The Gargle - Amazon | Pistachios | Fish

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

Nato Green and Matt Kirshen join host Alice Fraser for episode 17 of The Gargle - the weekly topical comedy podcast from The Bugle. What a show we have this week...📦 Amazon destruction zone�� Illegal pistachio operation🥚 Smooth balls🌱 Meat-substitute wars🇨🇳 China pulls bitcoin plug🐠 Deep fish🕸 Australian spider websThis 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

or tracks or engines of some variety. God, what a hot sell this is. I mean, you must be so excited. Listen now. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Every sport has their big, juicy controversy. Boxing has the Mike Tyson ear bite.

Cycling has Lance Armstrong. Baseball has its steroid era. Curling has... Broomgate. It's a story of broken relationships, houses divided, corporate rivalry, and a performance-enhancing broom. It was a year I'd like to forget. Broomgate, available now. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere.

Acast.com. This is a podcast from The Bugle. Welcome to The Gargle, the last bastion of lies in a world full of truth or vice versa. You decide. Don't let me tell you what to think. Just express your opinion. I'll tell you afterwards if I hate you for it or not. Sure, in previous episodes we've gone for classical and modern references, partly for fun and partly as a way of forcing me, your host alice fraser to expand my woeful pop culture knowledge but today i felt like metatextual self-reference and call it narcissism if you like it's my f***ing show

which is to say as the bugle is to newspapers the gargle is to the glossy magazine you get in newspapers sometimes no politics said in universe, welcome this week's guest editors. Glamorous and suspiciously funny in that he's an intimidatingly good jokesmith and I refuse to believe he hasn't sold something to someone for that level of skill, it's Matt Kirshen. Welcome to the show. Hey! How are you? I'm good. I actually have, um, I sold an old printer to a friend once. So, you know, I'm no stranger to retail. And a man who makes it his business to get angry and then also, in a surprise twist, actually literally get stuff done about it, Nato Green. Welcome.

Hey, buddy. How are you? I'm good. I'm excited to get cracking into this week's magazine. Let's have a look at the front cover. Front page this week is Britney Spears posing provocatively, covered only by the insane possessive greed of her deadbeat dependent dad. The headline reads, Other headlines on the front cover include, Bitcoin shanghaied by China crackackdown Who could have seen this coming? Anyone who noticed that an ostensibly decentralised currency

was being mined predominantly in a nation state not known for its embrace of anti-authoritarian thinking and, quote, our secret battle for his love, end quote. Bill and Melinda Gates agree to share custody of Warren Buffett. The satirical cartoon this week is a whiteboard in 10 Downing Street with a crude sketch of an array of frozen sausages littering the ground in a 66-acre floodlit 24-hour truck park in Kent. Now let's get into the magazine.

This week, Destruction Zone is our topic number one. This is a story from Amazon. Nato, you're in the land of Amazon, which is to say America, not the other one. What is this story? We burned it down. We burned down the other one. The actual Amazon was destroyed,

and so now we only have the idea of Amazon to represent destruction. Yeah, so Amazon has been, there was an investigative report out of England or the UK or whatever the f*** you call it, that Amazon was destroying 130,000 packages a week

and environmentalists are concerned that it's incredibly wasteful and bad for the climate. And they say that Amazon shipping packages create a lot of waste from all the discarded cardboard, but not if they destroy the packages before they get shipped. Uh-huh.

Checkmate, Enviro's. I love this story so much because it's almost like a threat that you need to buy these things. You know, buy it or the package gets it. Yeah. We would rather destroy a macbook than give it to a charity we would rather burn it this is one of those stories though that's like i

don't like to be that kind of well duh what did you think they were doing kind of guy but like it's like when a t-shirt costs three dollars like something bad is happening like there's no amazon you can like all other online stores if If you buy something, they're like, yeah, we think we can probably get it to you by Friday if we really rush this thing. And Amazon is like, we're already outside your house. Where do you want it? Like like some that there can only be a bad reason for why that's how it's not that they're just better at driving than the other companies. We're really we're really clever at driving. Things are only this cheap because you need the money for like conscience salve which is quite expensive the products they

weren't getting incinerated they're being sent to a landfill which means the steepest prime day discounts are at the dump if you know where to look for them uh when i was a kid my dad would say like like my dad was one of those people who get excited about a deal and he'd be like oh that's such a deal with that kind of savings i could buy one and throw it away and so they did i just i always find like these like these landfills full of unused consumer items what will historians in the future think? Assuming that, you know, society will degrade and we'll have to rebuild ourselves from the rubble. When they dig that, what are they going to think?

It's some sort of horrifying burial mound or what? Is that what the pyramids were? Just unused pyramids that people didn't buy for home use? Yeah, that was the issue. The problem is it's like it's really expensive storage the pyramids like the warehousing cost is really high because firstly construction the pyramids and secondly you know the pyramids are a big tourist destination but that pushes the price up so now you're like oh okay we've only got so much pyramid and so few you know so many

sarcophagi so they just dump it in the desert yeah eventually they just have to go right like the unused atari et game exactly this raises a question for me and i'm sorry for a stupid tangent what do you think they called pyramid schemes in ancient egypt you think they were like ah that they're doing that. Whatever that. Graveyard schemes. Grave deals. Your ad section now, because what other metric do we have for knowing that we're better than animals, except that gorillas don't buy designer pants? Have you noticed people talking about how tough Australian men are?

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more with our 63 part podcast series all of history as professor history and guest host joanne rogan walk you through all the other theories and narrative logics that historians use to frame reframe and understand the impossibly complex reality of the past swoon to marxist theory gasp at feminist history, applaud wildly at the great man theory of historical events. Alexander the Great conquered the world. What? How can you even begin to sum up the vast range of interlocking structures that allowed for a single individual to be credited with that outcome? Find out in All of History, available soon online. a-cast powers the world's best podcasts here's a show that we recommend every sport has their big juicy controversy boxing has the mike Mike Tyson ear bite. Cycling has Lance Armstrong. Baseball has its steroid era.

Curling has... Broomgate. It's a story of broken relationships, houses divided, corporate rivalry, and a performance-enhancing broom. It was a year I'd like to forget. Broomgate. Available now. get. Broomgate, available now. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. Now it's time for section two, food stories. We have two main stories in food this week. Matt Kirshen, have you been following the latest nutcracking news

about these missing pistachios? I sure have, Alice. This is quite the story, because it turns out this big pistachio company called Touchstone, by the way, which I don't know whether they are directly related to Touchstone Pictures. I hope they are. Like, Touchstone Pictures. I hope they are. Like Touchstone Pictures apparently no longer exists. They stopped in 2018 and I guess they moved into the pistachio world.

And it turns out one of their truck drivers has just been taking massive bags of pistachios and reselling them. I just respect a physical heist in these days of like high tech hostage. Yeah, there's people who can just siphon pistachios away that like that takes something very pleasing about that and it's not an easy heist because i know they're light i know pistachios are lighter than gold but they crinkle there's a noise trail i know we shouldn't be condoning theft on this show but there is a certain sort of robin hoods one for the little guy kind of this is kind of one in the eye for Big Nut. Yeah, it feels like the kind of story in which the comments section will be mainly made of puns

rather than people trying to kill each other. You know what I mean? Nato, have you been following this pistachio news? I sure have. Speaking of busted nuts, I've officially reached the level of fame that I was given the opportunity to become a brand ambassador for Smooth My Balls. So that's a big personal triumph for me. level of fame that i was given the opportunity to become a brand ambassador for smooth my balls so

that's a big personal triumph for me uh i have been following the story it happened you've just you've just glossed over that we i've got to have closure on this story did you or did you not accept the deal uh i did not accept the deal uh because they they said that uh like, I looked at the materials and it was like, they said that you could make your balls smooth as an egg. Oh, no. Which sounds like not a safe medical condition. Were there other restrictions as well that if you went with them, you couldn't even mention other ball smoothing products on the air.

I just feel like the only logical way to smooth out a set of balls would be to inflate them. Which is exactly what the company is. It's just a pump and a needle. There are all kinds of shaving, hair grooming products uh to contain the hair so i was just fascinated that they had whatever i was doing that they feel like the central textural problem of the testicle is not the hair yeah that they that they had profiled me as as as a likely candidate in need of uh in need of ball smoothing. Just be there, like, I mean, I like my balls,

but they're just so textured. Yeah. If there's only something I could do. Sandpapering my way through my underpants like an Australian cricket player trying to get away with something. That's heartbreaking. I mean, a cricket player could actually use them

to rig the balls. Rig the cricket. Come on! Can you smooth one side of the balls and rough up the other so that you get more bend in the air? Laws of conservation of ball texture.

You have to have a constant. Your average ball smoothness has to remain the same. I want to maintain the same texture, but I just want to redistribute it. It's just some horrible curse, like you smooth your balls and then just all other balls in the world

just become a tiny bit rougher. So the pistachio heist in Tular County, California, the thief was apprehended and his name was Alberto Montemayor. And Montemayor is Spanish for the bigger mountain. And he stole a literal Montemayor of pistachios. And I love the idea that he's like he's that guy and that's what he does. My name is Montemayor and I do one

thing. I do things that are Montemayor. If it's Montemayor, I will do it. The biggest mountain in California is near my house. It's Mount Whitney. I can walk up it. I have big poops. I eat super nachos by myself. I do Montemayor things. It's not just the bilingual pun that I enjoy about this, Nato Green, so much as the upraised index finger of an old Jewish man in a cafe telling a great joke.

Have I complained to you about the structural anti-Semitism of Zoom, that there's not a separate screen for my hands? He stole 42,000 pounds of pistachios and so this was the trucking company for the touchstone pistachio company or whatever they're called and they found it in another lot near the montemayor trucking company and so there but the story made it seem like it was like sherlock do you know what i mean like the crack investigative team from the sheriff's department went to montemayor trucking and we searched high and low for a truck with 42 000 pounds of pistachios and we walked around the block and there was on the other side of the building we marked we marked 42 000 pounds of pistachios with a fluorescent dye yeah well i feel like this kind of story when it's when you get away with that

much of a heist 42 000 pounds of pistachios it's a lot like when they find you know an undiscovered civilization or something and the story is not that we found this thing it's that we spent a long time missing this thing like when they found that new bit of the human knee like three years ago, and you're like, how did we miss a bit of the knee? I'm going to say that Mr. Montemayor maybe got a little bit carried away with his activities at one point. And by a certain point, it wasn't even about the money. It was just the love of the game.

Right, because everyone knows that if you really want to get away with stealing 42 000 pounds of pistachios you don't do it all in one go like 42 000 pounds of pistachios is 21 tons or to put it in terms that alice will understand as australian about 190 chris hemsworth stacked on top of each other so like all of the hemsworth he's just trying to play it off with a truck manifest just like no no this was, it says 42 pistachios. That's what they sent me with. And they are here. Count them, every single one of them.

The classic problem is the choice of material to steal because you can never get away with just one pistachio. Pistachios are so Moorish. You think you're just going to have a small handful, as you've been told to by your health advisor, and in the end you've eaten 42,000 pounds. That was their problem. They were just as impossible to stop stealing them

as it is to stop eating them. Our next story has been sent in to us by at Captain Raggy on Twitter. This is an Australia story. It's close to my home. We're about to launch an inquiry about whether we're allowed to call fake meat meat-like things. Matt Kirshen, I know you don't eat meat.

Can you tell us more about this story? I don't eat meat. I do sometimes eat fake meat products. I do, however, think that the fake meat industry has gone too far. The fake meat scientists got carried away. They nailed it a few years ago. They kept going.

Now it's weird. There are competing brands of fake meat burger that are like, this is so realistic, it bleeds. And that's not what I was missing. That's not the one thing I yearn for from my meat-eating days. The blood, the horrible, the mouthfeel of blood just the slaughterhouse in my face kind of like try these real sex dolls they cry they get incredibly upset before during and after they were programmed by fake meat scientists to be horrifyingly real however however having said that i do eat fake meat sausages and fake meat burgers, and at no point do I ever confuse them for the real thing, which was the claim made by this Queensland politician, Queensland Senator Susan McDonald.

And I'm going to warn you in advance that I have gone down quite the deep dive on Susan McDonald. I got quite carried away with this story. with this story well then we'll uh we'll get to that in just one second because the thing that i think is about uh fake meat burgers and fake meat sausages is uh no one's going to mistake real meat sausages for the real thing either the vast majority of meat sausages bear very little resemblance to actual meat but tell us more about your deep dive matt kershen susan mcdonald like she she's she's proposed this law and and, and it's basically a law that says anything that calls itself a sausage has to be made of meat. She's defined a sausage as one pig and one intestine, and the union thereof. And anyone who says anything else is ungodly and going against the the will of the

lord wait till someone tells her about soy milk well the way she phrased it did make me wonder about her other voting hit past and it was exactly what you might think it was she has a very very similar attitude to all things she also voted against covid funding for the arts so her as an arts person and also against gay rights and trans rights and all all the sort of rights it's like it's meat sausage is a meat it's a cow or a pig and some shoes and knives and whatever else gravel and whatever else you can find stuffed in a pretend intestine and that is what sausage has to be and these fake meat products are undermining the meat industry and it's and it's all gonna okay firstly i will say i support

i support the fake meat products i support the undermining of the meat industry as a non-meat eater i think the better they do the the better it is for the world like good for them this is this is one in the eye for big beef. But also, I looked her up. I found an article on the real website, beefcentral.com. Which is a real, real website. And it turns out she's a butcher magnate. She comes from a family that owns this huge chain of butchers that own other chains of butchers she sold out just as she became a senator she's meat royalty this law isn't about you know

protecting the little meat guy or about you know some kind of like moral crusade this is looking after her own this is like no if you want a sausage've got to buy it from me and my meat friends. Neda Green, you do eat meat. What's your perspective on this? When I was in college, I took some anthropology classes and I read an anthropology of meat and how all of our ideas about edibility and nutrition are completely culturally and socially constructed. and nutrition are completely culturally and socially constructed and so like there's not an inherent reason why cows should be more edible than horses or dogs that's just like how we and so it was this whole like elaborate thing about how all of our ideas about meat are just like like have to you know and what isn't it is more or less edible are all metaphors for how we understand ourselves and our own power

structure and our own mortality. And that we use these things to create a sense of personality and distance and that kind of stuff. But the reason that it's all nonsense, that it's all made up from start to finish is like, even meat itself is not real. Do you know what I mean? Like, if you've ever spent time in an emergency room, they're like, oh no, someone just came in, they got shot in the filet mignon. You know what I mean? Like, it's all rubbish.

So I love the idea that there are people, that they're worried that people in Australia might accidentally eat a plant-based meat and then become a vegetarian. Yeah, or just be deceived, just be tricked. My favorite phrase in all of this discussion is being used by both sides about the relative confusion about the uses of this product.

I think there's such a limited number of uses for this product that if they're worried about this, I think we have different issues in our society. They don't want veggie burgers to be called burgers, but they will still call another thing another thing. That's a joke technique that Matt will recognize that in America we call that kidlering. When you have a joke structure, but you can't be bothered to actually think it through that's all the time we have for our food

section because now it's time for our reviews section regularly we ask our guests to bring in something to review and review it out of five stars uh matt kershen what have you brought in to review so i've brought in a squeezy bottle of saline solution that clears your sinuses. And here's why it interests me. You're both writers and also NATO. I've just found out you're also an anthropologist. You'll know that the grand history of stories and storytelling is the sting in the tail. Be careful what you wish for.

No pain, no gain. Every positive has a hidden negative. This product, it works. You squeeze some saline up your nose through the squeezy bottle and it clears out your sinuses and you can breathe slightly more easily. But at the expense of making you feel like you jumped into a swimming pool without holding your nose. So huge benefit, but also at what cost at what massive cost so a solid three and a half stars three and a half stars and nato green what have you brought us in to review well to tie in with our earlier story i'm going to review pistachios uh pistachios. Pistachios. One star.

Pistachios are a bad nut. Wow. Obviously, in the objective all-time universal rankings of nuts, they are in order as follows. Almonds, pecans, walnuts, macadamia, peanuts, hazelnuts, then pistachios. Interestingly, peanut is a kind of a banana. Banana. than pistachios. Interestingly, peanut is a kind of a banana.

Thanks for nothing, Frasier. Shelling pistachios is painful and frustrating but not fun like peanuts, which are fun to shell. The resulting nut tastes like wood with a rancid spray on it. Pistachio ice cream are bad. They're not versatile as a nut. i have many cookbooks

and cooking magazines and because i'm this person i have a cookie cookbook database site to organize my recipes uh and i have 8 390 recipes in my on my shelf and i looked it up today just for sake of comparison. I have 470 almond recipes, 264 walnut recipes, 245 peanut recipes, 107 pecan recipes, and only 84 pistachio recipes. They don't do shit. Pistachios are the muscles of nuts. But instead of a beard like muscles have that you have to to peel off you have to cut your finger by getting out of the getting them out of their stupid shells pistachios one star one star one hang on do you mean mussels a body part or mussels the seafood mussels the seafood okay cool just checking yeah matt kershen thought you were trying to take advantage of your sponsorship

that's all the time we have for our review section now because now it's time for our money section. This week, Bitcoin has continued to plunge from the heights of whatever it was being worth a certain amount of imaginary money and now it's not worth as much imaginary money because a lot of Chinese regulators have cracked down on Bitcoin mining in China.

Nato Green, you love money. I have to confess, I was trying to follow this story. And at any given time, I'm at a high risk of feeling like an out-of-touch grumpy old man. And I'm always afraid of being the old white guy comedian who has a dated joke and then is Googling references to update my reference. You know what I mean? Like there are these old like old guy comedians who are like, I had a joke about Britney Spears. Billie Eilish.

What's up, kids? I'm relevant or whatever. And I don't want to be that guy. Remember when Billie Eilish shaved her head? Yeah. I know because my children told me. Bitcoin makes me feel stupid. Actually, today, like to prepare for the show, I talked to some friends of mine who were in their 20s and it was

like, explain Bitcoin to me. And they spent an hour talking me through it. And I was like, I feel like I'm watching a mass psychosis. Am I getting this right? That there are energy intensive, bad for the planet server farms in China that are called mines where computers make up digital currency that can't be used for anything. But people want to be able to speculate on it. And they were like, exactly. So it's like having money to buy extra greaves for a suit of armor in a game of D&D. But the money also causes climate change. And they're like, yes, now you understand.

Yes, but importantly, Nato, you can't tax it. So it is imaginary money that you can't really spend on anything except things on the dark web like assassinations and drugs and NFTs. But you can also not be taxed on it. So that's the pro pro you can buy some regular things like um meltdown comics in la used to take bitcoin but then they they no longer exist uh but now there's uh like an apartment building that's being built where that used to exist but you could now buy an assassin with bitcoin to stop that building project and put the comic store back in.

So, you know, there are things you can do with Bitcoin. I vaguely understand bits of it. And I do have some issue with the idea of going like, oh, it's made up money because all money is fundamentally made up. And like all money, like money, you can't point at $10 any more than you can point at a bitcoin you can point like at a ten dollar bill which represents the concept of ten dollars but that's not ten dollars as a thing and you can point to a young man wearing wraparound shades and black that he doesn't need to and whether that's too warm for it and say that man represents ten thousand bitcoins exactly but having said that bitcoin has been explained to me by people who are big fans of it

and i don't see how it's sustainable the reason why it needs these massive server farms is it has a built-in scarcity to make it more expensive where the way it works is to generate new bitcoin you have to solve a complicated mathematical problem and whichever computer gets there first wins the new bitcoin and the way it was designed was that this the mathematics gets more complicated the more bitcoins generated so at the beginning it was very quick and easy and you could mine these bitcoin with just like a home computer and now it takes these massive server farms in china that use i think is it collectively the power consumption of Argentina is used worldwide to generate Bitcoin

and on top of that you can't buy graphics cards anymore apparently if you're a gamer you can't get graphics cards because every graphics card is being used to generate Bitcoin because that's the type of computing that it works best with and it's just gonna hit a limit like it's gonna hit a cap

it was designed to have a built in scarcity scarcity and a built-in like more difficulties goes along but i still just don't see how it's not a pyramid scheme i don't see how this thing can grow continually it has to reach a point where it stops like it has to reach a point where the power consumption and the cost of these computers outweighs any value of the Bitcoin. What we need to do is encourage the Bitcoin type of person to fully indulge in their anarcho-seasteading antisocial tendencies. And then once all of the Bitcoin in the world have been mined, we just push them out into the ocean and they can look after themselves and each other.

Right. And this lovely planet with as much Molly and hit men as you ever need. So the story is that the Bitcoin is in crisis this week and the value of Bitcoin plunge because Chinese regulators are limiting the power supply to the server farms, which they call the mines and have put the miners out of work and this is something hilarious to me that they keep calling the miners do you know like like it's that i imagine someone in west virginia with the black lung being like are you shitting me all you do is plug in an ethernet cable twice a day like what is what what are the

hazards you're facing there's this one guy just leaning back on a gaming chair now just going like i have no other skills what am i gonna do get an oxy habit you're just spreading the risk instead of one instead of one person getting a uh the black lung the whole world gets the black lung it's exactly that i know some of it is generated by that hydroelectric power, but a lot of it isn't. So weirdly, there is mining that has to happen so that mining can happen. There is still somewhere, probably,

a bunch of coal miners who are getting black lung underground so that that one guy can plug an Ethernet cable to maybe win the Bitcoin auction. I just want to say that if there are regular Gargle listeners who are bitcoin enthusiasts and feel like we're getting it wrong please don't communicate with me in any way at all that's all right now don't they communicate with me directly is there anywhere on the internet or like any podcast where we could find out about bitcoin or have people tell us about it now it's time for our animal section uh this is my favorite news of the week scientists have found

an area of the ocean that contains up to 95 percent of all fish in the world that have hitherto been basically invisible to us uh this this fish biomass has been lurking down in the deeps. Nato Green, do you follow this story? I did follow this story. I was trying to figure out what the stat meant, because the stat was that 95% of the fish biomass in the sea are these deeper fish, and that these fish are good at evading nets, and so they're not getting fished by fisher people. They're in what's called the mesopelagic layer, which I say because I just found out what it was called. Is the story telling us that we ate all the other fish already,

and that this is what's left? Entirely possibly. Or that this was just a lot of fish in the deep sea that we didn't know about, and they're still there. Yeah, I was a bit puzzled by the story as well, because the story does seem to be just a bit kind of, hey, we just discovered that there are a lot more fish in the bit of the water that we don't keep taking fish out of. There's a lot of fish left to eat, is the way that I read the story. There's a lot of fish left to eat is the way that I read the story. Well, these fish are extremely good at avoiding nets, partly because they have large eyes and can see in dim light.

And they also have enhanced pressure sensitivity. They go up in the nighttime to feed up to the higher levels and then down deep into the ocean. So they're just incredibly good at avoiding us. And there's so many of them. I'm not sure if we're going to try and eat them or if they're going to try and eat us did you know there's way more grass on the bits of the planet that we don't mow i also really like learning about the layers of the ocean so this is this is how i understood i understood the layers of the ocean is that there's the epipelagic which is the skin of the ocean the mesopelagic which is where we're talking about the 100 to 1,000 meters deep, which is the middle layer, the bathypelagic, which is deeper and refers to the layer where if you stay too long, your fingers get all pruney. And then the abyssal pelagic, where there's Ed Harris from 1989's movie The Abyss by James Cameron, and the hadel Pelagic, which is literally Hades.

And you can't get there without putting a coin in your mouth. Yep, that's that's our sea scientist, NATO Green. They're reporting on the different layers of the ocean. The other exciting news that's come out of our animal section this week is spider news, that's come out of our animal section this week is spider news, which is just basically a viral image that's gone around the internet of a web of webs covering a large proportion of the ground in Australia. I don't find this exciting or newsworthy at all. This is what happens sometimes in October.

You get a spider plague. So I don't know why people are bothered. Can either of you tell me why this is news of any kind? I can tell you why this is news of any kind? I can tell you why this is news for me, Alice. And that's because looking at the pictures, this is one of those occasional times I have in my life where I see something and then realise, like, oh, that's why people draw stuff like that in cartoons.

Like the first time I knocked my head and actually saw kind of like stars. And I was like, oh, you really do see stars like in a cartoon when you knock your head. And these spider's webs... And then you realized that the cartoon was like actual real life. Yeah, and I'm like, wow.

I'm wondering whether I'll also get a lump that comes out of my head that I have to push back in with my finger. But these spider's webs, they look like Halloween decorations. And i didn't know spiders did that like i thought that was just you know that sort of sheet of spider web that you get from the halloween store which is a thing that i only seems i've only seen in america in britain it would just be like a general store that has a little halloween section but in america there are halloween stores that open for about a month and a half and they run up and it's just like we just little halloween section but in america there are halloween stores that open for about a

month and a half and they run up and it's just like we just do halloween now and in australia we just place flies strategically around the room and let the spiders do them just just leave some sugar out and just like then the flies will come then the spiders will come then hopefully if you time it right that's october 31st eventually the old lady will come so yeah the spiders kill the old person then that person haunts the room it's all a system but this looks like the sheet of a sheet of web that you actually just buy from the store that looks like a cotton wool sheet and but it's real and it's just covering the crops and spiders did that well i mean this is a thing that happens often uh when there's a flood that moves spiders onto higher ground. They'll gang together in this way because spiders aren't hugely communal creatures, despite all of your worst nightmares.

Nato, do you have anything to say about this story? So this is where I learned with this type of spiders. So as you say, they flood and then they do this process called the ballooning. And I want to read the quote from the scientist describing the ballooning process. This is what the scientist said. What the spiders were doing was, quote, ascending to a high point on foliage and letting out fine silk lines that catch the breeze and eventually gain enough lift to waft the spider up and away, end quote. end quote that sounds like a scientific description of spiders and also the tear-stained journal entry of a 16 year old girl sad that the captain of the lacrosse team didn't ask her to prom i might as well just waft away

it's called ballooning all i can think of when i hear that is spiders having a gentleman's wager. Like it felt like they met in their club in London. And for the price of a bottle of brandy, they're racing across Australia, leaving this Halloween-y scene in their wake. I think it shouldn't be called ballooning. It should be called the spider rapture. That brings us to the end of today's magazine. We can flip through the ads at the end.

There's an ad here for netball. The most played sport in Australia, actually, is netball. It's meant to be originally a ladylike sport designed to stop women from running or jumping, but now is an insanely fast, extremely dangerous and high-impact sport where huge Amazonian women go from full sprint to total stop in one step. There's also a warning here in the classified section.

There's a poetry class. It's being advertised on a number of polls around town and it's just a trap for middle-aged women to steal your museum scarves, the scarves that you've bought at the museum. So if you do want to go to this poetry class, please double knot your museum scarf. Matt Kirshen, have you got anything to plug in the ad section here? I guess I have. I'm Matt Kirshen on the various

social media. I think there's an underscore in the Instagram version that I don't use very much. And then my podcast is called Probably Science where we go through the week in science news with guest comedians including Alice and hopefully Nato at some point. I'm just asking you to do a podcast in the middle of another podcast. That's how podcasts

work. Sounds good. It's like Bitcoin. You can only buy an appearance on a podcast with an appearance on another podcast i'll meet you at an imaginary mine in china matt i mean the thing that you absolutely can buy with bitcoin is bitcoin and also if any of you are anywhere around colorado i'm about to do my first road gigs since lockdown i'm gonna be at fort collins at the comedy fort and then i'm also to be at Fort Collins at the Comedy Fort, and then I'm also going to be in Boulder at the Boulder Comedy Club. So if you are anywhere near Fort Collins

or Boulder, or know anyone who is, please send them my way. I don't want to do my first gig after lockdown to no people. So, please come by. I'm at Nato Green on Twitter, MrNatoGreen on Instagram. I have a couple comedy albums out that you can check out. The best place to acquire them in terms of financial support out green on instagram i have a couple comedy albums out that you can check out uh the best

place to acquire them in terms of uh financial support for the artist is by buying them on bandcamp so please do that i'm alice frazer this is the gargle the editor for this week is ped hunter the executive producer is chris skinner the gargle is a bugle podcast and alice frazer production if you have stories to send in this week we've had stories sent in by Archibald Primrose and Stefan Chilcott. Of course, send in your stories to at HelloGogglers on Twitter. I'm on Twitter at at alliterative, A-L-I-T-E-R-A-T-I-V-E

and also on Instagram. Or you can sign up at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser for a one-stop shop for all of my stand-up specials, podcasts and blogs, as well as my weekly Tea with Alice salons.

I'll talk to you again next week. You can listen to other programs from The Bugle, including The Bugle, The Last Post, Tiny Revolutions and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts.