The Gargle - Doing a runner | Octopus boom | Drugs bunny

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

Josh Gondelman and debutant Joz Norris join host Alice Fraser for episode 69 (nice) of The Gargle, the weekly topical comedy podcast - with no politics!🏃🏻 Doing a runner🐙 Octopus boom👮🏻‍♂️ AI crime predictor🐰 Drugs bunny🐒 ReviewsProduced 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. 22 years ago, two priceless manuscripts written by Charles Darwin were stolen from the library at Cambridge University. Scholars and detectives were mystified, dead end after dead end. Students waterboarded, confessing to crimes they hadn't committed, a breakdown of civil dignity, many, many PhDs on the subject. This year, the notebooks were returned with a simple note saying,

this is the gargle. All of the news, none of the politics. We are the Sonic Glossy magazine to the Bugles Audio Newspaper for Visual World. I am your host, Alice Fraser, and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Joss Norris and Josh Gondelman. Welcome. Hello. Thanks for having me.

Yes, thank you. I feel very welcomed. I'm glad to be here. Well, I'm also glad to be here. I just flew in from being the moon and boy are my arms tides. Whoa. Thank you so much for all your hard work up there. I've been a big admirer for a long time, so that's nice to put a face to a name. Well, I just can't resist pulling. Before we clasp our hands in prayer and address the stories that are this week's worshipful news,

let's have a look at the front cover of the magazine. Front cover this week is Taika Waititi hitting his straps as the new hot fun time daddy slash chaotic neutral slash quirky Jeff Goldblum type for those people with a sex hard-on for that, which turns out to be most, most people like that. Are you a Taika Waititi fan, Jaws? I have been for a very long time. I think his films are great. I think he seems like a lovely guy.

He does seem to be going mad, and I can't work out whether that's in a way I think is really cool and fun and playful and admirable or yeah I don't know what the end result is he seems to be just surrounded by all the most famous and kind of cool people in the world now and he can do literally whatever he wants and so far he seems to be using that power for good but I guess I've got my eye on him he seems to be yeah an excitable person who can do literally anything and you never know where that could lead. It's amazing that the work he's doing hasn't become worse

as he has infinite capacity to do, like you said, whatever he wants. I'm waiting till the guys with my kind of body type become the weird, like, ooh, this is the hot thing now. Just like kind of a series of gentle circles one on top of the other um kind of a jason alexander assance that's what i'm that's what i'm excited for yeah it's a shame that he seems to be pegged as everyone's sort of weird

crush or whatever but actually you look at him and you go he's just a very yeah that's what i had some guys there's nothing strange about he used to be sort of our man on the inside a kind of a dorky comedian type who was really excited to be there and now he's become unstoppably f***able which is a dangerous it seems like with every career accolade his jawline gets sharper and sharper yes what kind of deal did you make with whom who books that jawline is what i want to say i could imagine him ending up like a sort of an elon musk type that's my that's my only worry is he's at the moment he's still he's still great i'm a big fan but i just i wonder where it ends like he's the kind of person that could go like

yeah i'm gonna live on the moon and i'm gonna take all of us with me and everyone would go yeah great we love that idea but actually at some point you've got to go, this has to stop, we've got to rein this guy in. I don't know how good the Thor movies were. We can't just have him taking us on a moon. Yeah. The satirical cartoon this week is a panel of television executives brainstorming an idea, and one of them says, what if we had a circus made out of bread,

and it's full of people competing to have sex with a hot man who has his shirt off, and it's on an island island in prison and they're all famous from other reality television shows top story this week is doing a runner news uh there's a man in chile who got paid 286 times his salary and did what i think we all might do uh joshondelman, you've run away forever and changed your name. Can you unpack this story for us? Yeah, look, I'm a guy that runs from conflict, so this dude is near and dear to my heart. So he got 286 times his monthly salary in an error,

and he said he was going to give it back, and then he just disappeared. And I respect his decisiveness. Last week, a guy at a coffee cart gave me an extra dollar in change when I bought a breakfast burrito and I stared at it sweating for a full minute and then gave it back. So I like that this guy just knew what he wanted and went for it. He was paid. I did the conversion. It was 165,398,851 Chilean pesos, which is about 175,000 US dollars. So he got like a dentist's yearly salary

in his bank account and just went full DB Cooper, which is awesome. And that is a lot of money to come into in a month, right? But it's not so much that you never need to work again. So it's going to be tough explaining the gap on your resume when you come back like it's this

here from 2022 to 2026 you were off the grid living like a king can you unpack that for me but not only am i rooting for this guy i hope the company learns a lesson it's like oh it's hard to reach someone to get a payment error straightened out oh Oh, how do you like it? Not fun, huh? Maybe it's a customer service lesson for corporations. I think they need to take it to heart. Well, the people he works for are one of the largest producers of cold cuts in Chile, which makes it ironic that this is one of the deepest burns that could possibly be executed. I mean, among other things, what it says is to the company, which is pretending to be your family by keeping you late uh you which i think is something we've all wanted to say to large corporations jaws i i was amazed with this story the the fact that it said i guess this

makes sense but uh it said that the company only noticed their error after processing their accounts and it just made me really reflect on the the difference between my life and the life of whoever runs the largest producer of cold cuts in chile because i think if i ever paid somebody 300 times what i was supposed to pay them i think i would notice immediately like the very next time i tried to pay for anything i go oh all my money is gone so it just made me marvel at the idea that they just were able to sit around for a while and then go, hang on, we messed up. I think we got something wrong. He also, I really like that on two separate occasions, apparently, he promised he was going to give it back.

He said, yeah, I'm going to go to the bank today. And then he didn't show up at the bank. So I think a week later, they wrote to him again and said, can we just check that you are paying that back? And he went, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm going to pay that back. And then he disappeared. So it wasn't even the immediacy of the smash and grab. He had that week there where he was like, maybe, I don't know, I'll think about it. And then eventually went, yeah, I'm out.

No, he was spending that week being like, what's my new name going to be? What's a cool name I've always wanted to have? I mean, this is the relationship behavior of a commitment phobe. No, no, no, no, yeah, sure, no, no, no, no. It's going to be fine, yeah.'s gonna be great and all the time you're planning your your escape to hawaii with all of her podcasts i don't know what people steal when they leave relationships in the modern age i want to know if he was coming into work that week in the middle where they were just like hey bud uh any updates and he's like oh yeah, man. Yeah, don't worry about it.

Yeah, I've just been too swamped. That's a nice diamond ring you have on there. Yeah, no, no, no. I've just been up to my eyeballs in ham. Just no chance to go to the bank. Yeah, it's on my list. It's the very next thing on my list is I'm going to pay you back that. Totally.

Your ad section now because you can't be what you can't buy. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by the assertion that billionaires keep buying media companies and boosting cryptocurrencies in order to protect freedom particularly freedom of speech they definitely do not want access to unregulated forms of power in order to manipulate consumers and investors to make their money into more money they have so much money surely they can't want more that would be irrational deranged greed without end, a belly with a black hole in the middle, and probably quite a sad way to exist.

Billionaires. I'm sure they're fine. Today's episode of the podcast is brought to you by nature. Nature. It's only beautiful if you blur your eyes. Otherwise, up close, it's just things eating each other alive. I've been living on a boat, so I've been watching a lot of birds murdering each other

yeah i didn't know they did that herons right all of them they're all they're all in the constant state of murdering each other i saw some gulls murdering a heron i saw what murdering some gulls yeah yes a seagull gang there is a murder gull the first day i arrived i saw it carrying off a live rat the next day i saw it uh dismembering a pigeon the third day i saw it dismembering another pigeon next to the body of a crow at that point i was like it's not even eating what it kills it just has a taste for blood yeah yeah yeah this is gang violence it's just protecting its turf yeah and there's a there's a bunch of swans near my boat at the moment and i've just never been so conscious that they're an overhyped violent giraffe duck yeah they're huge only the

queen can or would want to eat a swan i think i reckon she does i reckon she eats them alive yeah bites their heads off she's allowed and if you've just squirted lemon juice in your eyes a quick way to distract yourself from the agonizing existential despair of living in the modern world, but it's turned out not to help with that. And in fact, only hurts your eyes on top of everything else. Try rinsing your eyeball with half a glass of water. 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. helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com Now it's time for your Octopus Boom News, which sounds like the funnest rave where everyone's arms are up in the air. Joss Norris, you love an octopus. Can you unpack this story for us?

I do. Well, fellow octopus lovers are going to really enjoy this one because there is a currently opinion is split as to whether it's a boom or a plague of octopuses off the coast of Cornwall. The story basically is a kind of a back and forth between two people who occupy each side of this debate. There is a fisherman called Chris Chesterfield who is very upset. This fisherman has been trying to pull up shellfish catches

and has been unable to because he keeps catching a hundred times more octopus than he normally would. He's said that it's very difficult to pull octopuses up in a lobster pot because you only have two arms to pull them up and an octopus has eight arms to pull them down. And I initially thought it was quite strange that you would assume that the only reason for your kind of superiority as a human over the marine world is because you have arms and fish don't but then as soon as you picture a whole trawler man's net full of thousands of fish

and they've all got arms you do actually realize actually that it would be tough and presumably when he pulls them up the first thing they do is sort of slap them around the face so it is a relief actually um there's the other side of it is there is a guy called matt slater from the cornwall wildlife trust who is very excited about this octopus boom uh because he's a huge fan of octopuses he's been training octopuses in his area to recognize his own face for a long time because he wants to build human bonds because they're such intelligent animals only his face i think only his face at the moment at the moment it's a real kind of vanity project is he trying to build bonds with octopuses or is he trying to build an army out of octopuses yeah i think he really i think he's on the same kind of path as taika waititi towards who knows

what kind of egomaniac ends maybe it's a peaceful thing it's all out of love and he's just poly octopus yeah he just loves to be around them my favorite thing about this story is that it tries to kind of keep the balance between these two sides through the whole thing. About on the one hand, it's bad for fishermen. They're eating the catches. On the other hand, it's great for octopus and for wildlife diversity and things. And it tries to give them each equal time in the story. But then the final paragraph says that Chris Chesterfield, the fisherman, says that he humanely dispatches his octopus catch quickly with a knife between the eyes to the creature's central brain. This is so we haven't got them crawling all over the boat like in previous years, he says.

There were long, hard days until we found that out, which is one of my favourite images I've come across for ages. Of weeks of hordes of octopus crawling around the deck of a boat and one guy trying to stab them in every orifice to work out how to do it so ultimately i think this article comes down on the side of they must be culled and slaughtered it's so violent very upsetting josh gondelman how do you feel about octopuses personally i love them however i think in this situation the fishermen have to act and they have to act quickly because look the the octopuses are stealing the food out of the fishermen's pots and the fishermen should be embarrassed they're gonna let a bunch of sea creatures with pudding for bones be the netflix to their blockbuster video no you can't let this you can't just lie there and let the octopuses put you out of business

if that happened to me if an octopus was putting me out of work, I would be too humiliated to even go on the record and admit it. I would just lie and make up a reason my business was going so badly. I'd be like, it's inflation. It's happening all over. Like, I know that an octopus is smart. I have a lot of respect for them. But has one octopus in history baked a single cake? Has one octopus ever even developed the generic form of an antiviral medication?

Never. So all these fisher people just sound like, oh, that four-year-old beat me at chess, but she's a prodigy, so it's fine. Stop making excuses and defeat the octopuses. Our dignity as a species depends on it. Yeah, the worst thing about being defeated by an octopus is they make you high-five them six times. Defeat the octopuses. Our dignity as a species depends on it. Yeah, the worst thing about being defeated by an octopus is they make you high-five them six times. Two legs, two legs, but only they know which two. This isn't the first time it's happened.

It feels like in the 1940s it happened once, and then in 1899 they called it another plague of octopuses. But I don't take that very seriously, because in, a lot of anything they would just call a plague. Like octopuses, runny noses, Jews. They just call it a plague every time. And so I'm a little skeptical. Now it's time for your review section. Review section.

Now, as you know, each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review. Jaws Norris, what have you brought in for us i would like to review the experience of uh finding out the names of the gibbons in london zoo for free uh this is a great experience that i managed to stumble across this year uh this week sorry there's a section of fence in regents park where you can get a perfect view of the gibbons if you walk past uh and if you go there at the right time of day then you can end up eavesdropping on a school group as they're going past and being given all the information about the gibbons uh so if you stand there and hide in the bushes in just the

right way it's actually possible to find out what they're called um i would say that the the sort of unique combination of the kind of cozy familiarity of finding out the name of a funny animal so that you can address it personally next time you go by, mixed with the sort of the illicit thrill of knowing that that information wasn't supposed to be for you and that you got it at an extremely discounted rate. Those two things coming together makes this genuinely one of the best things that has ever happened to me in my life. And I give it six out of five.

Wow. Wow, that's a bold move. Highly recommended. Pop down, pop down. If you get it at the right time of day, or I can just tell you their names, but I won't tell you live on air because i think it'll spoil it for so many others the experience is what you're there for not just the knowledge it's about it's about the learning it's the journey not the destination exactly exactly you gotta go down josh what have

you brought in for us i'm brought in pesto to review. Yeah. You surprising your faces because pesto went away for a while. We weren't seeing a lot of old pee hanging out in pastas and on sandwiches. And recently, like a person from college whose name you truly forgot until suddenly you have a friend that does trivia with them and now you see them every week again you're like hey it's back and you know what it's not bad it's it's kind of a john travolta in pulp fiction kind of thing where every chef in new york city is quentin tarantino going you know what i think pesto still got it and we're going to show the world uh i've had pesto on a sandwich i've had pesto on a pasta recently it's inescapable it's unavoidable it's back three and a half out of five stars for our old friend pesto very nice three and a half i feel like pesto was always three and a half

pesto oh right but for the last 20 or so years it's been like pesto's probably like two stars right and then it's back you're like three and a half i remember now it's still quite good yep so it's green but it doesn't taste especially healthy that's fun it's vegetable adjacent i remember when pesto was four stars or four and a half that was when it first came into cafes and it was like very sophisticated that was just pre-sushi yes remember it was pesto on things and then and then his food then we had sushi we're like pesto get out of here bud you had your moment in the sun yeah pesto too complex we want the clean refreshing flavors of japanese cooking your next section is pre-crime news uh There is an AI, which despite having presumably watched the movie with Tom Cruise,

has started to predict crime with 90% accuracy. I have not watched that movie because when it was out, my brother watched it first, and he said it has weird eye stuff, and that's a thing for me. I don't like weird eye stuff. Yeah, I don't like weird eye stuff. So somebody who has watched this, Jaws Norris, can you unpack this story for us? Yes, so this is an AI that is able to predict the type of crime and the location of a crime

with 90% accuracy within the next week. There's a lot of kind of concerns over it, over whether it kind of reinforces racial bias in policing and that kind of thing. The thing I wonder about most, when I read about it, I thought of Minority Report, but then I also thought, actually, I wonder whether it kind of reinforces racial bias in policing and that kind of thing. The thing I wonder about most, when I read about it, I thought of Minority Report, but then I also thought, actually, I wonder whether it works more like the, you know, the witch's prophecies in Macbeth,

where the fact that he's given the prophecy that he's going to be king is the thing that then makes him become king. And then they give him the prophecy that says, this is how you're going to die. And it's him trying to avoid that that ends up making him die in that way, that self-fulfilling prophecy thing. So I wonder whether actually what this AI does is maybe it sends some kind of alert to people it thinks might be criminals in the local area and goes you're going to commit a crime this week and then they go well i guess i can't fight my destiny so i now have to go out and

commit that crime so actually it's kind of creating the crime that it predicts in order to give itself its perfect track record. And actually, I think this computer is organising crime in the area in order to be patted on the back and be told, wow, you're a really kind of intelligent AI, well done. So I reckon it's playing a lot with people's fears of destiny and fate and that kind of thing.

And I think they should shut it down. It sounds dangerous to me. Yeah, I mean, that's the big fear. If you don't commit the crime you're predicted to commit then you might end up f***ing your mother and that's yeah exactly that's bad yeah it's only when you fight against it that it all happens so i guess they just got i've just i've got to go with it you might as well do the mail fraud or whatever yeah yeah i guess it would depend on the level of crime yeah if it tells you you're going to steal a bottle of milk today then you'll go well yeah sure yeah hoping to use it to sort of inform high level policy decisions rather than it would depend on the level of crime. If it tells you you're going to steal a bottle of milk today, then you'll go, well, yeah, fine.

They're hoping to use it to sort of inform high-level policy decisions rather than direct allocation of resources to the location because, as we know, if you send a policeman to police a pre-crime area anticipating a crime, if there is no crime, the policeman feels obliged to commit the crime while they're there. Does that count as politics? Probably. Ring the bell, Peg.

Josh? So this system can predict crime allegedly with like 90% accuracy, which sounds good, but like 10% going to jail for a crime you didn't commit is bad. That's too much. It's leaving too much to chance, right?

It's like, oh, it's essentially, they're like, if you go out, if you're like 90% chance of rain, you bring an umbrella, doesn't rain, no harm, no foul. But if you're like over-policing an area because 90% chance of crime, 10% chance of

Les Miserables, I think is what might happen. Someone gets pinched for taking a loaf of bread, you know, or bottled milk as you're talking about. The creator of the system said in the interview specifically that it's not minority report. Right. The Tom Cruise movie. They said specifically, which is troubling. First of all, it's false. A few years ago in Chicago, they tried an attempt to use similar technology, and it just, like, more than half of the black men in the area were,

like, caught up in this AI system. So it literally was a minority report. Also, it is a giant red flag when you're defending your technology against specific dystopian allegations. Like, look, I'm opening this theme park for dinosaurs, and last time that happened, the dinosaurs ate a bunch of people, but I swear this time it's not Jurassic Park The Lost World. It'd be great if they have to get to a point where you have to pre-explain which dystopian fiction you're going for. This one, we're sort of going for a Brave New World thing,

so we promise it's probably one of the better dystopias of the ones that are available but it is going to be one of them and if you think that certain groups commit more crimes than others think about all the times you walked past a policeman and they were like you're fine it is very much like look we know the system's always been racist in the past we promise this time we're going to be on our very, very best behavior and not perpetuate centuries of racism, which you can't make humans not do that. Like, human police always do that. And you think this machine is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got this.

Well, the way you do, the way you build an AI is by feeding it all the information that you have, and then it learns from that information and then does the thing that it anticipates will be required from the information of all of the terrible things you've done in the past. And they go, oh no, this turned out terribly. What did we do wrong? I'd rather just an artificial ignorance in this case.

It's just like, I don't know, seems fine. Give it no information and then see what it comes up with. Just a robot that's like, oh boy, wow, the world. Scary place. I seem to be really stupid. Just a robot baby's like, oh boy, wow, the world. Scary place. I seem to be really stupid. Just a robot baby. But at least I'm pure. I'm innocent. And we interrupt this broadcast to announce

the winner of the inaugural Dancy Lagarde Literary Tribute Competition. Previous winners include Neil Gaiman and Dancy Lagarde in disguise as themselves, now disqualified from entering again. Lucky you! Our judges enjoyed all of the submissions incredibly.

It was just an absolute delight to read all of the just f***ing nonsense that people sent in. Without further ado, I will announce the runners-up of the Dancy Lagarde Literary Tribute Competition, which included Sarah Marcotte, who wrote chapter one of and a title page of The Crystal Throne. It was a very good piece of work. You can see the full piece of work linked at my patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. Extracts will follow. Second runner up, in no particular order, all the runners up were equal in my heart they're all they're all winners to me andrew bates who submitted chapter 68 of a hill to call my own entitled in which our heroine bears her heart soul and creamy breasts and melts a heart of iron with steamy passion that is also

linked to my patreon announcement post and nora von chokstrakoff who was uh submitted their piece via the dedicated amanuensis Aaron Goodesman, writing a tantalisingly delicious chapter 7 of Down for the Count, if you'll remember that one. The winner is Pips Pollard with their magnificent chapter 14 of Dark Bridges of the Heart, entitled Sexy Cage of Destiny's Desires. I highly recommend you head over to my Patreon and read these runners-up, and the winner i will extract further passages for your delectation in the coming weeks congratulations everyone who

entered congratulations to the winners and the runners up the winner wins 200 pounds in real money and a thousand pounds in imaginary cryptocurrency and their name written in my non-distributed ledger and the runners up win 50 £50 each. Thank you. I look forward to next year's Dancy Lagarde Literary Tribute Competition. And now it's time for your Lettuce is Making Rabbits High news because rabbits get made high by lettuce, according to the news.

Salad variety is particularly like iceberg lettuce, the most boring of lettuces to us, apparently the most exciting of lettuces to rabbits, known as lettuce opium, giving rabbits a mild sensation of euphoria that it can be dangerous in high doses. Josh Gondelman, you're a fiend for cocaine. Can you unpack this story? Okay.

So rabbits apparently are getting these mild euphoric sensations from this compound in iceberg and other lettuces. And they say that we shouldn't give lettuce to rabbits. That's what the thrust of this report is. And I say, why not? Why can't rabbits have a good time? What do they need to do that they can't be high for? Are they going to be operating a forklift? Do their kids need help with math homework? What could possibly go wrong if the rabbits get a little stoned? And like you said, the iceberg lettuce contains a compound known as lettuce opium, which does sound like a trick to get humans to eat more iceberg lettuce. From the people that brought you Runner's High, it's heroin salad. Give it a shot.

brought you runners high it's heroin salad give it a shot apparently this is there's there's lots of other things that rabbits that are not healthy for rabbits that we think of as rabbit food right like um carrots have more sugar than a rabbit needs in their dessert so rabbits shouldn't be eating carrots and that blew my mind because basically at this point, everything I know about rabbits appears incorrect. Next thing, we'll find out that they don't even f*** that much. And they never dress up as a sexy lady to trick hunters. Jaws, what have you been feeding your rabbits? I haven't had one since I was a kid. I had one that I think we probably did feed all the wrong stuff to.

A lot of lettuce and a lot of carrots and a lot of that kind of thing I do think that this is an irresponsible story because I think the immediate panic reaction obviously is going to be the responsible rabbit owners everywhere cut out lettuce and carrots and all that stuff immediately and I think that creates a real risk of uh throwing rabbits into withdrawal very very suddenly like if they've kind of acclimatized to a diet of lettuce opium and suddenly that's taken away from them i don't know what the symptoms of lettuce withdrawal are but i imagine it's that that scene in train spotting has to be close i think that that has to have been modeled on something so i think what we're going to end up with is potentially kind of horrific scenes of rabbits breaking into green grocers and trying to steal what they need at gunpoint just sort of real

deprived stuff isn't that i'm worried about it i'm scared oh yeah that's exactly yeah maybe that's i think we risk bringing it true and that was a cautionary tale that we were told when we were very small so we think we've got to learn the lesson wean them off it i think and find you know put it in little doses in something else and help them find their way back to a healthy diet i think if we just stop it's going to be a nightmare i don't think anyone's prepared for an aggressive rabbit uprising it's going to be hell rabbits can't go cold turkey cold turkey of course is the industry where you accidentally get paid 286 times more than your salary we can't have rabbits with that kind of money and drug dependencies.

And that brings us to the end of this week's episode of The Gargle. I'm flipping through the ad section at the back. Flippity, flippity, flip. Josh Gondelman, have you got anything to plug other than your special, which is out, which I watched, which is great? Oh my gosh, thank you. That's all I have. I have a new stand-up special called People Pleaser.

It's available internationally, worldwide, depending on where you are. Vimeo, I think, is worldwide, and then it's Amazon Prime and Apple TV and YouTube. So wherever you are, it's available for sale or for rent, and I would love if people watched it, if you enjoyed my news broadcasting on the Gargoyle. Charles Norris, what have you got to plug? I am working on a new show, which will be at the Edinburgh Fringe in August. It's called Blink.

It's about a paranoid megalomaniac magician who thinks he can control everybody's minds at the same time. And that's on at the Pleasance in August at 8.20. Like all magicians? Yeah, basically. It's about all magicians. So if people go to j josnorris.co.uk or follow me on Twitter at Jos Norris,

then they can see all the things about the show dates and that kind of thing. I'd love to see you there. I am Alice Fraser. You can find me online at alliterative, A-L-I-T-E-R-A-T-I-V-E, on Twitter and Instagram. Also at my Patreon,

which is a one-stop shop for all of my stand-up specials, podcasts, and blogs. That's at patreon.com slash alicefraser. It also has my weekly Tea with Alice Salons, which is where we do chat. We have a conversation. I'm also doing a live chat this weekend. If you want to meet me in person in London,

subscribe to the Patreon and I'll tell you where I am. Is that weird? It's probably weird. No, that's good. If you would like to be part of the gargle, become one of our roving reporters by tweeting us with all the stories that you think are funny at hello garglers on twitter matthew collins sent in the pre-crime story and miss otis sent in the drugs bunny story this is an alice fraser and bugle podcasts production i am alice fraser your editor is

pedhunter executive producer is chris skinner and 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 and this episode of the podcast is brought to you by the imposter kings a game of cards written by one of our very gargle listeners yes it's my favorite a listener funded ad read in the show that's moderately famous for its fake ads. It's a game within a game, unlike this game, which is just a game within a box that you can buy.

But it's a competitive strategic card game with tons of replayability and variations created by someone who you already know has good taste because they listen to the podcast that you are listening to right now. The Imposter Kings is a travel-sized fun pack lovingly created by a small independent designer

who is passionate about quality, but in a platonic way. Go online to impostorkings.com and see all the pictures on the cards as a little sneak preview I just did, and they are genuinely amazing. Unlike the cryptocurrency, trading market is easy to learn this game, but difficult to master, and I'm assured by people who like fun that you will like this if you also enjoy other nerdy competitive card games like Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering. But it is also accessible to casual gamers and even, horrifyingly, children. This is The Impostor Kings. The creator is giving a 20% discount for gargle listeners using the code THEGARGLE. That's capital THE gargle go online