The Gargle - Farting snakes | Brain surgery | Roadkill app

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

Helen Zaltzman and Fin Taylor join host Alice Fraser for episode 54 of The Gargle, the weekly topical comedy podcast - with no politics!This episode would not be possible without Space Vampires from Outer Space! Go here to buy it NOW!🐍 Farting snakes🧠 OnlyFans brain surgery🛣 Roadkill app💊 AI killer drugs🧊 New ice has dropped🏡 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. on you. A corridor. More of them. More of their blood. You're getting good at this. Endless doors. Hallways. Rooms. A maze. Them versus you. You do things you never imagined you were capable of. Survival is the only morality. And then at last, escape. You're outside. Free. You look up at your prison, but it's not a spaceship. Not a secret alien based in Antarctica. The sign says, Hospital. Ah. now you remember. The elective surgery you'd lined up to get your eyebrows evened out. Whoops. Still, this isn't your worst mistake. This is The Gargle,

the sonic glossy magazine to the Bugles Audio newspaper for Visual World. All of the news, none of the politics. I'm your host, Alice Fraser, and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Helen Zaltzman and Finn Taylor. Welcome. Hi. Hello.

I'm just thinking about surgery now. We're going to plunge together into the body of this week's magazine, but first let's look at the front cover. The front cover this week is Mad Max sitting in a comfortable living room, impatiently checking his watch. The headlines read, The end of the world is taking its sweet time, how to be ready when it finally happens, Skulls, skulls, skulls, dress like nuclear war has already started

with our wasteland makeover, Elizabeth or Bonebreaker, the best baby names to take your infant from the board room to the thunder dome and back, and The Cold War is in again, how to look good cowering under your school desk. The satirical cartoon this week is Hillsong Church founder Brian Houston carrying a cardboard box full of possessions as he's marched out of the building by security. The new boss yells after him, this is a cult, not a brothel. That's our front cover. Let's go into the body of our magazine. Our farting snake section is our first section in this magazine.en zaltzman can you unpack this

story for us well it's very exciting i guess it's not news to snakes uh specifically western hooknose snakes that they can do this but those snakes and some other snakes can basically fart as a defense mechanism so if something's coming to attack them they can suck air into their anuses well it's like a cloacal sphincter and then uh force it out again with terrifying effect and congratulations to them i don't know what they smell of maybe nothing if they've just sucked the air right in yeah i feel like they've buried the lead here because I think everyone uses farting as a defence mechanism. It's the sucking the air in first that I feel... It's the true talent.

...is the true talent. You know, I mean, anyone can... It's sustainable. It's renewable. Yeah. It's good for the planet. I am concerned that you're going to get people writing in saying, no, I train myself to suck air in through my anus

and then pop it out at predators I mean if we have a listener who can suck air in their anus I'm sure they can let us know they will probably record themselves doing it I won't watch the recording or listen to it if you send it in but do let us know if that's something that you can do I feel confident that no one can actually do it maybe you believe you can do it whoa you want to make this interesting that's the worst way to make something interesting i'll give you 10 pence that someone already can i was reading about other animal fart defenses and um there's a species of beaded lacewing that when it's a larva has a fart that can stun termites and then it eats the stunned termite.

Wow. Ingenious. Wow. We've all thought about it. That reminds me of my wife when she was pregnant. She spent her second trimester reading The Art of War and by the final stages she was dropping some pretty hot ones. I think the closest that we get to that,

to using farts as kind of an attack mechanism, is that thing where teenage boys try to light their farts on fire. I'm sure you could aim that at something. Oh. To cook it. Like marshmallows on camp. I'm sure if you were willing to take that risk, you might as well make it useful.

Yeah, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it on a hob. Chaos. Cook marshmallows on a hob or fart on a hob although with gas prices i know we're not meant to bring in the actual news but with gas prices this could be a way out that's not been mentioned as a way of coming around getting weaning off russian oil teenagers farting onto their farting to matches people never talk about the emotional price of gas your ad section now because you can't be what you can't buy but what you can buy is ad space on the gargle if you would like me to read one of your ads write into hello buglers at the bugle

podcast.com are you sick of your car working for more than 16 hours at a time do you wish your boat periodically disgorged disgusting slop why isn't your skateboard sad sometimes for no reason? Well now there's a new way to get around, a better way. The human body. I can't pat that bat, that bat is too high. I can't pat that bat, that bat is too asleep during the day. I can't pat that bat, that bat drank my blood and then made me drink its blood and now I roam the night preying on the innocent incapable of death or emotion. Was this you? Not anymore. Now you can pat a bat. With cats, the bat for your lap. Sort of. Or if you're not a fan of smaller bats, try mice, the flap-free bat substitute for a ground-based nightmare. Okay, we can all admit both are fine, but a mouse is not

very bat. I for one can't believe it's not batter. But that's the ad. I don't make the ads, I just make them up. What am I going to do? Deny the promptings of my own brain? Never, never do you hear me? That's the end of the ad read. And it's 2022.

You don't write on paper. You don't read paper. So why are you still using paper in the bathroom? Live in the present with the Amazon bidet. Just ignore the comments section. And there are roughly 2.7 litres of water in the bathroom. Live in the present with the Amazon bidet. Just ignore the comments section. And there are roughly 2.7 liters of water in the average human body and 0.11 liters of water in half a glass of water. Half a glass of water, 24% of a friend. 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 Now it's time for your OnlyFans section. For this section, all of the columnists will be nude. Finn Taylor, can you unpack this story for us yes an only fans model continued to take nude selfies while she was in hospital uh undergoing neurological surgery and as someone who has been kink shamed their entire life for being into women

undergoing brain surgery i found this article very triggering alice there is something about a dizzy woman with her head wrapped in gauze that gets me going and i won't apologize i'm tired of the media making me feel like a deviant it's a subscription like any other netflix amazon prime hot babes with cranial trauma it is part of my weekly bill um it's amazing because her subscribers started messaging her going, please stop. You should have some rest. This is not why we follow you or we pay you. What is it?

ICU is just not sexy enough? What possibly about it isn't? This is the thing. I think what this story is trying to do is trying to shock us at the prurience of the naughtiness of this person doing sex work while in hospital. But the thing that really shocks me about it is the horrifying invasiveness of hustle culture.

That this person couldn't even take a day off their job to get their brain surgeon done. Yeah, I released two podcasts when I was in hospital. One, I was a day out of the ICU because otherwise I wouldn't have got paid. There it is. This is a sad story this is the terrible or is it is it indicative of the bottomless pit of weird men on the internet that will pleasure

themselves to absolutely anything well at least she was on only only fans beforehand imagine the morphine wearing off and then discovering you have an only fans now that's true i interviewed someone recently who'd been offered 10 grand to live stream the birth of their child on OnlyFans. And to make it really creepy, she then had to have a cesarean and the guy pulled out. Which is weird, isn't it? Had she agreed to live stream? Yeah.

And then she told him she was having a cesarean and he went, nah, you're right. Horrible. Oh, so he just wanted to see some birth canal action. I think so. I think he was a birth canal guy. I mean, look, some people are interested in consequences. Yeah, let's give him some credit. Let's say he was just a fan of storytelling.

There's so much that's stressful about that. First of all, that your friend agreed. No, not my friend. No one in this story is a friend of mine. Let's make that very clear anymore anymore she didn't take the money

so she's not no it was someone I interviewed it was an influencer I interviewed for a show the interesting thing the crossover of men

who would want to do this and who have £10,000 I imagine it's very small well it's not proven that you have the £10,000 is it? true god what a forensic mind

do you have to pay up front? I don't know. I've never used any of that. You're the only fan's model. Yeah. But maybe he earned the money by showing himself sucking air into his anus in order to warn off predators. Maybe it's one of those cycles of life thing.

Now it's time for your review section. As you know, each week our guest editors bring in something to review out of five stars. Helen, what have you brought in for us this week? Oh, well, I've brought in a doll of the TV detective Columbo. Thank you, Pam. It is only half made because it is a limited edition of one dolls of Columbo that I'm making. But it's going to be the best doll of Columbo I've ever seen. Wow. I mean, is it going to be the only doll of Columbo that you've ever seen?

So far, yes, but I live in hope. I don't go to toy shops that much because I'm not a child and I don't have one, but maybe they're all the rage at the moment. And so how many stars is this Columbo toy? Well, because at the moment it doesn't have a face because I haven't made one yet, I'll say four out of five stars, but ready to rise to five once it has a face and an overcoat. I like that Columbo hasn't arrived,

but we already know who the perpetrator is. That's very apt. It was me with some scissors. It was you with some scissors and then Columbo will arrive and say, just one more thing. I just really appreciate the lack of narrative stress with a rich wanker committing a crime

right at the start of a show. You don't have to worry about anything. Yeah, it's a beautiful narrative device, I think. The Columbo. Early murder. I mean, because it is, that's how time works. The murder does happen first. But sequential.

Yeah. That's a splash. And Finn Taylor, what have you brought in for us? Well, I moved house quite recently, so I've decided to review my new neighbours. On the right, we have a Cypriot family who keep bringing us delicious food. Five stars. On the right, we have a Cypriot family who keep bringing us delicious food. Five stars.

On the left, a woman named Yvonne who wants nothing to do with us but was so upfront about it I actually have quite a lot of respect for her. And ironically, we'd like to get to know her more. Four stars. A few doors down, Shirley and Pete, old couple, been here since the 50s,

very sweet, but from the outside, their living room looks f***ing disgusting. Looks like an old map that's been dipped in tea three stars um over the road family woman very friendly despite being very locally anti-vax and i've not met the husband but i have seen him hiding tins of beer by the bins and when he takes the bins out he sits and has a can on the wall. Big fan of his work. My kind of man. Four stars. And then finally, the house next to them, they gave us a fruit basket on the day we moved in. And they're too friendly.

They wave at us from inside their house. They're clearly sex people. They're grooming us to join their mucky filth parties. No thank you. One star. That's all the time we have for our review section because now it's time for roadkill uh a roadkill app has been invented and is now proliferating through society it's like the natural evolution of pokemon go ironically enough finn taylor can you unpack

this story for us yeah big tech has finally entered my good books. It has designed an app that tells you the location of fresh roadkill. It's like Grindr for straight guys. I've downloaded it and marked next door's cat as ready for collecting. It's not dead, but I am totally team dog. It's in Wyoming in the Midwest in America, I believe, and where there's a lot of roadkill. And I think there was a law beforehand inhibiting people from taking it

or if it's still illegal to eat it. And now whatever it is, the EPA or the local government have come up with this app that allows you to mark something as dead and ready to collect. But you have to take the whole carcass home. You can't butcher it on the side of the road.

I feel anything that legitimizes roadkill is a slippery slope to people using the slipperiness of a slope as an excuse to swerve out of their way to kill animals that's why they haven't had this app before apparently but they're also saying another application of the app is to find out where people are plowing into animals with their vehicles and figure out why those places are so dangerous. Yeah, if there's a hotspot, then it's like, well, clearly someone's just hungry on its way home from work and keeps swerving into elk.

Also, roadkill is the only kill that's named after the location rather than the weapon, I think. Very true. Humans are never called roadkill. No, that's another feature of it. Maybe it's, you've got a stabbing, but it's not the road that's killing them it's the people in the cars on the road that is killing them roads don't kill

people people in cars on roads kill people very true my brother-in-law's job is um supervising the removal of dead animals from public spaces in wolverhampton which is mostly roadkill and um that's a lot of wasted meat because they get put in a council freezer for a week and then disposed of at a local pet crematorium. Someone could eat all those foxes. It also seems quite energy intensive to freeze them and then burn them. True, but it's probably more energy intensive to have to send them to the crematorium every day before they rot.

That's true. What about turning into pet food? Controversial. Is it? Well, especially because some of them have got, like, they've had avian flus. They've had to remove a lot of dead ducks from parks and geese.

So they don't want to spread that. I think this is the most informative gargle we've ever had. It was the best conversation I'd ever had with my brother-in-law. I'd known him for like 20 years and it was only the other week that I was asking him about the intricacies

of his job. It was fascinating. You've known him for 20 years and this is the first time you've asked him about what he does? It's just not that talkative. Just as a side note, what are the boundaries of his jurisdiction? Well, the Greater Wolverhampton Council area. And it has to be public land. So if you've got a dead animal in your garden, throw it into the road.

Otherwise, it's your problem. Very interesting. If a cat dies halfway on your driveway and halfway onto the pavement then it's going to get disgusting i think that's the the truth of all life on earth eventually it becomes disgusting that's all the time we have for our roadkill section uh because now it's time for our ai chemical warfare section i love this section uh much. I'm going to unpack it myself. So this is a group of scientists who apparently are incredibly naive. They have published a paper describing how it never occurred to them that their research into artificial intelligence could have been used for evil, despite the fact that they were researching

various compounds in order to cure diseases but their AI was very it was sort of unpacking and unfolding diseases and then recombining them in order to make medicines for people and it didn't occur to them even when they were doing things with you know the Ebola virus and whatever that it could be used for evil and then they turned off the bit of their AI that said don't kill people and within six hours the AI had figured out lots of ways to kill people and they realized that the code had figured out lots of ways to kill people and they realized that the code that they've been building has potentially evil implications finn taylor is the most evil person in this zoom room can you unpack the story a little more what was that

hey i'm insulted i don't know anything nowhere near as much about disposing of dead bodies as helen has just proved anyway it. I think that's true. It's all secondhand knowledge. Supposedly. You can't prove anything. Look, you always get me to do the science stuff and it's always above my head. But there's AI. They were trying, as you say, they're trying to invent good chemical combinations.

And then they switched on the, quote, bad mode and invented thousands of chemical weapon combinations here's a tip let's get rid of bad mode i think let's remove that mode is humans though finn you can't get rid of that this is the thing people are oh no ai have figured out more ways to kill us ai don't give a shit like this is all just bad when humans get their hands on it and decide to do things with it like we don't need these 40,000 new chemical weapons. The ones we've got are already bad enough, but, like, the main factor is humans being shit with them. You also don't need, you know, an evil man to do evil.

What you need is a good man who's so naive about the potential implications of his terrible AI that he's willing to have a button that goes, maybe it can be evil now. You need men, really, to step up and stop being so irresponsible generally. I actually think a lot more simply and just think I'm blaming it on the Swiss. It came from the Swiss Institute for Nuclear Protection.

I've never trusted the Swiss. Neutral my ass. They're trying to figure out a way to bend time in their little quantum machine, aren't they? Yeah, just stop. Let's stop funding Swiss research. Too many holes in Swiss research. My favourite part of this paper was the heading risk of misuse followed by the thought had never previously struck us

not once not at all all these great minds and then it said at the bottom said uh we we really debated whether we made this public because the the entry bar for misuse was so low and then it said the full thing has been published well let's just don't tell people just don't tell people if you find out something horrific it's a really easy mistake to make just don't tell people if you read that so we we had two links one to the daily mail uh and one to their original published paper and i read their original published paper because i try not to click on daily mail links the whole first half of their paper is them describing themselves as dangerously naive and the whole second part of the paper is them publishing all of their results.

And here's how you, if you wanted to destroy the world with an AI like this, could do it. I do appreciate a self-flagellating scientific paper. You don't see that many of those. I think I like that level of self-awareness in these scientists. Is this one of those situations where they thank their wife for drawing their attention to the fact that they're idiots? Personally, if I have to be murdered by an evil AI, I would rather use a time-travelling Arnold Schwarzenegger. I feel that at least that's got some cinematographic quality to it. Does this mean that the next great threat is going to be AI?

Is that who we're going to invade, AI? They don't need to. They're already here. Oh, God. I hate it when people say that. You one phone update and uh suddenly they're in charge of everything this is only slightly worse than when they gave us all that u2 album for free isn't it i mean or the poem oh that was just a test case yeah that was the first run of this ladder but we survived that so we can survive anything that's all the time we have for our AI chemical warfare news because now it's time for new ice! This is the

news that there is a different kind of ice that we haven't hitherto understood as being water. And so it's changed the way that we're looking at planets. Helen, you have a dress with planets on it. Can you unpack this story a bit? No, not at all. I don't have a dress with ice on it and I don't understand this story something to do with pressure something to do with

ice what are humans going to do with it probably just make vodka luges for parties well it means that uh planets which we thought didn't have water on them before may have water on them because the ice now have vodka luges doesn't look like we thought ice would look like there's a second kind of ice you know that in three months when everyone hates new ice, they're going to re-release original ice and call it Ice Classic. But this has exciting implications for water on planets, which is exciting for us if we are going to go find other planets, which seems to be the only solution.

Yeah, if we're going to colonize, we want it to have all of our favorite things. Yeah, I thought there were only two kinds of ice rather than this new kind of third ice. I thought it was frozen water and the guy who sings Ice Ice Baby. I actually thought this article was about meth for the first half. So there's that kind of ice as well.

There is, but I'm not aware of that. I'm a very clean living person. What are you talking about? You're Australian. So this is the thing. I don't know what people think about Australians. Huge meth issue. I had a man who I used to catch the train with in New York

and we used to have a chat. Every day we would have a chat on the train for like three weeks because we were on the same commute. And then in the third week he said, I hear Australian women are sluts, so when are you going to come uptown and let me eat you out? And I never talked to him again. The end. He'd really played it cool by not doing that until the third week yeah i felt like that's that's what's called a

good guy it was just a very like a very bold move i thought it is a lot i suppose too many people read that book about negging didn't they they did they did and then this is the thing though what it meant was that i would then put on my headphones and listen to podcasts and that's how i encountered the bugle oh nice story yeah it's a great story it's led me down this terrifying path to this point in my life holy shit well thanks to that man i suppose yeah exactly thanks horrible man do you think he would have just replaced whatever nationality in that sentence just optimistically it's like you know if you try if you try something 100 times 99 times it won't work but one time it will yeah but just keep on pestering people on the train if you're proposing

that kind of sexual act on the morning commute on the morning i think yeah come on, man. I mean, wait until it's on the cover of darkness and the world's... The early bird. Hey, good point. The early bird catches the cunnilingus. That's the kind of thing that my neighbours over the road would say. Oh, no. I mean, speaking of ice, maybe you should bring them a bucket of ice. Is that a thing?

A sex thing or a thing? I mean, you can... I don't go to sex things. Is that what they do? They have a bucket of ice to cool down. I know that hotels have ice buckets.

I think it's for putting the champagne in. It's not for giving your giving your soldier an ice bath. I don't know. You just can't tell. Anything in a hotel room

may have been used for a penile ice bath. That's true. No, they use cryotherapy for rejuvenation. So if you want your dong to look forever young that's my problem with my my dong it's just it's all it's all old ah that's all the time we have for our new ice news and that brings us to the end of this episode of the gargle and flipping through the ads at the back helen have you got anything to plug yes you

can uh listen to my podcast, The Illusionist, an entertainment show about how language works. It's a very good show. I like it. Finn Taylor, what have you got to plug? I just put my stand-up special on YouTube. It's free. It's called So My Wife. You just YouTube Finn Taylor special and you'll find it. I'm Alice Fraser. I'm your host.

Find me online at at alliterative on Twitter and Instagram. It's A-L-I-T-E-R-A-T-I-V-E. Or patreon.com slash alicefraser, which is a l-i-t-e-r-a-t-i-v-e or patreon.com slash alicefraser which is a one-stop shop for all of my stand-up special podcasts and blogs as well as my weekly tea with alice salons where we get in a zoom room like this and have a chat i'm doing a tour of my show kronos i will be in melbourne and then in perth and then sydney and then london and then various places in the uk and then in edinburgh which is also in the uk i think still depending on whether scotland's decided to leave or not by August.

So look me up and basically follow me on Twitter and I'll tell you my dates. We'd like to thank our roving reporters, VB for the farting snake and the recuperating model stories, Miss Otis for the roadkill app story, and Isabel for the new ice story. We'd like to also thank everybody who sent in the story about the potato that wasn't a very big potato in the end.

It was the tuber of a gourd. So thank you, everyone who sent that in. If you would like to be a roving reporter, tweet us at HelloGogglers, and that's on Twitter. Tweet us at HelloGogglers if you would like to send in a story that you think is appropriate. This is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Ped Hunter.

Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week. You can listen to other programs from The Bugle Podcasts and Alice Fraser Production. Your editor is Ped Hunter. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. 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 a new novella is out by self-published novellaist Supi von Nudelbach. Part one in the Odenkirk Legendarium series.

The book is Space Vampires from Outer Space, an epic 17-chapter supernatural adventure saga that makes fun of itself so you don't have to. Odenkirk is a vampire-hunting warrior monk suddenly confronted by extraterrestrial unlife. He and a gang of pals pal up to form a gang to fight the suck-obsessed space revenants under a gibbous or other moon, and presumably save some lives in the process. Find it online in all good search engines at the Kindle store or at spacevampiresfromouterspace.com.

I can't believe that URL wasn't already taken. Well done, Soupy. At only $1.49, you basically can't afford not to buy it, and certainly the amount I charge for an ad read is only going to be made up if a lot of you decide to succumb to my irresistible sales pitch. My irresistible sales pitch is a quarter of a tone below the E above middle C, if you're interested. That's Space Vampires from Outerspace.com.