The Gargle - Meta legs | Pong | Naturists

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

Alison Spittle and John-Luke Roberts join host Alice Fraser for episode 84 of The Gargle, the weekly topical comedy podcast - with no politics!🦵 Legs are a lie🧫 Lab-grown cells play Pong ��� 7m naturists in UK🦀 Crabs cancelled🍹 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. the lust for sleep. As Elon Musk buys Twitter, Kanye West buys Parler, you buy a bottle of water and scream at the soon-to-be-privatized void of space hiding behind the blue shell of the atmosphere because actually, even though you're on Earth, nobody's listening to you scream unless you start a YouTube channel and become a screamfluencer. You take a deep breath, but before you let

it out, you recognize that taste in the air. It's smoky, sweet, full of memories. It reminds you of the gargle. The Sonic Glossy Magazine to the Bugles Audio Newspaper for Visual World. All memories. It reminds you of the gargle. The sonic, glossy magazine to the Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world, all of the jokes and all of the politics. I'm your host, Alice Frazier, and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Alison Spittel and John Luke Roberts. Hello.

Hi. Boo-boo-boo-boo. Hello. Hi. Hi. I mean, you said hi like you were starting a sentence. Who did? Me?

Yeah. No, I mean, you said hi like you were starting a sentence. Who did? Me? Yeah. No, I just like taking up space. Before we sit together shoulder to shoulder on the friendly bench that is this week's stories, let's have a look at the front page. Your front page today is James Corden posing provocatively with an egg yolk omelette. Did any of you see that story? Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's the first I've ever heard of an egg yolk omelette. I didn't think you could make such a thing. I would assume that would just be a slab. Yeah now I think about it. It's because

it's mainly like the white that holds the thing together isn't it? It's the yolk for the flavour the white for... Isn't an egg yolk omelette just mayonnaise? Yeah. Or custard. Oh yeah, it's weird how close mayonnaise and custard are to each other. I don't like that. I don't like that at all. They're cousins. They're cousins, John.

Kissing cousins. Put them on a sandwich together and see what happens. That is incest. We don't really... I don't like that at all. No, I'm suggesting in bread, not... In bread. Wait, that's enough, isn't it? We can end the podcast there.

I think we've peaked. The satirical cartoon this week is a Halloween-themed one. Boris Johnson rising from the dead while an everyman figure labelled the elector electorate scream why won't you just die and hit him with a shovel marked his track record now it's time for your top stories this week is everybody strapped in and ready for the metaverse this is such exciting uh news for I feel. The metaverse is a terrifying place that we could all have less of. Meta is the new new Facebook, the old Facebook being the original and best place to find the people you went to uni with

whose phone numbers have changed. The new Facebook being a click hole of boomers and regime shattering levels of misinformation and bot armies riding the algorithm to terrible minions memes. The new new Facebook is meta, selling you the possibility of never looking up from your phone again, because it'll strap your phone to your face, and you can live in the metaverse.

A world that is everything you hate about social media, but you can't see the sun. It's like a game, but full of ads selling you one weird trick, and you have no legs, and the legs they promised you were a lie. Alison Spittel. You live in an alternate universe made of uh code can you unpack this story for us so basically mark zuckerberg he's been promising uh that a metaverse will have legs and he did it through a video with another person who works in facebook

and what happened is uh they actually got the legs from motion capture and they the the metaverse is not ready for legs yet and it's very weird to me it feels like it feels like it's no better than a brat stall you know at least with a brat stall they have uh if you've ever have you ever touched a brat stall before um or seen it up close they don't know Would I be talking to you today if I have? I'm no fool. I won't touch a Bratz doll. Well, I've brushed up against a few Bratz dolls in my day. That explains a lot.

Being a geriatric millennial that I am. And Bratz dolls, they have like interlockable feet where the doll itself doesn't have feet. And then you just attach the shoes like their feet and so like the technology of a 99 Bratz doll is better than metaverse also metaverse should just buy the sims like I don't understand the sims have legs the sims was invented in like the year 2000 and I can watch a werewolf

woohoo with a vampire and yet in the metaverse it can't have legs. I think Mark Zuckerberg has got a thing or two to learn. Also imagine being the person that works for Facebook that has to use the motion capture for your legs

like you're just running around like Andy Serkis with tennis balls on you for your boss, the Baron Mark Zuckerberg. It just feels like it's not a great place to work at all. Well, it just feels like with $10 billion, you should get below the waist at least. Is this what, the metaverse or? Well, they've spent $10 billion this year alone

on the technology for the metaverse, yes. And also they haven't had legs up until this point but they've also not had anything else up until this point i think if i were you know we can all imagine ourselves being a billionaire if i were a billionaire running a ridiculous vanity project that is definitely not going to work i would have done like upper body realized i couldn't animate legs and then given everyone giant slug bodies because who hasn't wanted to be Jabba the Hutt? Who didn't watch Star Wars and think, yeah, that's me? John Luke?

I don't have anything to add. Partly because anything I would have said has sort of been covered. And partly because, like, who is this man? And why is he doing these things? I would like this. I don't like... I mean like and you can't even

even with motion capture you can't get legs looking good it's two people dancing about looking a little bit surprised at their feet and one of them with a colossally large skull which cannot be supported by those tiny tiny little animated toothpick legs i don't we're meant to buy this we're meant to be happy in that universe and not sitting there going something has gone horribly horribly wrong i don't know i mean it seems to me obviously the question that facebook ask at every point of their progress is what now can we next do to make the world a bit worse and it's interesting to me that they finally got to the point where the answer to that question is legs not just promise legs and under deliver yeah yeah imagine and wait also one more thing

did those feet come free with the bat stalls or did you have to buy them separately like were you just left with they came free with the bat stalls but you could buy other feet you know what i mean but the feet were inside the shoe yeah it was kind of a oh it was very odd but you couldn't take the feet out of the shoes so you'd never really see feet if you took the brats shoes off right you would just be left with two stumps at the bottom of their feet so if in the brats universe there was a cinderella yeah she would have dropped her foot on the stairs at midnight as she ran away it would have been horrific

would he then have been able to actually attach that foot to any Bratz doll that he found maybe like a lot of old fairy tales he just followed a trail of blood you know where is she the prince licked at the trail

of blood until it took him to the woman. Your ad section now because you can't be what you can't buy. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by the ad section now t-shirt because you can't be what you can't buy and you can buy this merch or you can't but you will be able to soon

if I organise it. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by homemade play-doh uh i i should have googled how you make it homemade play-doh uh what you need is um some all-purpose flour cream of tartar cheap table salt vegetable canola oil gel food coloring and about half a glass of water. Ah, you thought I didn't know where I was going, but I knew where I was going all along. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by melted ice cream, a perfect soup for making you realise that looks do matter. Ice cream, you wouldn't eat it if it wasn't cold,

unless you were very sad. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by memories. It's like now now but it was then and your brain can vaguely visit it but by no means as well as you think it can memory have you tried it before acas 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 Acast. and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com And now it's time for your gaming news. Gaming news now. Lap-grown brain cells can play Pong. This is the story.

Arguably, it's contained in the headline. John Luke Roberts, you have a brain cell can you unpack this story for us that is the nicest thing you've ever said to me um yep they've so scientists working in collaboration with uh bioethicists which is the french for organically made ethicists they've got a bunch of brain cells together they've put them in a little pot they've tied them to a video game with some electrical string or as you call it wire and they've made they've made the brain cells no the brain cell has learnt itself i think they haven't taught the brain cell how to do this the brain cells are playing pong the game where you've got two little white um rectangles moving around bouncing a ball around the screen so that's what they've done they have managed to cut the human aspect out of playing video games completely so that basically

video games become self-playing if you attach them to some brain cells so that's going to save everyone a lot of time and we can get on doing more work rather than playing those games that we've had to play the mini brain apparently learned how to play pong in five minutes which is depressing because i'm pretty sure it took me longer um alison spittle have you played pong recently yeah i actually i actually haven't i did terrible at it i'm very scared of stuff becoming sentient but i'm very comforted that it's only pong if it could play uh abe's odyssey uh i would be very afraid that is a, very hard game to play. Also, in this article, it discusses what sentience is,

and it says that it's not quite sentient because it can't have feelings or sensations, which to me sounds like a billionaire who's not allowed crisps. He can't have feelings, and he also can't have Walker's sensations, Thai sweet chilli. Because I'm sure if billionaires did eat crisps on a regular, it would be Walker's sensations

because they're quite expensive. But yeah, I... Maybe they would have like a higher... I wonder what kind of crisps Elon Musk would have. Probably like communion wafers or something. Just stuff that you can't really get as a normal person. What, blessed by the Pope communion wafers? Yeah, blessed by the...

Prawn cocktail. Prawn cocktail. Pope cocktail flavour, you know. Mark Zuckerberg just brushing the virtual crisp flakes off his virtual legs to... I mean, that is the great thing about eating chips in the metaverse. A, you can't taste them. B, you can't feel them. And C, you don't have to clean up the crumbs.

They just fall through your empty holes. They're trying to find out what a sentience is. I know what a sentience is. It's a collection of words which has a fully stirred at the end. Now it's time for your reviews reviews section as you know each week we get our guest editor to bring in something to review out of five stars john luke what have you brought in for us this week i have a review of the uh 10 minutes before the podcast started when i realized that i had ground the coffee but not poured the hot water that I had

an egg frying getting too hot for the kind of consistency of egg I like also suddenly needed to go to the loo um and there's something else that had gone horribly wrong as well but basically I'd started about four different things and then I had to do the second and third parts of those things and then I got the microphone out realized I'd stored the microphone really well and taken it apart so I was running around these like getting the egg out putting it on the sausages coming back to the microphone to screw the microphone in before plugging the thing in and then I had to the kettle boiled so I had to go and pour that and then it was all a lot rushed and then I had to eat the egg and sausage thing which I did very very quickly quite impressively but did leave me

in a state of alarm and panic and it was the most thrilling start I've ever had to recording a podcast so I give it five stars five stars I I wouldn't I mean I feel like um sausage and thrills are antithetical to one another I feel like sausage is sort of inherently the most calming of foods no one's excited by a sausage. Oh, like a second wave feminist, you. Alison, what have you brought in for us? So I'm reviewing sangria, which is a beverage I had while on holiday last week. I thought I didn't like wine before, whether it be red or white, but I realized what I like is my wine to be chunky and I just can't get enough of those chunks. It's amazing. It's an incredible beverage. You can get it almost everywhere in Spain. It's a bit of a risk to ask actually because like some if they don't serve it it's because it's a really nice

restaurant and they're quite disgusted with you that you would want sangria with your food but I just love to chew on something while uh while drinking alcohol it's like it's like a boozy version of bubble tea it's exactly like that it's exactly isn't it i mean it's not socially acceptable to drink on the street you know if you're just walking around having a sangria jug in one hand glass in the other yeah ole you know they're like what but uh i i really really like it i really enjoy it i i've never had a bad one yet and uh it more love it more sangria please it also weirdly is quite like sick in a comforting way like the way mcdonald's is did you ever get that like a big mac has the flavor profile of

vomit but i but i like it i'm really scared that you're right you genuinely bite into a big mac next it won't put you off it will just make you accept puke more in your life genuinely does that mean that there's something in the big mac which is already digesting it before you eat it. Oh my God. Pineapple. I just have a vision of Ronald McDonald just eating himself. Ronald McDonald getting the burger out, taking the lid off and then just... Some acid from his stomach just on top so it will start before he hands it over to the person who, shaking, the front desk and gives it to you are we all like baby birds we're just holding our mouths open while our mum ronald mcdonald just vomits big mouth

this is horrifying five stars five stars yeah I imagine that's why people debate about pineapple on pizza because pineapple's the only food that eats you while you're eating it

oh my gosh that's so true pineapple the 69 of fruit I did a did a podcast yesterday and pineapple came up

where this woman was discussing she was talking about discussing she was talking about okay she was talking about giving blowies and she insisted that she would have pineapple juice before she gave blowies and would say to the men i'm doing this for you and they would be like what and she she did not get the understanding of why she do you get what i'm saying yes she thought it made sperm taste better but you have to

yeah but I mean it could do because it probably destroys your taste buds also it does mean oh you've got the taste of oh would she drink it she wouldn't like oh because I've seen her still holding it in her mouth well

just She wouldn't like... Oh, because I've seen her still holding it in her mouth. Like, just creating a seal, you know, around there, and then holding around. In which case... Gargling. It's not going to affect the flavour unless you Ronald McDonald it. Oh, please, I'm going to use Ronald McDonald in every... I understand her logic, though, because if you want chocolate milk, you don't feel chocolate to the cow.

Put the chocolate in your mouth and then drink the milk. She, like, raw-dogging flavoured condoms by just bringing the flavour. Do's like, raw doggy flavoured condoms by just bringing the flavour. Do you know what I mean? Like, somebody who doesn't use condoms anymore but still wants the frill of like a flavoured condom. No, no, you have to feed the condom

to the man. If you want the taste of the flavoured condom. He has to eat it. That's where the penis has to eat the condom. I mean, by her logic, she'd be filling the condom with Smarties and then putting it on. Like a Smarties meal. Like she's trying to... Peddy's looking concerned concerned this is all staying nude news now nearly seven million people in the uk identify as naturists or nudists so if you're

walking through the world looking at people in clothes know that at least a certain percentage of them are unhappy to be there. Alison Spittel, you're wearing clothes. Can you unpack this story? Yes, so this story, apparently some organisation of nudists have done an online survey and said that there's been a big jump in people admitting to being nudist because you would admit to more stuff on the internet than you would if someone came to your house and asked you if you're a nudist because they would you would admit to more stuff on the internet than you would if someone came to your house and asked you if you're a nudist which i would love to be like a fly on the wall for the for the past surveys that the naturists have done where is this someone knocking on your door going have you accepted new your lord and savior titties into your life you know

it's just encouraging people to become nudists. Modern society is weighed down by a body confidence crisis and more and more people are discovering the benefits that nudity brings to mental, emotional and physical health by allowing us to reclaim ownership of our identities. I think before I was brought up Catholic and a real prude and the older I'm getting, the more I kind of see nudism as something that's not a direct attack on me or,

you know, like before I'd be like, uh, scandalized by this. But, um, I think the older I get, the more accepting I am.

I would rather see someone's skin tags and nipples than see a game over married t-shirt. You know, those t-shirts you see i love i saw do you know what i saw i live in camden and uh i saw a t-shirt being sold that said i can lose the weight but can you lose the face and the t-shirt was in an extra extra small and i would just love to know the person that bought that because like that is i mean number one why would you manufacture something with that statement on

such a small t-shirt but naturism they're a bit like the pro-life movement in the way that like the pro-life movement their name i i want to see when this is going well just to say that like the pro-life movement their name is pretty positive and you you can't really... I'm pro-abortion. That's what I am as a person, right? But I would never say that I'm anti-life. So you can't really go, I'm against pro-life. You have to go, I'm pro-choice. And then for naturism, it's a lovely word

for just getting your balls out in the fresh air. I mean, that's how I feel. maybe that was a bit of a weird analogy but like you know sometimes you hit and you miss i feel like there's not a lot of orthodox naturists i feel like it's sort of a shame because you ought to be able to know what a naturist is you ought to be able to know whether someone is a naturist by looking at them. A lot of people think lying. Well, no, because even then you could look at them

and just not know whether they're a naturist or just forgetful. John Luke, you've done nude comedy before, I assume. Can you unpack this? It's because of the clown school,

isn't it? Actually, I'd like to go on record. No, I would always put a fake penis made of rubber balloons on over my real one because i thought that was funny but it turns out most audience members do not look directly at the exposed penis so they all thought i was naked anyway so there we are um so being a naturist as i am presumably it's doing things naked so doing things naked that people would normally do naked does not make you a naturist so having a bath or banging but the questions they were asking were things like

have you gone swimming without a swimming costume on and like have you been to an outdoor naked beach um but nothing like do you play snooker in the buff and um how much cooking do you do without clothes on like can you be naked in your own flat if there's can you be a naturist in your own flat if there's no one else there or does that just count as is that normal so i used to live in a one-bedroom flat and it was mine and in my conception the flat was my clothes did you stick your arms like out the windows and so i felt like you know this is my space i can i don't need to wear clothes in this space uh but then if i invited someone around for tea, I realized that I was so habituated to being like at least semi-nude in my own space

that as I walked in the door, I was unclipping my bra. And I was like, this is the wrong message to be sending. Oh, you mean with them walking in behind you? Yeah. What you should have done is made them like, they should have gone in to take their clothes off, gone into the flat next door. You're both in clothes, gone into the flat next door.

You're both in clothes speaking across the hallway. Alaskan crab news now. This is the sad crab news that Alaska has cancelled its snow crab season after a snow crab population collapse. Normally they have a winter snow crab season and now it's not allowed. Now it is not permitted to hunt the precious snow crab. John Luke, you do this with your hands a lot of the time. Can you unpack this story for us? Yes. I mean, it is quite a sad story that for some reason the snow crab population has... There was a boom, but then it collapsed the following year.

They thought they were going to have a huge peak and they've all gone. And so now they're banning the normal season where people go and hunt the crabs and a big crab can sell for a hundred dollars or something like that but i will say i misread this and thought that crabs had been cancelled so i have a list of reasons why amazing you would would cancel crabs bad at typing they do not appreciate jokes like, make it snappy. They're always giving it all that, which is another joke they wouldn't appreciate. They have a lot of legs for very little height,

which seems silly. Although they have eight legs, they cannot make webs. They're very defensive. They pinch things a lot. And honestly, which one do you want sea or land pick a side guy so that's how i feel about crabs and 100 of crabs are naturist that's true depends if you count the shell as the inside or the outside no well that's the skeleton on the outside so apparently they're even more naturist than uh than human naturists

crabs walk sideways don't they like that's another big part of the crab mythology well it depends if you're on whose perspective you're looking if you're if you're a crab maybe we walk sideways maybe that's true but i think they'd be great on a on a on a comedy panel show about politics because they could have a sideways look at the news you know other than the fact that everything evolves to become crabs eventually so i feel like we don't need to be too worried about the collapse of this population i'm just looking for reasons not to be too worried about the fact that the world is a disaster right now that in australia we're currently having more flooding but it's not news because it's flooding on top of the places that were

already flooded and we're having our third round of la nina which means again like no bushfires but more floods and I just don't know how many more floods you can have before we're all just standing in the ocean and we have to admit that we don't have a country. Genuinely I had this realisation in this podcast the world is absolutely boned because if you're a megalomaniac

billionaire and you want people to love you, you could save the world but they're not doing that they're putting legs on avatars and uh buying twitter they should be putting legs on crabs yeah like it's fine i've kind of accepted it or maybe i'm a bit too accepting but if billionaires are farting around doing really really silly stuff when there's very very serious stuff maybe the serious stuff isn't fixable and maybe we should all just be silly i think that's what i'm going to be doing i was thinking about this the other day i got locked outside of my uh chalet in spain

and the electric turned off and it was just fully blackness everywhere and it felt very apocalyptic and i left a jar of nutella out on the patio and i just put my fist into it and ate it off my hand and looked at twitter and i was like this is what i'm gonna do when the world ends i'm gonna self-soothe by eating stuff out of jars and just talk shit on twitter a beautiful communing with the cosmos thing and then you and then there's a jar of Nutella and Twitters appeared in it. Yeah! I thought, look up, look up, the stars, the stars. And I was like, no, no, I want to see what an all yolk egg omelette looks like and eat my feelings at the same time.

Those aren't your feelings, that's Nutella. I know. Yeah, they make it without palm oil, but with your feelings. I think oil but with your feelings so delicious when you're sad that is all the time we have for the show we are flipping through the ads at the back Alison Spittel have you got anything to plug I do I do I do I'm on tour so the 5th of November I'm gonna be in Dublin and then I'm going to different places in the UK. I'm going to go to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle, Belfast, Brighton, Warwick, Manchester, Leicester at some point as well. You can go to my Instagram.

I've got a link tree in the bio. You can go to my website. I'm going to sort that out today. And yeah, come see me on tour and listen to my podcast Wheel of Misfortune I'm recording episodes now and it's coming back very excited What should people see of yours John Luke?

I think I've got one last run out in the UK for my Edinburgh show A World Just Like Our Own Butt in February over Valentine's Day in London I'm making a documentary for Radio 4 about Infinite Jest for a thing called The Exploding

Library, which I think is out at the end of the year. So listen to that when it comes out. It should be quite fun, I think. Also, you have an album on sale on your website. Oh, I do. I have an album called This Is Better, which I made during lockdown. A whole show just made for especially for vinyl with a brilliant musician, John Chambers, which I think the easiest

place to buy is to go to Monkey Barrel's website, monkeybarrellrecords.com and order it from there I'll be doing Kronos live in Brisbane on the 12th of November at Good Chat Comedy I've booked one

solo show I've not done a solo show in Brisbane before it's a little experiment to see if people come out and watch me if you do then I can come

and visit my twin Moor who lives here in Queensland so please share that with your Brisbane friends so I can visit my brother, I miss him. Find me online at at alliterative on Twitter and Instagram

that's 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 specials, podcasts and blogs. You get all my stand up specials there for free. I feel like I should mention that more often. If you sign up to Patreon you get all of my stand up specials and then you can just cancel it after a month so you can sign up for a dollar you get all of my stand-up specials, and then you can just cancel it after a month. So you can sign up for a dollar and get

all of my stand-up specials, including Kronos. So imagine how much more comedy, one whole more hour, you could get for free on my Patreon. Thank you to our roving reporters for this week. C. Lips, Paul Crawford, Robert Silito and Lockie, who sent the Pong Playing Brain Cells, and

Andrew Jones, who sent in the Naturist's story. If you would like to be a roving reporter for The Gargle, tweet us at Hello who sent in the naturists story if you would like to be a roving reporter for the gargle tweet us at hello garglers with the story that you think we might find funny in a way that we could make funny for you 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 programmes from The Bugle, including The Bugle, The Last Post, Tiny Revolutions and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts.