The Gargle - Hunter gatherers | Landlords | Amish phones

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Tiff Stevenson and Alison Spittle join host Alice Fraser for episode 134 of The Gargle - the glossy magazine to The Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world.All of the news, none of the politics! Hunter gatherers Landlord villains  Amish phones ReviewsStory 1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/Story 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/magazine/tiktok-landlords-villians.htmlStory 3: https://www.boredpanda.com/amish-smart-phones-emergency-alert-system/HOW TO SUPPORT THE GARGLE- Keep The Gargle alive and well by joining Team Bugle with a one-off payment, or become a Team Bugler or Super Bugler to receive extra bonus treats!https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/donateCONTENTS0:00 Start02:13 Front cover04:23 Satirical cartoon05:58 Story 1: The theory that men evolved to hunt and women evolved to gather is wrong13:33 Ads14:47 Story 2: The landlords of social media seem happy to play the villain25:07 Reviews31:13 Story 3: Amish men exposed as their phones rang during emergency alert test 38:02 Bye / Anything to plug? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Acast.com. This is a podcast from The Bugle. Out of the ocean they march, serried ranks of scaled men clad in exoskeletons of shell-curved whalebone flags slung over their shoulders. They're eerily silent apart from a surprisingly loud collective drip of water onto sand from a thousand slowly drying bodies like rain in summer and the gurgle of their ocean-filled water-breathing tanks. It is impossible to tell whether they're a threat or an invitation. Nobody's drawn a weapon, they just stand there, still and multitudinous, waiting for a signal. Nobody knows to meet them, they're unannounced. A small family down by the shore for a morning dips its frozen mid-sandcastlele ignored. The father draws his arms around his children and whispers,

it's the gargle. Yeah, this is the gargle. The Sonic Glossy Magazine to the Bugles. Audio newspaper for a visual world. I'm your host, Alice Fraser, and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Tiff Stevenson. Welcome back. Hello. Hi. Nice to be here.

It's one of those funny things with podcasting. Nice to be here, where it's the same place where you normally are. Nice to be in the corner of my living room. And Alison Spittel. Pew, pew, pew, hello. I am in my sitting room as well, and I live in a new place, and my downstairs neighbours, I've never met them before,

but they enjoy TV 12 hours a day at quite a loud volume so uh i've covered my i can like because i watch pointless every day at the same time but i pause it because i'm not a pervert you know i like to i like to pause it and work out stuff and then play it again and then i can hear they're also pointless people too so they can't be all bad you know what i mean at least they're not chase watchers but I can hear, they're also pointless people too, so they can't be all bad. You know what I mean? At least they're not chase watchers. But I can hear the cadence of it, you know, just below. And it freaks me out. So I'm here with my floor covered in cushions because I hear that soundproofing. I'll show it to you because you've got it on video here.

It's the gargle. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So, hopefully that's worked. Before we take hands and leap together into the soft play area that is this week's top stories, let's have a look at the front cover of the magazine. The front cover this week is Britney Spears posing provocatively

with a quarter of a century of provocative poses and the horrifying backstories that will make you feel ashamed for liking or disliking her music and public persona in the past. Alison, have you been tracking this exciting news? Oh, I've been listening to the audiobook. I've been reading all the tweets. Free Britney once again, and she's freeing herself through uh her book i um i do have an obsession with pop people who i feel are trapped by uh larger larger companies at hand

i'm a big pop conspiracy theorist do you know what i mean like i genuinely am um and uh yeah i'm really really happy that once again just Timberlake is getting in the neck. I feel like every year there's a reckoning where people are like, oh, my God, Justin Timberlake's a dickhead. And I've been like, I've been saying this the whole time, you know. But every year we get reminded. So it's been beautiful. Yeah, it's been great.

Was there any mention of the knife dancing? Not yet. I need to get to the later chapters. But the knife dancing not yet i need to get to the later chapters but the the knife dancing um was it representative of the fact she wasn't allowed near knives or something or she had sharp objects taken away from her do you know what reclaiming that sometimes it's the way sometimes i put batteries in my mouth i thought it was just sometimes you just don't think about you're just like oh this looks like fun i'll just dance with a knife. Pretend I'm in Beauty and the Beast or whatever, you know?

Yeah. Do you not do that sometimes? So I'd like to see what she has to say about the knife dancing. But in my head, I just presume that sometimes you just want to dance with a knife, you know? Yeah, it's one of those things that if you're just a cool dude with like a scar over one eye, no one questions dancing with a knife. Yes! This is sexism in the pop industry.

Yes. If you have an eye patch and a parrot on your shoulder. It's not all swashbucklingling just knife dancing from a certain perspective uh the satirical cartoon this week is cultural icon and maverick billionaire elon musk claiming he would give wikipedia a billion dollars if they changed their name to dickipedia a joke that i would write off as the lowest form of satire which is where someone says the name of someone they don't like wrong and also in an annoying voice like they're bullying them in primary school. I would write it off as a joke except with people who have billions of dollars, not enough of which they spend on no men, these kinds of impulsive jokes

directed at news and information platforms can turn into whatever the f*** Twitter is now. I feel all billionaires have to own at least one and ruin at least one newspaper oh yes and yeah I applaud Elon for going straight to the source of Twitter and now Wikipedia to to own and ruin not a newspaper a media source they're like puppies you know how to just piss all over newspapers it's very common and so you know if you said that in a serious tone by the way alice that he would change in the zikopedia i would believe you you know what i mean that that's like look i don't know what tone he used but he

definitely did say that that is the kind of satire that is me just saying the thing that has actually happened in real life oh man oh my god i'm such a case i was like alice has got it so on the point here she's really got him and it's like no it's him it's just just what he wants to do just his own words just just his own words his own petard if you will which brings us to our top story our top story this week is evolution news and this is the exciting news um that a very long-held evolutionary theory that men were evolved almost exclusively for hunting and women evolved for gathering um has been debunked by science and looking at skeletons and actual archaeology rather than superimposing our ideas of how things ought to be on the world. Tiff Stevenson, you know some hunters and gatherers.

Can you unpack this story for us? Okay, so it says that there's mounting evidence from exercise science that indicates women have physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons this advantage bears on questions about hunting because a prominent hypothesis contends early humans are thought to have pursued prey on foot over long distances until the animals were exhausted furthermore the fossil and archaeological records as well as ethnographic studies of modern day hunter-ers indicate that women have a long history of hunting game so um so proponents of the man the hunter theory which is what they talk about it as men being the meat winners which then evolved into modern day bread winner

winner of the bread i i'm already a winner of scottish plain uh which is which is a type of bread in scotland and also what i nicknamed my husband he's far from playing um but uh yes that that um they the man the hunter theory assumed evolution was acting primarily on men and women were merely passive beneficiaries of both the meat supply and evolutionary progress i've not known this theory i always thought and maybe i read it in people's history of the world but i always thought we hunted as teams um but just one half of the team had more skills than the other like and i always used to use that as a rebuttal as to why women couldn't do comedy because you know using that hunter-gatherer explanation is that men were

supposedly faster but women would often spot the prey and observe the land so they were the observers so the idea that women can't do observational comedy is a joke to me because women are we're we're observers like if you if you've ever argued with a woman a woman see everything hear everything remember everything so so i think what this is saying is that women also hunted well as far as I knew women also hunted but they were slower because they carried the babies so I thought it was like historical ginger rogers just doing everything that gene kelly did but backwards and in high heels so they were still hunting um you know they were just a bit slower at the hunting as is what I thought it's super interesting because I think the evolutionary theories that I grew up

with were first of all that like meat has more calories than vegetable stuff and so men were the calorie winners and then it became obvious from the fossil record and from archaeology that actually ate about 80% of a hunter-gatherer diet was from the gathered stuff because meat is actually pretty hard to get it's very hard to chase an antelope until it decides to give up and die and also fairly dangerous. And so over that period of time, it shifted towards then, oh, actually men might have done some of the gathering because the men who were doing this research were quite attached

to the idea of themselves as being the difference between life and death and uh now it looks like actually it was all pretty interchangeable if you were a good runner you would probably be a hunter and if you were good at fiddling with things you might have been a gatherer and uh gender might not have necessarily played that much into it except as you say probably if you just had a baby you're not up for a marathon um but uh I think it's fascinating or you're doing the marathon and and taking the baby like if you have to keep moving if you're part of a nomadic kind of people that are like if you have to keep moving then you just got to move with the baby so you just it is literally doing it all doing everything Gene Kelly does backwards in high

heels it's super fascinating because on one hand it doesn't matter it all already happened no matter how it happened nothing you can do or say now makes a difference to what actually happened but on the other hand it like these kind of theories reflect so much about what we believe about ourselves now and i've saw i've seen some really angry reactions to this basically people saying how dare you suggest that women have hunted because it they're in their narrative of the world women are not evolved to uh exhaust an antelope to death and that's that's the job of a man is to just to wear someone down until they give up um i'm beginning to see where yeah where the dating yeah where this has come from like well you keep asking she keeps saying no she'll say yes eventually yeah but i feel we need to kind of help these men work towards a more kind of uh historically consistent view of the world and just be like, who do you think would be best at nagging a gazelle to death?

And then we can claim our rightful place in anthropological history. This article says women were better over long distance as well, I think, wasn't it? Yeah, I mean, women hold the current ultra marathon championship record ship is that because of estrogen isn't it like estrogen is like uh they they were comparing testosterone and estrogen and testosterone is like talked up quite a lot uh in exercise but estrogen as a hormone kind of helps

you uh do stuff for longer also like, this was really interesting to me because my only knowledge of cavemen behavior was the Flintstones before. And I was trying to think of, like, a Flintstones gender reveal party. Like, what dinosaur would be used within that? You know, these have, have like a dinosaur that was a bin like how would fred flintstone do a gender reveal party and what kind of tapes would go wrong uh and it's just uh it's also like the flintstones came out in the 60s and this theory came out

in the 60s as well so this these were, I think... Man, the hunter theory. Yeah, the hunter theory. Yeah, and it's so strange because it feels like the sexual revolution was happening and then all of a sudden this theory came out that actually men are responsible for humankind continuing by hunting. And it does feel like this, you know, it feels like a kind of it feels very pointed

that's what I'm trying to say well around the same time they had was it the 60s where they had the the female orgasm is a myth oh yes you know so I think have we told some male comedians that still because I think they believe that like the amount of stand-up I've had to listen to where it's just been like, I can't make a woman cum, and that's okay. You know, it's just... And that's not my problem. Yeah.

I can't make a woman cum, and that's not my problem. That's a new problem. Just somebody levering themselves off and going, I thought you were a feminist. Aren't you meant to be empowered you can't have it all you know if you want to get job done do it yourself your ad section now because you can't be what you can't buy this episode of the podcast is brought to you by ferns ferns the dinosaurs of plants ferns why evolve ferns they're in your house looking down on your evolutionary optimization yeah and this episode of the podcast is brought to you by the human bottom the human bottom a

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Broomgate. Available now. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts. Everywhere. Acast.com. And now it's time for property news. This is the property news that landlords are going on social media basically talking about evicting single mothers, old people, people who are desperately ill and seeking help and kind of cackling about it, playing into kind of a villain trope as though they were proud of it.

Alison Spittel, you've just moved house. Can you unpack this story for us? Yes. It feels like we're back in Dickensian times, except people do dance routines while evicting people. I am... You've TikTok'd Dickens. Yeah.

Little Dorrit has got a dab. Don't look that up. That's a different thing. I am TikToked Dickens yeah so this um this is about like uh landlords in America um who are going on TikTok and talking about evicting people um as if it's a like as if it's a part of, sorry, it's kind of like landlords talking about eviction without any shame. That's what the news is about. It's about this guy on TikTok. His name is Tom Cruise. No relation to the actor. Maybe a relation to Ted Cruz. Yeah, could be. Could be a relation to the actor.

Maybe a relation to Ted Cruz. Yeah, could be. Could be a relation to Ted Cruz. But he talks about kicking out a single mother. And this article is about other landlords who make themselves kind of villainous on social media. They're either villainous or they're trying to encourage other people to uh become landlords I've seen I've seen a lot of landlord stuff on uh on TikTok um and like you know I've I've had landlords for about how many years now I'd say

about 18 years I've seen one landlord who who when i said i had a mold problem came around in a in like a really nice suit and cleaned out the mold himself like destroying his own suit like landlords are dumb they are they are not clever people you know uh think think about monopoly right is it is it the cleverest person in your family that wins Monopoly? No. It's the most untrustworthy shit weasel in your family. The type of family member where you wouldn't leave a spare mobile phone in front of and leave the room for 10 minutes. You know, that type of one.

So, like, yeah. Do you know what? It's very risky me saying this because I still rely on landlords for shelter. So, of course, to my current because I still rely on landlords for shelter. So of course, to my current landlord, not you, you're going. But the rest. So yeah, it's a very odd kind of article because it's very neutral.

When I was reading it, I kept like, there was this like big thing in my head going, guillotine, guillotine, guillotine. Like, they're genuinely they they they offer no skills slandered there's no skills they see it as a job it's not a job you know it's just uh uh wait i'll wait there i'm getting too rageful well it feels like this is a backlash to the trend on particularly on social media that arose particularly during covid when people had a minute to think wait a minute society isn't

uh geared in my favor i wonder why not uh it feels like there was a lot of anti-landlord stuff going around that people were you know pointing out for example that it's not a real job or um saying things like, oh, if you scalp tickets, if you buy tickets and then sell them at a markup, that's illegal. But if you do it with real estate, that's perfectly acceptable. And so it feels like this is the landlords trying to fight back, trying to take hold of the narrative.

But they've taken hold of the narrative essentially by tying a young lady some train tracks and saying, isn't my waxed moustache debonair? by tying a young lady some train tracks and saying isn't my waxed mustache debonair yeah it feels like they're sort of leaning into the to the empire side of this narrative i think landlords are very affected by the mental health crisis at the moment because like i've never seen an industry so susceptible to peer pressure in my life like my landlord last year was like i have to raise the rent everyone else is raising the rent that's essentially what the markets is the euphemism of the markets it

doesn't mean like they need more money it's like they can get more money other people in their industry are getting more money therefore they can get it too but it doesn't you know lots of landlords have their mortgages paid off. It's bullshit. And they just put the money, you know, if interest rates go up, it's always the renter. The renter never gets a break and I'm sick of it. Yeah.

The market dictates, which is such a great phrase because I imagine the market sitting down again. Okay, if you've got a notebook, write this down. Yeah. Well, it's if you want to feel really depressed about life and why wouldn't you you're listening to the gargle if you want to feel really depressed about life look at look up how much of the current

inflation uh in prices of consumer products is just companies going oh inflation's about to happen let's put our prices up really uh yeah well not for fun obviously for profit they don't do fun they sell fun this guy is purposefully going out of his way though i think to be like um uh provocative and confrontational because he says in one of his videos guys there's nobody protecting uh there's nobody protected in my portfolio the elderly the disabled the single mums so this guy deals solely in this ted ted cruz tom cruise guy deals solely in section 8 um housing which is welfare you know partially subsidized by the government so he specifically is looking for people who are vulnerable

or down on their luck or looking for work or whatever else. And he's got something like 650 homes across four states in the South and the Midwest. Guillotine, guillotine, kill, kill, kill. So I blame RuPaul's Drag Race for this. Really? Or reality television as a whole for teaching the general public

that you can become iconic by being a villain. Yeah. All you need to be is memorable. And so there's no incentive to be like nice anymore. You just need to... Who decided that, you know reality reality shows or that real estate people estate agents and landlords are the people we should give reality shows to and now that they're in the influencer you know you've got selling sunset which i am

obsessed with and i think it's because i don't own a property so i may as well watch these people and the 20 million pound mansions uh because that doesn't feel like reality like it feels like but if you don't know selling sunset the storyline is two tiny bald men surrounded by giant women yes that's pretty much that's the storyline and you have like heather and chris shall and maya and davina and mary and heather and heather and chris shall oh maya is Maya is my favorite. If you're listening and you watch Selling Sunset, Maya is the one who's like, Jason, I would like to go to Miami and sell some luxury apartments. And her main storyline is being pregnant across the five seasons.

And then there's Mary, whose husband appeared for the first two series and then just disappeared. And I think she's eaten him. I don't know. She looks very young. So maybe, And I think she's eaten him. I don't know. She looks very young. So maybe, you know, she's ingested. Maybe she's Brian Johnson'd him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've started watching van life videos on YouTube as an aspirational method now of living. Because I don't think I'll ever own a house. But I think if I work hard enough, I could own a van. You know what I mean? And just put a mattress in it and life's a good one. And like, it's very like, I've started watching van life videos and it's kind of, it's a very scary kind of prospect

because I don't feel safe in my house. How would I feel safe in a van? You know, it just feels, yeah it yeah it just feels wrong I don't know I've no ending to that actually I should that's just grim I feel sad now I feel like excited and bloodlusty over the landlords I think there's a stress to owning a home or even living in a home that would be doubled by the idea that you could crash your home yeah but you know what at least i'd be able to put a nail in a wall and stick up a picture without worrying about a deposit do you know what i mean like my last landlord took a picture of behind the oven to try and like take away my

deposit to go like look at behind the oven and it's like was it clean when i got it's just i just yeah that bit behind the oven where everyone goes to have a look that requires me i'm plumbing the oven to to go and clean behind it i think what you have to do now is you have to watch horror films this is what i do and we're in spooky season you've got to watch horror films like they're property renovation shows and then the horror films make a lot more sense like you know there's blood running down the walls yeah that's what happens if you try and dry clothes with the windows closed at the same time the taps keep turning on and off the doors are creaky um we just need some wd-40 on those and an exorcism and uh this old bitch is literally haunting the place because her property in the next life is part of a chain so we can't get out until until someone in the spirit world sells their property but uh yeah it's

it feels sometimes it feels like so far away and i don't know whether that's part of being in london to kind of um it's becoming seemingly impossible it seems like more and more especially in london more and more people are like renting now and not buying properties but fewer people own the properties that's it on the bright side allison if you uh in a van and your downstead neighbors are playing pointless too loudly you know you've found the teenage mutant ninja turtles and now it's time for your reviews as you know each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review out of five stars uh tiff what have you brought in for us this week oh what am i going to review this week i think i'm going to review fake tan um because um you

know last week i went for a spray tan and i feel like it's still developing um well I'm developing as a human and the term but I don't know when it's going to stop no I think the worst part of having a spray tan is when they say can you lift your boobs so I can spray underneath and then you have a little cry and then that streaks all the tan on your face I like the idea of um of feeling like it's summer all year round um but the reality is I end up with like a kind of like like Turing shroud on my sheets I get yeah like fake is there Jesus in my fake tan I've had a professional fake tan once and I felt like a driveway that was being cleaned do you know it felt satisfying I'm gonna just spray you and I'm like yes like a driveway that was being cleaned. Do you know, it felt satisfying. I'm going to just spray you. And I'm like, yes.

Like a pressure, yeah. Like a pressure hose. Yeah, I would love to be pressure hosed. I mean, that is essentially water cannon. Maybe in a few weeks when I protest, I'll regret those words. But at the moment, I'd love to be pressure hosed. You know, I'm going gonna say spray tan like three

out of five i like the results but i don't like the admin i don't like the other i don't like the side effects which are the sheets and the interacting with a with another human who asked me to lift up my boobs i don't know if this is like confessing to a deep lack of femininity or something but i've never had a fake tan. I feel like I've missed out on a coming of age kind of experience. Yeah, you need to get into ballroom dancing. You'll have to have one daily for that. Competitive ballroom dancing or anything.

You know, sometimes it's sort of mad isn't it I sometimes have it for you know a tv recording or something because studio lights are so strong and absolutely blast you that actually just to kind of look like normal on screen like oh yeah so maybe this is it my lack of television uh credits means that I've never had to have a fake tan I always assumed it was for like ball ballroom dancing. And then it's just so that, because as far as I can tell from all these dancing shows, they end up having affairs with their dance partners.

So it's just that you know whose sheets who's been in. Yes. Yeah. You're rubbing tan off on each other infinitely. You never need to get it topped up. Ripping off each other's paper knickers from the tan itself. Yeah. See, Alice, you've never suffered the indignity of paper knickers

or those little eye things that you put on. They give you these little like foil things and you bend them and pop them into your... Oh, yes. You get as much of your face sprayed as possible. So, you know, there's fun. You're missing out, Alice. There's fun stuff.

Well, she could just put a covid mask on her on her fanny and that would be the equipment just put your two legs into the ear holes uh alison what have you brought into review this week i've brought into review i regret now not going up with like a fake talent uh there's this book I really like called Reach for the Stars by Michael Craig, which is a history of pop music from the late 90s to early 2000s. And because I'm reading the Britney Spears book at the moment, it's made me, reminded me of how much I love that book.

And it came out this year. And I just want to say, I think Simon Fuller, who used to be the manager of the Spice Girls and S Club 7, should be in The Hague for war crimes, genuinely. There should be some sort of UN human rights kind of investigation into the way that people were treated in the late 90s. I remember once I read Smash Hits

and they asked Rachel Stevens for some nutritional advice. And she said that she would eat two spoonfuls of beans, cold baked beans for a protein hit. And that made me stop wanting to be a pop star. I thought like, if that's the life that you have, you would publicly say that you like eating cold beans out of half a can.

That is not a life well lived. So I'm going to give it five stars out of five. It's an incredible book. Genuinely gives a history of like loads of stuff. And it's like mostly working class people as well

that were pop stars. Not nowadays, where like they're the sons and daughters of someone of it i'm getting angry again it's this it's landlordism or it's nepo babies in pop music and i gotta stop i feel i feel like if you're treating uh two spoonfuls of beans like a hero and hit you need to at least heat up those beans with a lighter underneath chase the flatulence that would be amazing and i'm sorry but like you know this podcast is a very big proponent of a

half a half a glass of water half a tin of beans it's a more grimmer you know that that's the rachel stevens equivalent of alice fraser it's half a tin of beans do's a more grimmer you know that that's the rachel stevens equivalent of alice fraser it's half a tin of beans do you think that was given to her to say or do you think that's genuine i think what like genuinely what i think happened is that they probably when they said nutritional advice of pop stars they looked for like when pop stars talked about food do you know what i mean i'd say that was it i don't think rachel stevens rang up smash it because guys have you heard of a two spoonfuls of beans like that's a cry for help that's like calls up the sun press office i've got an exclusive for you

two two spoonfuls of beans very satisfactory and that's I don't know and that brings us to Amish news now and a number of Amish men have been shunned from their communities shunned by their communities

after an emergency alert test revealed their secret mobile phones. Alison Spittel, you have at least five secret mobile phones. Can you unpack this story for us? Oh, and so many crevices. So in the US, it was a similar thing to what happened in the UK earlier this year. Basically, all phones were set off an alarm uh it was a practice run for when shit goes really bad although shit is pretty bad right now i i'm like i'm thinking

what kind of cataclysmic event is gonna is gonna need uh these phones to go off but um in the amish community it is kind of frowned upon to have a modern uh modern stuff like mobile phones and uh some amish people were keeping secret mobile phones and that's because they wanted to be upstanding in their community but also play wordle at the same time you know these were the types of people that were doing that and uh because the alarm went off uh lots of discoveries were made of people in the Amish community who had secret mobile phones and there has been some shunnings according to a fellow on TikTok so it's interesting because like uh I was reading this article and it says there's there's many different types of shunnings shunnings to me seems like a very old style version of cancel culture it's like

you know the amish they're able to make their own butter and also they're able to cancel in real time too and uh one of the one of the ways that they've uh they they shun right is uh if when visiting your amish family and you want to serve a glass of water to your parents, you must leave it on the table for one of your younger siblings to give it to your parents. You're not allowed to hand your parents a glass of water if you've been shunned, which really makes me think that these people need Candy Crush in their lives. They have too much spare time. That is too much thought that's gone into it.

time that is too much thought that's gone into it and um it's uh yeah it's uh it's it's very interesting to me this this Amish uh community because they're very secretive and quiet and I've thought about that and I was like that's because they don't have smartphones and they're not showing off their business all the time like if I wanted to know what it's like to work in Starbucks I go into TikTok and I find out every single detail I know all the recipes I know the shift work I could watch uh I do you know what I do watch I watch a guy called Tom the taxi driver who drives around London and it's just in real time he's driving around he talks about I've never had an interest in being a taxi driver myself but I find it incredibly compelling and interesting and uh you know like so it is it is uh maybe

maybe actually they're dead right not to have their phones the more i talk about this maybe i have too much time on my hands maybe i should make my own butter you know instead of dead scroll death scrolling so the armature against anything that they feel weakens the family structure and i'm pretty sure uh that that texting at the dinner table does weaken the family structure. It's not to say that the Amish community completely eschews phones. They'll often have like a shared phone in a shed that a couple of families will be able to use for whatever nefarious phone usage purposes they might need to have. nefarious phone usage purposes they might need to have. But it's sort of the home phone and the private phone are not permitted, not allowed.

Tiff, have you been shunned recently? I thought it was an anti-electricity thing. I thought that that's why they didn't have phones. I thought that there was this kind of like more, like that's why you've got horses and carriages because they don't believe in you know petrol vehicles and that kind of machinery it's like very old-fashioned labor and labor being good for the soul and the heart and that everyone in their very clearly defined roles within the within the community but i could be wrong but

what i liked about this story was that there was a double shunning a double shunning a double shun yeah so i don't know whether that then if you're double shunned does that become unshun oh no is it like a double negative like it cancels it out i don't know one guy says the elders were coming coming in his driveway and they were there to speak to him about something they'd heard about him that he might have to get shunned we need to come and talk like i love the have the grapevine so they you know they don't need uh twitter or x i still can't bring myself to call it that um you know to hear rumors it's just within the community and um he said when that was going on the alert went off and the phone was in his pocket and now he's getting shunned for both whatever they're about to shun him for and also the cell phone the double shun

amazing i mean what a what a life but also how long how long does the shunning last for like there's something about it that maybe in a way is a bit more satisfying within the amish community because i think uh you were talking about as a version of being cancelled but at least with the shunning I presume it's for a length of time and it's very specific about what the person's being shunned for so it's like you get shunned for two weeks um no one speaks to you they're not allowed to communicate with you and you just have to stew in your own juices for two weeks and then you are unshawn and back in the community but it's scary because there's no central kind of governing force there's no and there's no central rules so

you are just relying on the most uppity of your community to uh to do the shunning and like if you i'd say they love shunning like i'd say the people who do shun love it too much. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Cause it's a, well, yes.

Yeah. Yeah. There are people who are calling for shunnings on the weekly. Yeah. Who are we shunning this week? As opposed to. If I was Amish, I'd be shunning all around me.

I'd be going shunning postal. So I wouldn't talk to anyone. I'd be a hermit. I'd be like, you postal. So I wouldn't talk to anyone. I'd be a hermit. I'd be like, you're all shunned. But then technically you've shunned yourself. Exactly. Exactly. And I'd do it again.

Before turning the shunning against herself. She shunned everybody else. Yeah, machine shun. Yeah. Shun rights for everyone exactly out of my cold dead hands i mean that is what i'm going to call the block button on twitter from now on is the machine shun and that brings us to the end of this episode of The Gargle. I'm flipping through the ad section at the back. Tiff, have you got anything to plug? I will be plugging Catharsis if you want to hear it.

We've got lots of episodes, so get those into your ears. Also Old Rope, which is at the Comedy Store, November 13th, I think is the next show. It's the second Monday of the month and we've got some incredible lineups coming up um and i believe uh assaultsman maybe at some point i'm waiting to find out if that'll be uh uh november or december so yeah and also check out slotherhouse which is streaming on hulu if you're in amer and Paramount UK if you like

comedy horror films, if you like me, if you like sloths, if you like yeah, if you like funny, ridiculous stuff, so there you go well then you'll enjoy Slotherhouse, so go watch that. Excellent, Alison

have you got anything to plug? Ooh baby yes, I have a tour it's called Soup it's starting off in New Milton and Fairham and I've looked at my ticket sales today no sales there so go buy tickets if you're there

because I don't want to start off my tour with no people coming you'll definitely get some ponies and some horses and I'll tell people I know. Go see Alison. Go see me. I'm touring around in 2024. Go see me in different places.

Also, I'm in Westport this Saturday. I'm in Wicklow the next Saturday. And I'm doing a thing called Kilkenomics as well, which is the weekend after this, which is good fun. Anyway, that's all the bits and do. I got an email in from my website form, which I maintain, because I do like to get the occasional deranged email. This one says,

Hi Alice, or whoever screens these. Mmm, secret. Behind the curtain glance. It's me. My wife is a big fan, and I heard that you have a book out. That said, I can't tell if it's something you've co-written or if Dancy Lagarde is a character, or what. Apologies if this have a book out. That said, I can't tell if it's something you've co-written or if Dancy Lagarde is a character or what. Apologies if this is a dumb question.

Kind regards, the name. First of all, it's not a question. You haven't asked a question there. You've just made a series of statements hoping that I will leap into the breach and elucidate what and who Dancy Lagarde is. I feel there are so many places i could begin to answer that but nowhere that i could end answering that i can either send you back to the last post podcast

which is still available if you want to go back to a really weird sci-fi experiment that we ran during the year that was 2020 or uh you could go there's a wiki page if you want to look up all of the dancy lagarde advertisements or also you can go to unbound.com and buy the Dancy Lagarde reader currently on pre-order there and read the whole book which includes an interview with Dancy

Lagarde and a series of other bits and pieces which ought to explain what and who Dancy Lagarde is but probably actually you will read that book and be none the wiser. I certainly wrote that book and was none the wiser at the end of that. So that's unbound.com and write in Alice Fraser or the Dancy Lagarde reader to buy your copy.

If you would like to be a roving reporter for The Gargle, if you see a story that you think would be a hilarious part of this podcast, tweet us at HelloGogglers or over on Blue Sky. We are also there at The Gargle. I think. You'll find it. There's only like eight people on Blue Sky. I'm there.

I'll come along. I'm Alice Fraser. You can find me online at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. It's one stock shop full of my stand-up specials, podcasts and blogs, as well as my weekly writers' meetings and my Tea with Alice salons. At the moment, you can get all of that for a dollar a month, as well as Twist and Kronos,

which are coming out in the next three weeks, which are my last two stand-up specials will be available there for free. 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

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