to kind of just fly across various buildings. I think that was sort of subconsciously then prepping us for this. Although, you know, the great thing about an Uber is that you can sort of just say, you know, if you're not enjoying the ride, just say, oh, I'll just hop out here. Whereas that will be compromised when you are, you know, a thousand feet in the air. Yeah. I just feel like this is a sign that we shouldn't be doing this.

I think the moment someone's trying to invent a flying car is the moment that you go, OK, let's just start again. That's all the time we have for our stories today. We're coming up to the ads section at the back of the magazine, languidly leaning teens advertising things that you can't quite identify. Is it the handbag or the perfume? It just smells like paper to me. Stop smelling the magazine. James, have you got anything to plug?

If you are in Australia, I would say please keep an eye on the ABC on Wednesdays at 8.30. We have something coming up in a few weeks that is about to be announced. It'll be very fun. If you're not in Australia, it's geo-blocked, so please do not listen to the last couple of sentences. Otherwise, as I always like to put on this, a quantum of science on Instagram

is where I collect all of my favourite, very, very silly science headlines, and I only ever plug it on here. So if you're following it, you are amongst friends. Tom Neenan, have you got anything to plug? I just put all of my nonsense thoughts onto Twitter amongst friends. Tom Neenan, have you got anything to plug? I just put all of my nonsense thoughts onto Twitter, on at T Neenan, and if I have anything else to plug subsequently, I will no doubt put it there,

because I, like everyone else, can't drag myself away from Twitter. Yes, I also have Twitter, and this is the thing about Twitter, even if you don't use Twitter, you just have an account but you don't really use it, it is worth following your favourite acts and supporting them because, unfortunately, people do get hired on the basis of that kind of arbitrary number. So go out there and follow and support everybody. I'm at alliterative on Twitter and Instagram. That's A-L-I-T-E-R-A-T-I-V-E.

Or follow me on Patreon.com slash Alice Fraser, one-stop shop for all of my stand-up specials, podcasts and blogs, as well as my weekly Tea with Alice salons, to which you are invited. The editor of this podcast is Ped Hunter. The executive producer is Chris Skinner. This is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. I'll talk to you next week.

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