The Gargle - Moon smash | Bumblebees | Ukuleles

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

Laura Davis and Sami Shah join host Alice Fraser for episode 81 of The Gargle, the weekly topical comedy podcast - with no politics! Smashing up a moon Bumblebees are fish Ukuleles on a plane Federer retires  ReviewsProduced by Ped Hunter and Chris Skinner. SUBSCRIBE TO TOP STORIES: https://pod.link/TopStories 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. rings and they shuffle wearily back to lodgings for their grey serving of thin gruel. It does little to sustain their stunted bodies. One small boy, plump cheeks hollowed out by hunger, angelic and ambitious, returns to the line when he has finished his meagre slop. Please, sir, he says, stretching forward his tin plate. Please, sir, can I have the gargle? This is the gargle, the sonic glossy magazine to the bugle's audio newspaper for Visual World. I'm your host, Alice Fraser, and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Laura Davis. Hello.

And Sammy Shah. Hey, hey, hey. It's an all Perth special guest. It is indeed, although no one's in Perth, right? I'm in Perth. Laura, are you in Perth? You can hear it in my voice, I'm in Perth. It's the bushfire smoke I'm currently choking on.

That's right right i was wondering why that sense of defeat and despair was there i apologize yes laura is currently lit by the eerie red glow of uh burn off in the distance yeah it is isn't it it's a controlled burn we're in no danger before we put on our vulcanized rubber swimming caps and dive together into the cooling waters that is this week's stories let's have a quick look at the front cover the front cover this week is hurricane ian posing provocatively surrounded by insurance agencies preparing to explain how the phrase act of god also applies when you're an atheist has everyone been following the approach of hurricane ian yeah the footage has been amazing there's an actual shark in the streets.

Like there's always a meme or like a Photoshopped shark in the streets, but this time there's an actual shark roaming around the streets of Florida, which is probably the sanest thing that's ever roamed around the streets of Florida. Yeah, it feels like shark in the streets is the symbol, you know. That's the biblical symbol of the end of days. Yeah, they did a whole movie about that shit, right? Sharknado. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And of course you have to remember shark in the streets, but dolphin in the sheets is how everyone's always described me. No, no, no, no. Actually sharks ask for consent. That's true. Wait, I was talking about myself here. Dolphins do not.

That's true. I wonder if that's the turning point i wonder i wonder when you're trying to convince people to care about climate change if sharks in the street would work is that enough that's enough yeah i want to see somebody go well actually there could be other reasons for sharks in the streets not man-made climate change actually it's just a phase it's just a natural part of the natural cycle. Occasionally, every couple of hundred years, you end up with street sharks. That's just how the world works. I mean, I have warned about this for a very long time and that, you know, we are not safe from sharks and people always mocked me and now here we go. Yeah. The satirical cartoon this week is about the Labour Party conference in the UK right now. It's just a Statler talking to a Waldorf meme saying,

why do they call it the Labour conference and not the Agenda Reveal Party? Passing news, alleged company MSCHF has launched a campaign called Key for All, where they've been selling thousands of keys to the same car for $19 each. The game is you then call a number to find out where the car is, and then you can hunt it down and you're allowed to drive it if you have the key i call it installment one of a post-apocalyptic energy crisis thunderdome a thousand keys enter one car leaves i also estimate it'll take about three days before someone bangs in the car and leaves a used condom in the footwell they're frequently asked questions section on the website i just have to use this story because it's so it's

a real it's not even a real story it's's just a website that launched. I didn't notice it as a news story, I noticed it as a product, is what I'm saying. Their Frequently Asked Questions segment on the website includes the phrase, key for all has been engineered to be grand theft auto tragedy of the commons. That's actually what they want for this project. I hope it stands them in good stead in court when somebody's inevitably hauled up for car-based battery assault, which I should note is different, though not exclusive of car battery-based assault. Runs over a shark.

Yeah, the shark has a key. Yeah, there must be someone doing like a GTA skin where now you can be a shark on the streets and make Grand Theft Auto more realistic as opposed to less realistic. Let's have a look at our top story for this week. Our top story this week is the news that we have smashed into the moon or not the moon, a moon, should I say? We did a historic space smash. Laura, you look at the moons sometimes. Can you unpack this story for us?

You look at the moons sometimes. Can you unpack this story for us? I am very worried about this because NASA has done a test to smash up a moon to see if we're good at smashing moons. So if we ever had to really smash a moon, we'd know how to do it. But now I'm worried that the moon has other friends and even bigger moons now like what if that was another alien culture's favorite moon yeah what if we've just started a moon war I don't know if we should just go up there smashing stuff I don't think it should be the

first thing we do you know we went up there we stole some rocks and then we smashed a moon was it causing us any trouble no we just wanted to know if we could smash a know, we went up there, we stole some rocks, and then we smashed a moon. Was it causing us any trouble? No, we just wanted to know if we could smash a moon if we ever needed to smash a moon. Here's the weird part about the story, though, is so NASA did this thing where they basically smashed a satellite into into this meteorite, right? The idea is asteroid, rather, the idea is to see whether or not they can deflect it. But they haven't told us whether they had any effect on it. We know they smashed a satellite into it. But then what? Like, did it move?

Did it alter the path? Or did we just waste a satellite? Like, there's no... It's just a whole bunch of NASA scientists high-fiving without telling us whether or not the high-fiving is because they smashed it or because the asteroid shifted a few inches either way yeah so the asteroid is called uh dimorphous it's orbiting a larger asteroid named didymus

which makes the asteroid we've smashed into a moon and us into possibly the death star i'm not entirely sure this is the thing it was a fuzzy blob on telescopes. They managed to do this incredible feat of engineering to aim this rocket at the moon to make it explode. And yet we hadn't seen it until an hour before impact. We were completely incapable of actually seeing what we had planned to smash into until an hour before we were going to smash into it with no possibility of steering away ISC. There could have been a children's school on there,

like an alien children, like the dimorphians, who all obviously suffer from body dimorphis, would all be, sorry, it was right there, I had to. My favorite part of the story, by the way, is the fact that one of the NASA scientists, when describing this goes, look, we want a better chance than the dinosaurs had 65 million years ago. And this is an actual quote now from the scientist. This is a NASA scientist who says, all the dinosaurs could do is look up and go, oh, asteroid. I don't think they said that.

I wasn't there, but I'm going to guess that the more accurate quote would have been, or something along the, i don't know what dinosaurs sound like maybe they're more like birds and it would be but i don't think all asteroid would have been what any of the t-rexes were muttering at the time but it only hit one place the asteroid only hit one bit of the planet yeah and it was the cloud that killed, like... Most of the other dinosaurs were like, oh, cloud. Yeah. They didn't just all look over at once. I'm just really sad that we've at last lost Bruce Willis.

Was he the one who smashed into the moon? No. So he took a group of miners, like not children, like people who do mining, onto an asteroid and then they put a bomb inside the asteroid uh the one where they smash something into the moon into the asteroid was um deep impact with uh morgan freeman and i don't know why i know this who ended up sacrificing themselves for the sake of the mission oh bruce willis of course i mean you have to cry yeah bruce willis and aerosmith because they did the soundtrack for that one and their reputation never recovered, I don't think I don't want to miss a thing

that was actually the lyrics, I don't want to miss a thing where they're aiming at an asteroid I mean, that's pretty beautiful if a little bit on the nose, that's all the time we have for our Asteroid Smash News because now it's time for your ads your ad section now

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Everywhere. Acast.com That's all the time we have for our ad section, because now it's time for environment news. This is following up a story that we touched on in February, the news that the Californian Supreme Court has now finally confirmed the finding of a previous court that bumblebees are fish. Sami Shah, you're a lawyer. Can you unpack this story for us? This is basically what the conservatives have been warning us about, is if we let people identify how they want to with their genders, one day it'll be bumblebees identifying as fish and its political correctness gone mad. But basically what's happened is they needed to classify bumblebees as an endangered species and then realized that they had absolutely no way of doing so

because in the entire list of things that qualify as an endangered species in California, which is birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals or fish, insects did not cover it. No one gives a shit about insects. No one cared about insects. Insects can go f*** themselves. And then they realized, no, wait, actually, they actually are. So we need to save them now. And so instead of just expanding the list, they have now grandfathered in bumblebees into the fish territory. And the idea, the logic behind this is, is that fish are invertebrate and bumblebees are invertebrate, which I didn't know. I always assumed bumblebees had a spine, like a little tiny spine, but it turns out they don't.

And now they are also fish for the purposes of keeping them safe, which is very confusing. If you're a bumblebee, you're happy about being safe, but offended about the fact that you're now a f***ing fish. Laurie, you're our bumblebee expert. Can you tell us a little bit more about this story? I don't know why they can't expand the classification for, I don't know why insects wouldn't make the list in the first place.

I feel like we should just go all out at this point and just keep going. Like, then make everything a fish. Make me a fish. Make dolphins a fish. Most people already think they are let's just keep going let's return to the oceans uh from which we crawled out of some reverse evolution it's all under the california's fish and game code uh which when i first read this i assumed meant that they either had to classify as fish or game which means you could go on a bumblebee hunt but actually the the wording is a little bit more elaborate than that uh it is

aquatic invertebrates that are covered by this act and that that we need to protect are you a fan of bumblebees Laura I love a bumblebee I've never seen one until I went to New Zealand and then we don't have them so much in Western Australia because they're too delicate and they're too plumpy and they're too moist. And we are a hard, dry climate. So they need a cooler place because they're too chubby to be here. We got lean bees.

And I saw something and it had like this low resonance sort of what is that it was the biggest bee I'd ever seen and I was like that is a mega bumble and it was so much fun and I was like oh they call them bubble bees because they've got no idea what they're doing they're too heavy heavy. They just sort of flop around. And then they sleep by themselves. They crawl into like a little nook and they go to bed by themselves. They're solitary. They hang out all alone, just like under a bit of bark, have a little nap.

When you saw that bumblebee, Laura, did you think that's a fishy looking bumblebee? Yeah, I was like, hmm, and I could smell the ocean. Sorry. If you hold a bumblebee up to your like and i could smell the ocean sorry if you hold a bumblebee up to your ear you can hear the ocean if the sharks are loud in the streets the bumblebees are allowed in the ocean here's a question though does it does a a fish actually lose fish status for the bumblebee to make the list like is it there is there a criteria like it's only certain amount that there's allowed and now the tuna are like, f*** you, now we can't be endangered anymore

because the bees are taking our jobs. Yeah, now trout count as cows. Right? The roll-on effects of this just end with all of us somehow becoming vegetables. There's a species of cow that's now identified as a tapir. There's a tapir that's now in a year three school class. I think I've seen that. It's a tapir that's now in a year three school class i think i've seen

that it's a slippery slope but uphill slippery uphill slope we're all just grinding our way up now it's time for your reviews section reviews section now as you know each week we bring in our guest editors with something to review out of five stars. Sami Shah, start us off. What have you brought in for us? Serial killers. It turns out that serial killers are grossly underrated or have been for a very long time and are finally getting their day because you're more likely now to get a Netflix special as a serial killer than you are as a comedian or as a chef or really

anyone you're you have suddenly a sex symbol status if you're a serial killer um you probably get royalties for all the serial killing you've done I mean at the very least there's going to be a dozen podcasts about you and then the Netflix special that you get and and and it's got to the point now where serial killers really are having their day in the sun it's it's we always for so long thought you know anyone can kill lots of people in creative ways what's the big deal with that it turns out it is a lot harder than you think it is because we're clearly venerating them so much in society so you know what for too long the neglect and the abandon that serial killers have been treated with is no longer going to be tolerated. Now, if there's a serial killer in your life,

let them know that this is their moment to shine. Just start turning spines into wings and putting bumblebees in people's throats or whatever serial killers do these days to kind of break through the mold. You've got to be the different, you've got to be like the mold-breaking serial killer. So I'm giving serial killers a solid five out of five stars these days because I really, at this point,

might as well become one. It's the only boost my career could get. Laura? I'm reviewing an enormous pile of miniature chairs that are supposed to be stacked up in some sort of game. I'm giving it one star. It's terrible.

It's noisy. A picture about 60 small miniature plastic chairs about the size of your thumb, various colours, and you're supposed to somehow stack them up into some sort of delicately balancing megatower. One star, terrible game. Goes forever because you actually can't play it and so you can't win because it doesn't start because it's too hard to play

because apparently I'm terrible at stacking up miniature small plastic chairs. I mean, it's also probably flashbacks to your time working at the convention centre, right? Yeah, and it's very hard to explain to people or ask people if they want to play. Where did you find this? people or ask people if they want to play where did you find this uh it's in my mom's uh it's in my mom's house it's in her it's in her office i presume uh she also thought it would be fun at some stage i used to work in a convention center where my job was to uh stack and remove chairs or put them out depending on the day or the time of the day. And you could be putting out up to 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 chairs,

exactly spaced with a little chair trolley, a big pile of chairs, lay them all out, you know, one meter apart, one meter behind. So all your chair stacking expertise has not made you better at this game? It's not transferable. No, because I was stacking big chairs and I wasn't stacking small miniature plastic ones. These are flimsy. I need the big guns.

That's all the time we have for our reviews section now because now it's time for your surprise ukulele news. This is the news that Guitar Center, which is an instrument shop, has surprised Southwest Airlines, a low-budget airline, with free ukulele lessons during a flight from Long Beach to Honolulu. Now, I can imagine nothing worse on a low-cost airline than to be forced to learn the ukulele. But maybe, Sami, you can imagine something better? Well, the only way this flight could have gotten worse

is if they also then hit turbulence and everyone was bludgeoned in the head by a flying ukulele. But yeah, they just got on a plane. I don't know if this is... I'm conflicted, I'll be very honest. Because a part of me thinks, this is ridiculous, I don't want to learn a ukulele. When I get on a plane, I want to put on my headphones,

I want to take a nap. Or I want to watch something that makes me cry. That's my two preferred ways of flying. But if someone gets on and offers everyone on the plane a cello, and then a cellist gets on and says, I will now teach you how to play the cello. And when the end of the long distance flight, you can now play the cello and start performing in the Melbourne Philharmonic Orchestra. That's pretty cool. I think I'd be down with that. I think it's the choice of instrument that I have problems with here. Yes, that's important that your fantasy scenario involves a real instrument

and not this kind of thing. Not a leg room for a cello. Oh, doesn't everyone fly first class like I do? Well, the ukulele is a perfect instrument for economy class. But I just think this is the kind of gift that you should have asked beforehand if people wanted it. I think it's a kind of an opt-in option, possibly electric ukuleles with headphones on because what if you don't like the sound

of the ukulele or don't like the sound of people who can't play the ukulele playing the ukulele laura what if you just broke up with an improviser and terrible memories like some sort of forgetting sarah marshall situation yeah yeah i just look i just did a 42 hour trip from london to perth with multiple stops and it was very unpleasant i can't think of anything that would have made it uh more unpleasant except for failing at trying to do something whilst it was happening yeah imagine if somebody had given you that chair stacking game at the beginning of the flight. Most people who can play a ukulele have gone and done that for themselves. A lot of people have looked at a ukulele and gone, not for me. And we've made our choices and we've moved on with our lives.

It's not because nobody's strapped me in a tube with one for the requisite amount of time. Well, what is the percentage of people who've always wanted to learn the ukulele a bit but haven't gotten around to it? They're quite accessible. Do you get to keep the ukulele also after the flight is done?

No, you put it in the in-flight pocket with the remote and the headphones. Well, because all I'm thinking is normally if you're landing in any other part of the world, you'd be like, all right, great, I got a ukulele. I don't want this. This is a burden. I'm just going to gift it to someone. if you're landing in any other part of the world you'd be like all right great i got a ukulele i don't want this this is a burden i'm just going to gift it to someone but they're landing in hawaii where i i assume everyone already has a ukulele as well yeah talk about taking coals to newcastle yeah yeah you're just stuck with a ukulele for your

entire life or you put in the ocean and ukuleles get classified as fish i guess i don't know i assume they've got them on sort of the pillows like a chocolate in the hotel. You just go on this trip to Hawaii and everything is a surprise ukulele. You stick your feet in under the sheets. Or in the top drawer like a Bible. Sports news now. This is the news that Federer, famous Fed Federer has given up tennis for good no more love or all love I don't know how tennis works but he's he's lost his last tennis match he's uh

said goodbye to the sport that he's dominated for so many years uh everyone's talking about how human he was because Rafael Nadal cried about it uh which I don't think tells us how human Federer is. A man who was once gifted a cow by his village in Switzerland for winning some tennis. Laura, I know how much you love tennis. Can you unpack this story a bit for us? I had not heard of this man. It's true. I read this.

I wish him well. Look, it sounds like he got really good at tennis. He's proved he's very good at tennis. Now he needs to go and prove, unless he's going to start giving tennis lessons mandatory on a flight, I don't want to hear about it. Sammy, are you a sports watcher?

I'm not at all, but I did appreciate in this time of you know Andrew Tate and all of the toxic masculinity that we're kind of hearing about and everything online and young people's influence like the influences on social media are all these toxic masculinity experts I kind of like the fact that these two men who who play tennis and and are probably the peak physical health and and just role models for everyone wept and not because they you know the only reason for crying was they don't get to play against each other anymore and and that sense of competition has meant a lot to them go have lunch it's like you don't have to give up each other forever now

you have each other's phone numbers i assume well now the stakes are too high they've cried you can't like after this you can't have a salad together because everyone's taking pictures and go what the f**k are you crying about then so yeah no now they have to walk away and never look each other in the eye ever again just for the sake of the crying yeah i think that's how crying works right yeah when i selected this story i thought i'm what i can do is a kind of a retrospective of roger federer's career look at the scandals the things that he's done wrong and uh i i googled um roger federer scandals and i found swiss review the magazine for when he won GQ's...

Jesus didn't have holes in him. GQ's most stylish man of 2016. And also the fact that Nike once sent him onto the court in tennis whites and a buttermilk-coloured blazer in 2006, which he was reminiscing about for E! Online. And this is the quote. Yeah, we went a bit crazy at Wimbledon I did feel a bit funny in the locker room

with other players looking at me and going what is he thinking? But it brought some glam to tennis and some style and something to talk about other than just forehands and backhands I'm really glad that I did that and that I took chances like that during my career Now I want to cry

I am far more interested in this blazer so risky but he remembers that from 2006 as like one of the more risky moves he made in his career uh fills me with delight and i think that's all the time we have for today's episode of the podcast i'm flipping through the ads at the back laura have you you got anything to plug? I just have my album for sale on my website. Same as always at the moment, just a nice, peaceful audio album of my 2019 solo show. It's a very good show. I have not only bought it, but I've also bought it for friends. So you can do that. Same here. I absolutely love the album.

It was called Better Dead Than a Coward. Yes. It was called Better Dead Than a Coward. Yes, it was called Better Dead Than a Coward. Now it's called The Bus Show because Better Dead Than a Coward sounds like an anti-vaxxer slogan. Sammy, what have you got to plug? Can I plug two things? I'll be very quick.

One is my podcast News Weekly. That's W-E-A-K-L-Y. A terrible pun and I apologize, but it's a new satire podcast. It's a weekly roundup of the big stories of the week, and it's only 15 minutes. It's the only 15-minute podcast that is extremely vulgar, and that comes out every Saturday morning, so you can get that where podcasts are. And I wrote and directed a multicast, full-cast production. It's a crime noir series on Audible.

It's called The Mist, that's M-I-S-S-E-D. And it is basically a crime noir story set in a country town in Western Australia. It's got great reviews and the whole thing is available on audible.com.au slash The Mist, M-I-S-S-E-D. And if you found anything out about Sammy, it's that he likes spelling words

out loud on podcasts. Yeah, well, because I'm an idiot, I'm not good at coming up with names for things that are going to be audio-based, right? So I come up with a literary pun for an audio podcast, and then I come up with the name Mist, and everyone goes, M-I-S-T. And I'm like, no, that's a Stephen King novel.

Like, it's not that. So, yes. Or M-Y-S-T game in the 90s oh and that's a great game that's right yeah yeah I wish I'd written that I'd be much richer right now and I would have a cello on my first class flight I'm your host Alice Fraser you can find

me online at at alliterative A-L-I-T-E-R A-T-I-V-E on Twitter and Instagram or patreon.com slash Alice Fraser that's a one stop shop for all of my stand-up specials, podcasts and blogs, including my new stand-up special Kronos, which will be there in a couple of weeks. So subscribe there. We also have a weekly tea with Alice Salon and a weekly writer's meeting. Thanks to Robert Silito, our roving reporter for the week,

who found our bumblebees fish story and our ukuleles on the air story. If you'd like to be a Gargolas correspondent, tweet us at HelloGargolas. 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, including The Bugle, The Last Post,

Tiny Revolutions and The Gargol, wherever you find your podcasts.