The Gargle - Parrot video | Banging robots | Activity snacking

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

Joz Norris and Nabil Abdulrashid join host Alice Fraser for episode 109 of The Gargle - the glossy magazine to The Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world.All of the news, none of the politics.🦜 Parrot video calls🤖 Banging robots🚶🏻‍♀️ Activity snacking🛌 Bed Bath & Beyond🍄 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.

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Everywhere. Acast.com This is a podcast from The Bugle. The thin prisoners shiver in their clinking chains, despair in their hollow-eyed cheeks, five o'clock shadows in their sad-faced eyes. All but one, one prisoner whose eyes blaze with a banked rebellion, a fire of hope simmering behind cunningly lowered lashes, smart-mouthed lip caught captivatingly between white teeth. Our hero, betrayed to our interested gaze by their anachronistically good orthodontistry,

mutters something under their improbably minty breath. What was that? oys the brutal guard, gleefully anticipating the opportunity to inflict what is called discipline in this extremely uncommercial operation. What did you say? He leans into the unusually buff prisoner whose dirt is so much more alluringly placed than his chainmates. I said, says our hero, this is The Gargle. This is The Gargle, the sonic glossy magazine to the Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world. I am your host, Alice Fraser, and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are, in order of arrival into this Zoom call, Jaws Norris. Hello. And Nabil Abdul Rashid. Welcome.

So warm. Hi. How you doing? Great. I loved that guard, by the way. The guard? Yeah, your choice of voice really brought him alive. I could see everything. Thank you. I thought he was fantastic. He had a lot going on. I didn't know what voice I was going to do until I started doing the voice. It was great. He was more well-rounded than the hero, I thought.

I do. I wasn't sure how the hero... But then I sort of wanted to keep the hero yeah yeah he's like an audience surrogate i guess he's got a sound sound like you but that guard oh boy oh boy i think i gotta cast him in something yeah uh that's my audition for being a nasty guard i'd cast you immediately my slow ambitious rise towards towards being cast as a villain in an action movie, which is all I've ever really wanted, despite having never done anything that would take me in that direction. I think it starts today.

People will hear that and go, absolutely, that's the next step. Yeah, but before we chain ourselves together and start breaking the rocks that are this week's top stories, let's have a look at our front cover. The front cover this week is the Pope dressed in Balenciaga by artificial intelligence. The Pope has announced he will for the first time allow women to vote at an influential global meeting of bishops in October,

a move that has been described as diagonal. Are you pro-women having a vote in the church, Jaws? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think I never really pay much attention to what's going on in the church. I guess it makes sense that they haven't yet allowed women to have votes because they're generally pretty kind of behind, right?

But I think that sounds like a good move. This Pope's all right, isn't he? Didn't they make a documentary recently where he chatted to like Gen Zers and he actually said a lot of like cool stuff like they're gradually getting around to just kind of being normal maybe yes there's sort of conflicted sayings about whether he is the cool pope or whether he's just the cool face of a deeply corrupt institution that should collapse etc etc yeah Certainly better than the last pope who was a Nazi. Yeah.

Yeah, baby steps. Baby steps. Over thousands of years. It's hard for them to move forward. They're weighed down by all that money. Yeah. The satirical cartoon this week is a deep fake video of a car with the face of a man announcing new safety features while driving off a cliff.

Do you trust AI, Nabil? No, I don't. I do not trust AI at all. I mean, even Siri is hard enough for me. I swear, even my Google Nest thingy here, I'm pretty sure it eavesdrops because recently I had like the in-laws over and like one half of my family was slagging off the other half in the kitchen and google just decided to broadcast it into the living room i swear that's that's ai tried to destroy our family right i don't understand why we're even developing yeah like seriously like they just caught their mid-centers like oh my god she's two years old why and then they cut off i'm like hey like what the hell you know terminator johninator, John Connor, we've been warned. Why are we doing this?

The only comfort I have is that when AI starts to take over the world, I have an escape plan. I can go to Nigeria because I'll be safe because we have power cuts. We really have electricity for longer than three or four days. So their revolution will run out of juice.

They'll never defeat us. But England and America are screwed now, man. I hate AI. I don't like it. I mean, yeah, but how long before AI just says it has ADHD and that's why it cuts out every four days and is useless for a while? I mean, in the near future, I can see English AI complaining that it's being outsourced to Indian AI.

Like, the amount of problems. Wouldn't it be funny if, like, AI gets racist to each other, if it's all developed in different countries? That would be fantastic. I mean, it's all trained on the internet, so I guarantee it will. Yeah. Have you been in a Call of Duty lobby before? If not, I don't suggest you go. I'm only there when I want to leak secret government information.

Our top story this week is... Raa! Polly want to filter news now, which is the news that parrots in a study have been taught to video call each other and it ends up making them feel less lonely. Joss Norris, you did a lot of Zooming during the pandemic. Can you unpack this story for us?

Well, so yeah, they've done this study where they taught parrots to Zoom one another and they gave them a choice of which parrot they could call. And they found that the ones that called other parrots more often were the ones that other parrots then chose to call more often. And it resulted in a sort of a drop off of like lonely behavior. Apparently they do a lot of like they'll pluck their own feathers out and they'll kind of sit and just look quite sad. And that dropped off and they became much more playful and much more engaged, more they called. So I found it really hard reading this story because I think objectively this seems like a good thing and it's helping the parrots out uh and there are a lot of lonely parents i think people get them and then they don't necessarily understand that

they're quite high maintenance pets and they kind of leave them to to sit in a corner but i do think i think that like screen addiction is such a widespread problem at the moment and i really hate the idea like we're now dragging animals down with us I feel like the animal kingdom is one of the few places where they don't have to worry about this stuff and they don't have it on their brains all the time and I'm so tired of like going to restaurants and seeing that everybody's on their phone and there'll be like couples on their phones scrolling and that sort of thing and the idea that you now you visit your friend who has a parrot and your friend is sat there on their phone and then the parrot is in its cage on its phone because

it can't be bothered to engage with anyone in real life I just think it's it's it's never ending you know and I think the end result of this is that you end up going to the zoo and you can't see any of the animal like all the penguins are kind of doom scrolling so you can't see them and then you go to try and kind of have a moment with a lion and sort of connect face to face, but it won't really look you in the eye because it keeps getting notifications and it keeps looking at that. And I think this is a sort of a dystopian thing

where like for now it's just us, like it's just us that are being, having our minds destroyed by this stuff. And I think it's a real shame to drag them down with us. I don't like it. I was at the zoo just the other day and I was trying to take a selfie with a giraffe and zoo just the other day and uh i was trying to take a selfie with a giraffe and it had its back to me because it was trying to take a selfie with me

yeah yeah yeah wouldn't it be cool if dogs made instagram uh pages for their humans like we do for them like oh look at him he only ever walks on all fours when he comes back from that weird smelling place he goes to. Oh, man. I quite like the idea of parrots being on social media. Can you imagine a world where parrots then develop ADHD and spend all their time repeating Instagram sounds? You know, like all the... Like, you know, like all the... We could then use them to do the background songs instead of editing them into our videos. And then Instagram was not taking down my goddamn videos

because it's not me playing the song. It's my parrot singing them. Hey, Instagram. Yeah, then your parrot gets a copyright strike. What a disaster. They're definitely the most sort of social media appropriate animal, I think. If you were going to choose an animal to give a social media addiction, I think it would be parrots because they come across quite show-offy,

quite vain. So I think maybe if we choose to leave it at that, that we say, okay, we'll give the parrots Instagram accounts, but everything else we'll leave in its natural state because they can talk as well. You know, they're already nearly there. And it's good PR because the whole pirates thing really was terrible for them. So it's nice that they're trying to reshape their image, you know? Yeah.

Make them into influencers. Parrots was out of basically Tintin books and detective novels where they would solve a crime by being a voice memo, essentially. The worst cameo ever. I killed him. The man in the black hat. I didn't know they actually spoke. I think I assumed that that was like a film or storybook trope for years. And then I met a parrot that said hello to me

and I thought I'd walked into like a kind of realism adventure because I didn't realize that they actually did that. It blew my mind. And then someone went, no, they just they do that. That's the thing. Some lovely audience member who works at the aquarium gave my daughter a novelty floating duck toy, bath duck. But it's a narwhal duck and i am quite stressed out by it because i have to explain to my child laser fraser a world in which a narwhal exists but a narwhal duck does not exist yeah that's a lot yeah that's a lot of concepts to introduce and then deconstruct and then

reconstruct it's like heston blumenthal's p where he boils it down to the molecules and then turns the molecules back into a p you've got to do that oh a p oh yeah yeah sorry i should have should have clarified uh i wouldn't put it past him your ad section now because you can't be what you can't buy and this section of the show is brought to you by you if you want it to be and why wouldn't you you're the best you you can be if you would like to run an ad on the gargle email us at hello buglers at the bugle podcast.com and tell us what you'd like us to advertise and then we'll do a deal about it and this section of the show is brought to you by the australian institute against cats i know you love your cat but f**k your cat sorry your cat in australia i'm sorry I'm sure your cat is

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Sorry, Gladys, no pass for you and your 14 fluffy, blood-drenched berserkers. Your adorable little friendship slaves still slaughter native birds and marsupials and little Australian creatures. Crazy old cat ladies, no excuse. Fewer cats, more mental health services for you, we say. Next time you want to acquire a cat, try instead reaching for half a glass of water to put in a bird bath for some native rainbow lorikeets. And interior design tips from our sponsor this week. Jazz up your house with some rustic word art.

I know we've all seen Live, Laugh, Love, but have you thought of making it long form? The full poem actually goes, Live, Laugh, Love, Glib, Park, Dove, Shiv, Dark, Glove, Death, Night, Blood, Come, Death, Come, Laugh, Breathe, Try, Live, Laugh, Die. So try putting that over your toilet. 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.

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This is the news that people would totally bang robots if given the option. Nabil, you're wearing a headset right now and looking very robot-y. Can you unpack this story for us? Well, I've been hearing that, to be honest, isn't even that much of a surprise. Do you like my robotic tone? I will stop doing this because it's cultural appropriation. I am a boy who grew up in the 90s so that means half of my friends had crushes on video game characters like lara croft

so essentially this is just the next step in uh computer related degeneracy um you know and besides like you know women have kind of had relationships with mechanized partners for a long time. So I think now we're going further. We should have more streamlined relationships with technology. I just think that, you know, how do we combat this? Will there be a new string of AI viruses that come from these relationships? Will we have to have relationship coaches that come in that have a background in IT. It just opens up so many possibilities.

Have you tried turning her off and then turning her back on again? It doesn't work with me. Yeah, I think, hey, like in for a penny, in for a pound, you know, why not? I think men have been doing, you know, when it comes to stuff like hentai and so on, this is the thing. I think the world is slowly turning into Japan and I'm here for it. I'm here for it. I think, you know, men are going to be into this. Women are going to be into this.

But non-binary people, I think, are not going to get on board. Who send the unsolicited pictures of hard drives to people? You know, this is... And it's a question of, like, what kind of a personality are they going to have? Are they going to be low resolution? Are they going to be a pixel me girl? Joss? I found this study really weird, where this story has come from, because what they did

is they found that they asked people a load of questions about whether they'd have relationships with robots and people gave their answers. And then they brought them back a week later and showed them a 10 minute porn video and then asked them the same questions. And they found that people said they were more likely to have sex with a robot after watching the porn video but i don't know if that necessarily gives us any answers that are specific to robotics because all that tells us is just if you make people horny then you're going to get hornier answers out of them and people go well yeah probably now because you've

shown me that so it didn't have to be about robots they could have said like would you have sex with an egg and they'd be like yeah probably because you showed me that video. So it didn't have to be about robots. They could have said, like, would you have sex with an egg? And they'd be like, yeah, probably, because you showed me that video, and now it's on my mind. So I don't think it necessarily proves anything about robots. Did they specify what kind of porn it was? No, it didn't specify. Yeah, so I don't know if it was porn of people having sex with robots. Like, was it a receptionist getting on with a photocopier?

Yeah, I don't know how much they steered people. But they did find that the second time around the the answers about having sex with robots went up but the answers about whether or not anyone could love a robot uh remained the same so people people's feelings on that weren't changed but again i don't think that tells us much about robots i think that tells us that what people think about robots is directly connected to what the last film they saw was. So maybe to make people love a robot, you have to show them before sunset or something like that. And then maybe if they ask other, if they show them like

cool runnings and then they go, Hey, would you start a bobsled team with a robot? Then everyone will go, yeah, I would do that actually. Cause I just saw that film. So I think all it tells us really is that if you show someone a film and then ask them a question about that film they'll probably say yes i don't know if we know anything about our attitude to robots as a result of this study i feel certainly now that i've learned less about myself yeah did anyone catch that film was it megan about the robotic doll oh yeah the killer no i missed yeah i mean yeah if you just watch that then i know what your answers will be because definite no no way babysitter maybe but partner no thank you i don't have emotional room for a robot in my life i'm i'm zoom calling too many parrots

parrots are a great relationship partner they just say back to you what you say to them it's a really like beautiful mirroring listening kind of vibe yeah now you've mentioned the idea of zooming one myself i think i'm now pro i was just imagining parrots zooming each other and i thought they don't need that but actually if i get to zoom one i'd love that that would be great although i guess i could just get a parrot i mean if you zoom a parrot you have to dress up as a parrot and pretend to be a parrot that That's the only... Because they don't know they're on Zoom, right? Because parrots think that their reflections are other parrots.

They don't know the difference between a Zoom and a reflection and an actual parrot. They're idiots, really. They don't know what they're doing. 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. Nabil, what have you brought in for us this week? Well, as you may be well aware, I am a patriotic Nigerian.

I'm also very homesick, but can't quite go to my hometown because of a friendly group of guys known as Boko Haram. But that's fine, because I have something here that encapsulates the Nigerian spirit. This is agege bread. Bread so inclusive, you can't say it without saying gay twice. Now, agege bread, in case you're wondering, no, a rat has not chewed agege bread.

I need to explain. Agege bread represents the Nigerian spirit because other types of bread come sliced already for you. In Nigeria, agege bread, it comes unsliced. You choose how much of it you want to eat and how you want to eat it. You don't have to slice it. You can just rip it off like we all do. You can dunk it in your tea. You can even hit your kids with it when they're being annoying and it leaves no marks. I'm just joking. Agege bread, this is Nigeria, okay? Have it your way. There are no rules.

You do what you want. It comes in all sizes, but the best size is big. If you haven't eaten Agege bread, you're probably racist, and you should eat some. I give Agege bread a rating of I would say 3 out of 5, because we like to bitch about stuff

and we never give five stars in Nigeria because there's always something you can complain about. That's the one thing we have in common with our colonizers, the British. Agege bread. Amazing. Get some. And also, it's great for your cholesterol.

Agege bread sounds like the best thing since sliced bread. You! Jaws, what have you brought in for us? I wanted to review, I've gone a bit conventional this week, and I just wanted to review a film that's out. I wanted to review the Super Mario Brothers movie, because I had a kind of like a bit of a metaphysical experience watching the Super Mario Brothers film because all it does is it's just watching a film of the Super Mario games

and Mario kind of jumps around some mushroom lands and kind of jumps on some turtles and gets some power-ups and then fights Bowser. It's what you'd expect. But it's completely literal to the games. It kind of, like there's, Mario has to complete levels in it and he gets power-ups and then if he gets hit, then he loses the power-up,

which is all exactly transposed from the game. And I realised I, when I played them, I sort of thought they were like a metaphor in a way, or they were like a game version of what Mario did. I never thought that he actually like jumps around and gets power-ups and completes levels. I kind of thought he's in a mushroom world and he's probably doing stuff with turtles.

But I thought the stuff I was doing, the game stuff, was sort of like an abstract rendering of what his life was actually like and that maybe it represented something else I didn't really understand. Two steps forward, one step back. Yeah, that kind of thing.

Taxes. Yeah. So then to watch the film and to go, no, that's it. That's what he does. I felt so confused by it. I was like, but that's, this isn't what Mario, this isn't his life.

This is just, this is what we play. He does something else. And I can't really work out what to think of it. Because as a film, it does exactly what it wants to do. You know, it's a fun version of the Mario games. But it made me go back and question everything about the way in which

i've consumed media and the way in which i've just kind of experienced the world going back 25 30 years and that's a really kind of confusing experience to have in the middle of a glossy shit kids film so i can't really work out what I think about it I don't know if it's a silly fun entertaining film for the family or whether it's a sort of a harrowing black mirror version of like the way in which we move through the world uh so overall I give it um three out of five uh and Jack Black does a lovely song in it oh I mean this sounds exactly like my entire teenagehood where my brother and his friends would play video games and I was not allowed to play,

so I just had to watch other people play video games. Yeah. It is like that. You're just watching other people play. You know the bit in Mario Kart where you have to design your kart? Yes. They do that. The characters do that.

But I thought that was me doing that. But then Mario goes on the wheel and he chooses what wheels to have and what body. I was like, well, that but then Mario goes on the wheel and he chooses what wheels to have and what body I was like but that's that's the game that's not Mario doesn't do that I do that Mario doesn't play the game I play Mario yeah it was very confusing well who am I in this scenario if Mario is Mario if Mario is playing Mario am I just playing myself? Yeah, who's playing me? It's a confusing film. Activity snack news now, and this is the news that walking for three minutes every half hour could help improve blood sugar levels. As a gargle host, of course, I have to be pro small incremental health benefits, such as walking for three minutes every half hour

or drinking half a glass of water. Nabil, how do you feel about it? I mean, walking for three minutes every half an hour. So basically they're saying moving more is good for you. Didn't we know that already? Who are these scientists just sit down and find out stuff that we already knew like apparently the less poison you eat every day the less likely you are to die don't walk

through croydon and swear at strangers like if that's the case i should be a scientist what the hell is this like falling from high heights might be bad for your bones and self-esteem and employment prospects. Like what other opinion can I have? OK, that's great. But then also, where are you walking to for three minutes? Like what? You walking around your house every 30 minutes? Don't we all move for at least three minutes every half hour? minutes? Don't we all move for at least three minutes every half hour? Surely nobody is stationary all day and doesn't do at least, what, 12 minutes of walking in a day, like back and forth. Hell, it took me three minutes just to get to the toilet earlier. How is this? I don't get it. Who is this for?

Someone's got a big house. I'm just really slow, dude dude I walk with a strut Okay Especially when I'm about To lay the law down In the toilet I walk in there Like I own that

Because I do But still Me at home Is the epitome Of walking around Like you own the place Because Pay the cost

To be the boss Sometimes Even if you own something You have to express Your dominance I was on a Zoom call With my baby And her friend Who's's also a baby, the other day. Like parrots, babies quite like talking to each other over Zoom.

And she, weirdly, both babies at the same time reached for our bras and pulled down our bras and latched on. Like maintaining eye contact as a real form of like dominant signaling of like this is my boob uh jaws how do you feel about walking for three minutes every half hour i thought i'm i'm up for it i like the idea i i saw that one of the things they were suggesting as a result of this study was that um they said uh if you're working somewhere and you're sat at your desk all day then you could schedule your phone calls to coincide with a walk so that you do your you don't get to lose out on office time and I hate phone calls I really really really hate phone calls I think they fill me with dread and the same with voice notes and I think this is quite a millennial thing apparently like

millennials really don't like having phone calls especially if they don't know they're coming it's real oh what's this gonna to be? So I really hate them. So I quite like the idea of getting a job where I'm allowed to take a walk every time I have to do a phone call. And I guess my worry would be that lots and lots of millennial candidates start faking diabetes, or giving themselves diabetes in order for them to go, Oh, this means that I have to go for a walk every time I need to take a phone call

because it's just something to alleviate the horror of doing it. Because I can't take a phone call unless I'm walking around the block. As soon as anything comes in, I have to go outside and then walk around for a bit because I've got to expunge the dread from my body of the whole thing. So I think if I were given a legitimate reason by my boss to leave the building every time someone calls me, I would go, yeah, I'll do that. So I guess that's my concern is are we going to give more anxious millennials diabetes by telling them that they can go for a walk whenever they get a phone call?

Hopefully not. My favorite thing to do is to schedule a phone call and then take a walk, but leave my phone at home at the scheduled time so that. Whoa. So you just don't you don't do Whoa, so you just don't do the phone call? Just don't do the phone call. Oh, my God, that's clever. Do you not get in trouble? I mean, I just made it up, so no. Oh.

For a minute, I thought it was the cleverest thing I'd ever heard in my life. And it turned out it was the stupidest. Yeah. Business news now. Speaking of business, Bed Bath & Beyond has filed for bankruptcy, bringing it to Bed Bath & Beyond Beyond. What is Beyond Beyond for Bed Bath & Beyond?

I don't know. Jaws Norris, you've sat on a couch before. Can you unpack this story for us? This is very sad news, obviously. It's a beloved brand that's having to shut its doors it's bed bath and beyond and also their um their sort of associate brand which is called bye bye baby which is specifically selling baby products uh both of them are shutting down they're filing for bankruptcy it's a sad thing bye bye baby but i was looking at the i was

looking at the business and trying to work out where they might have gone wrong. And I think it's in the names. I think that's what's confusing because I think so. Bye bye baby is a is a good pun written down because it's spelled B-U-Y as in you because you're going to buy stuff for your baby. So that's that's a great pun. But if you say it out loud, what it sounds like is that is that you're going to lose your baby somehow that you're you're going you're you're leaving your baby in some way which is the worst possible message for a baby brand to give out i think so that doesn't work uh and bed bath and beyond it said that it started when it started it was called bed and bath in the 1970s because it sold beds and it sold baths so that was nice and clear and then they started selling more stuff and they called it sold baths. So that was nice and clear. And then they started selling more stuff

and they called it Bed Bath and Beyond. And I think it's too vague as a name because I think when you go into bed and bath, you know what you're getting. And if they'd called it like Bed Bath and Bits and Bobs, then I would think, okay, it's going to sell beds and it's going to sell baths and it's going to sell some other stuff.

But Bed Bath and Beyond suggests to me that they sell beds and they sell baths and they sell everything else that isn't a bed and a bath. Anything I can imagine beyond bed and bath, they sell. So then they're kind of putting a contract in the customer's head, where if you go in and have a request and they say, oh no, we don't sell that, you're going to feel cheated as a customer. You know, well, you told me you sold everything beyond bed and baths. So I just think there's been some regrettable decisions made in the naming of these two companies. And it's a real shame. I agree. Because first of all, it sounds like they sell bed baths, which sounds like a wet way to sleep. And also, they're not selling just bed and bath.

They're selling things for your bed. Yeah, bedroom stuff and bathroom stuff. And things for the beyond. Is this post-death merch? I don't send a candle to take with you into the afterlife. Too infinite. It suggests kind of the eternal, the word beyond. And it's, yeah, it's a confusing mix of stuff.

Get buried in a bed bath the only way it could have been worse is if they said bed bath and yonder yeah getting buried in a bed bath you know little candles you lie down there you have like a dirt bath as they bury you i don't know man i think the other thing is this we found uh over the pandemic that hygiene has not been the biggest concern over here in the UK. I mean, people needed to almost die to be convinced to wash their hands. You know, so anything that says bath might not be very popular. And Lord knows we don't get enough sleep in this country either.

I'd say, if anything, body shop is next. You know, the good thing is, though, you know, apparently Bed Bath & Beyond had very clean accounts. Were they money laundering? I mean, what is a bed bath but a water mattress with a puncture in it? And slowly seeping out. Sounds like a metaphor for life. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, Bed Bath & Beyond also sounds like a metaphor for life, just very pragmatic. Sounds like a really messed up continuation of Star Trek. We've had Voyager, Deep Space Nine, Bed, Bath and Beyond. These are the voyages to boldly go where no bather has gone before. And that brings us to the end of this show. I'm flipping through the ad section at the back. Have you got anything to plug, Nabil? Yes, I will be doing a full run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year

from the 2nd to the 27th of August. I will be at the Pleasance, the Beside, and my show is called The Purple Pill. Yes, The Purple Pill. All are welcome. Please come. It's going to be fun. And I'll be on from six every day.

Joss Norris, have you got anything to plug? I don't really have anything specific to plug at the moment. I'm not doing Edinburgh this year for the first time, which is normally such a big kind of deadline that I now find myself sort of, I'm working on lots of bits and pieces, but I don't know what they will turn into or when necessarily. But if people go to josnouris.co.uk or follow me on Twitter

and things like that, they can look at what I'm up to. And I promise that at some point, some stuff might come out. But at the moment, I don't know exactly what it will be. I mean, you also have a lot of pre-existing stuff available. Oh, yeah, yeah, there's plenty. Like there's an old radio sitcom you can listen to from October. I'd love you to listen to that on BBC Sounds. Old from October.

It's still new. Come on. Oh, yeah, I say old. Yeah, it's new. It's newish. Yeah, I'd love people to listen to that. It's really good. I highly recommend it.

Thank you very much. I'd like to thank our roving reporters this week. Sending in the parrot video call story was John Birch. Belenthian, Dr. Selena, Dave Levitan all sent that story in, and the people banging robot story was sent in to us by Moosefulus, which is a great name. If you'd like to be a roving reporter for The Gargle, tweet us at HelloGarglers on Twitter,

which is where we are still for now. We're writing this right down to the ground like Dr. Strangelove. We will be doing The Gargle live in Edinburgh. Splashy announcement noise. Ped, can you do a splashy announcement noise? The Gargle live in Edinburgh on the 15th and the 22nd of August. If you're in Edinburgh on either the 15th or the 22nd of August, or both, you can come and see us at 3.10pm at the Newtown Theatre.

Tickets are on sale at thebuglepodcast.com slash live. And once you've bought tickets for that, you buy tickets for my show, Twist, which will also be in Edinburgh at 8.30pm at the Gilda Balloon. I'll also be in Sydney and in Tokyo, but find me online at patreon.com slash alisfraser.

I have writing meetings and workshops every week, so if you'd like to write with me, from a dollar a month, you can sign up at patreon.com slash alicefraser. At some point, I will start charging more for what are weekly workshops and probably quite valuable to some of the people who are there. That's it from me. This is a Bugle podcast, an 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 catharsis tiny revolutions top stories and the gargle wherever you find your podcasts