The Gargle - Slime robot | Fugitive flamingo | Ancient smells

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

James Colley and John Luke Roberts join host Alice Fraser for episode 56 of The Gargle, the weekly topical comedy podcast - with no politics!🤖 Magnetic slime robot🦩 Fugitive flamingo👃 Ancient smells🧙🏻‍♀️ Modern spells🚰 HAGOW artProduced 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. to command, tell that its sculptor well those passions read, which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear, my name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, and this is The Gargle. Sonic Glossy Magazine to the Bugles Audio Newspaper and Visual World. I'm your host Alice Fraser. Your guest editors for this week's edition of the podcast are John Luke Roberts and James Colley. Welcome. Thank you. Hello. Thank you for having me. We're going to take hands together and run at the wall that is this week's stories. But first, let's have a peek at the front page. Today's front page model is a woman dressed half in a swimsuit and half in a

parka, wearing a snorkel as part of our special feature the clothing range for climate change be beach or blizzard body ready with the blazing hot looks people are flooding to see there's an avalanche of ideas and even cute things for the kitties to melt even the hardest heart or most persistent polar ice cap other headlines read low carb diets we teach you how not to press yourself against your local bakery window screaming mournfully for bread and nostalgia hell parents around the world shocked Other headlines read, Low-carb diets. We teach you how not to press yourself against your local bakery window screaming mournfully for bread. And nostalgia hell.

Parents around the world shocked their kids enjoy shows that were old and boring back when they were kids. A distressed father says, I just had to talk to my daughter about Star Trek. Not even the new shows, the one of them in the 60s. What do I know about the episode that's meant to be about the Cuban Missile Crisis? What's the Cuban Missile Crisis? Hysterical cartoon this week.

Comes from the war in Ukraine. It's Vladimir Putin holding a gun to a child's head but looking at the reader and saying, you see, the real enemy is cancel culture. Our first story is a premium story. This is a fan service episode all through and through. Our first story is a slime robot story. For those of you who are fans of the last post you will know

the history of slurm and glab this is the story of a sort of a sentient slime robot that crawls into the body and solves things john luke roberts you've been a sentient slime robot in the past would you unpack this story for us i hope to be again i would say like you've made it sound like it's a little detective or that this is a crime drama wearing a little hat and a raincoat it's a slime robot you're right about that it's been made and designed by um some scientists as you'd expect a slime robot to be like you wouldn't want a lay person having a go at this in the chinese university of hong kong so it's a lump of slime which is made up of magnetic bits covered in to be, like you wouldn't want a layperson having a go at this, in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. It's a lump of slime which is

made up of magnetic bits covered in silicone which moves around like a sort of slug thing. It's described by the new scientists as having a custard like consistency, although they don't mention what taste it has. The way that it looks is exactly like the stop motion

animation, like slightly psychedelic cartoons i watched in the 90s yeah it looks like if flubber was body horror like if they're saying it's custard like i don't know if it's a before after shot of custard it does not look appetizing i also so the idea is you put it in the body and then they can use electromagnets to make it go in and take things which like if you've accidentally swallowed a battery you you know, as you do when you're trying to change the battery in the smoke alarm. And it just falls straight down there as you're up at the top of the ladder. You put this in, it goes, they control it and it grabs the battery and then it comes out. But I know from nursery rhymes that swallowing one thing to consume something you've already swallowed is not a good starting

point we all know that this ends with with swallowing a horse and then dying of course but i'm glad that science is at least has at least made it look uh like something john carpenter might have filmed in the in the 80s it's also nice that um using slime to extract a battery that you've accidentally swallowed is a real turducken of gargoyle deep cuts here because it's very much in the gargoyle lore. I'm excited about this. This is huge for those of us who never consented to the magic school bus poking around inside our bodies.

I'm glad there's something that can go in and just get rid of us. I don't know why this has been invented. This is the worst thing that the mind can conceptualize. And once again, we have to ask, was there not enough existential horror in the world? If you, as a scientist, hand this in and say, we've made a discovery, the response you should receive is, you've made a mistake, you're fired,

hand in your badge and a gun, and explain why you were bringing a gun to work. That's also part of mistake you're fired handed your badge in a gun and explain why you were bringing a gun to work that's also part of why you're being fired i mean first of all if you brought a gun to work and that's why you're being fired the solution to that problem is you can't fire me i shoot you secondly i think this is quite cute it's got a sort of a benevolent vibe to it although that could just be the animal magnetism or robot i think benevolent vibes they often come in with benevolent vibes we know this and then they end up ruling i've seen enough movies to know um also if the robot if the robot revolution happens while the robots are inside us i think that's worse they can easily like take over start pulling the strings that exist inside

our bodies to, you know, I don't like it. I don't like it. And I'll buy one as soon as it's available on the market. That's exactly how skeletons got inside us as well. At first they were like, well, you can just swallow this and it'll actually help you move.

And all of a sudden we've got skeletons using us as puppets. That's true. That's true. Look, I think Benevolent Vibes is definitely going to be the name of my friendly sex company. I bags it. I bags it as the name of my friendly sex company. I bags it. I bags it as the name of my friendly sex company.

I bagsie the name friendly sex company as the name of my friendly sex company. I'm going to bag mine as Sentient Slime is the name of my sex company. It knows what you've done. Let's meet back in a year and see who's done best. That's all the time we have for our helpful robot section because now it's time for your ads. Are you trying to right a wrong that you've done to your beloved in a film? Have you

let them down somehow and need to redeem yourself? Try running after them with a boombox full of songs or sweating in the rain and if you don't have rain supply yourself with half a glass of water. The dignity reclaimer for the wrong. If you show up wet, they'll assume you mean it. And the bills sure keep piling up. If you're having trouble finding a place to stay, why not live rent-free in someone's head? People's brains are warm, have electricity,

and let's be fair, there's probably plenty of space. Just put your baggage near their neuroses and don't wipe your feet on their dreams. And that's your ad section for today. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Every sport has their big, juicy controversy. Boxing has the Mike Tyson ear bite. Cycling has Lance Armstrong. Baseball has its steroid era. Curling has... Broomgate.

It's a story of broken relationships, houses divided, corporate rivalry, and a performance-enhancing broom. It was a year I'd like to forget. Broomgate. Available now. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts. Everywhere. Acast.com. Now it's time for Fugitive Flamingo News in our fan service special on this The Gurgle,

your favourite glossy magazine. James, you're tall and unwanted. Can you unpack this story? Could have gone with graceful, beloved around the world but no tall and unwanted will do so the bird escaped from a zoo in 2005 and that's a very bad day for zookeepers when you finally have your flamingo enclosure ready to open and the birds fly away then you have to turn to your fellow zookeepers and say did you know they could fly they always stuck me as more of a standing one-legged during sunrise vibe,

which does mean they're most likely to be found on an insufferable Instagram feed. But this also has like a fantastic jailbreak element to the story. I'm more upset that it's been captured again. But then again, maybe it wanted to be captured. Maybe the outside world isn't for this flamingo anymore. It is an institutionalized flamingo. The flamingo is named pink floyd and can we pause for a moment just to enjoy that you should have just named it floyd and let the pink speak for itself but i refuse to give the flamingo any credit for that i refuse to give the flamingo any credit for anything other

than tricking its captors into thinking it was lazy by being lazy i'd also say i'm not really very willing to give the zookeepers much credit because the flamingo is also flamingo number 492. And if it took them 492 times to come up with the name Pink Floyd for a flamingo, then heaven help us all. Also, stop losing them at that point. I don't think you deserve to have flamingos. Nobody deserves to have flamingos.

No one's ever done anything that wrong. Can I ask, did everyone know that flamingos live deserves to have flamingos no one's ever done anything that wrong can i ask did everyone know that flamingos live this long because i think if you put a gun to my head and asked how long do flamingos live again i would say very odd for you to have brought a gun to this situation why are you carrying a gun but if i have to answer six to seven years provided they're not used as a golf club by a flintstone or like left in a garden as an ornament during mowing season like i don't i didn't know they could go 50 years you could have a 50 year old flamingo well you won't have it for long because it will escape after that

turn up in texas i mean it's exciting that this is the only long-legged flamboyant thing allowed to have a happy life in the southern United States. I did just wonder how they recognised him. They look very similar to me. So when this one strolled into Texas, they went, That's Pink Floyd from that zoo up in Kansas. Oh, my word. We've been looking for him.

I assume he had a magnetic slime robot and or a tag. Well, maybe the tag is it, isn't it? That's maybe the tag. I assume the flamingo detective was one day away from retirement, had one case that he could not sleep at night and went, you know what, that'll do. This is the one that I was talking about all along, popping back in the cage and we're sorted.

The worst true crime podcast is just finding a flamingo that's gone for a walk. You say the worst it sounds like the best it does sound like the best i don't i can't handle a true crime podcast no it makes me very anxious but if it was flamingos i'd be delighted all the time the thing of the story that just stuck out to me is how much they tried to lead into the pink floyd day would be like maybe the bird was on the dark side of the moon. It absolutely was. It would die in seconds. Maybe it's gone over the wall. Maybe it's done one of the other songs.

Maybe it took too much LSD and fried its brain in the early years and unfortunately could no longer tour. Maybe its foot has gone comfortably numb from standing on just one leg all that time. There we go. But the other way round so that the punchline comfortably numb comes at the end of the sentence well that's all the time we have for flamingo news because now it's time for your reviews as you know each week our guest editors bring in something to review out of five stars james colling what have you brought in so um the last few times i've done this i've put in quite a bit

of research and put quite a bit of research and put quite a lot of effort because the review matters a lot to me. And I thought, what could I review this time? And I decided that what I was going to bring and what I was going to dedicate was absolutely nothing. And what I'm going to review is panic. And right now, don't really care for it.

Really wish I had prepared something a bit more. Panic makes you feel bad inside. And then you're like, what's coming next? I'm afraid'm afraid i don't know i would have liked to know what was happening instead of just being in this state where my heart is beating and i don't really want to stop talking because i don't know where i'm going with this so i'm gonna say let's not do panic anymore zero stars from me james you know i met you doing improvisational comedy at Sydney University and boy has that shown. John Luke, what have you brought in? Well, I'm going to start by saying this is a one star review.

I want to make that clear from the top. It's not a very coherent review because I'm just very... Right, I would like to review the escalator situation at Cutty Sark DLR station in South East London. About time. About time! Thank you, thank you. I've lived in the area since 2009, that is 13 years, and I do not know that one month has gone by with the escalators functioning all the time. It's quite a deep station because it has to go under the river immediately you get on the thing. So there's two sets of escalators. Never can you get all the way down or all the way up without having to use the stairs they have a sign up saying it's going to be fixed by Christmas that's

happened that's just already happened they put that sign up before last Christmas and now suddenly it counts for the next one I don't know how come they cannot get their escalators to work and then they fix them and then they don't work again what has gone on with the escalator situation at Cutty Sarkdale Art Station I haven't asked the staff because I'm scared the tone that I use when I because I want to go in and playfully sort of say so what's the situation but I know it will come out with such venom that they'll think that I'm having a go at them rather than just trying to get to the bottom of this thing I do not like it. One star. Actually, two stars, because it has at least provided some release for me today, being able to rant about it.

Well, fair. I mean, the great thing about an escalator is that even when it doesn't work, it's still a thing. Not these! No! It's not like the Mitch Hedberg thing, because they've covered it up. They've covered it up with hoarding. You can't even use it as a stairs. I'm not sure it's there anymore. I think they've snuck it off and you just fall to your doom if you walk down,

which actually, some days, I wouldn't mind. I'm so angry about the escalators now. Well, thank you for your reviews. Now it's time for our ancient smells news. I'm always delighted when I step into a burial ground to discover that something smells.

James Colley, you've got a baby. Can you unpack this smells news for us? I have been unpacking unusual smells for just over four months now. So this story is that a study of jars of food left inside pyramids has revealed that they still smell sweet, which is a lovely and smart way to offset offset the smell of corpses all over from the people being buried with the pharaohs uh so this tomb this period is actually the tomb of an architect which i imagine makes it one of the shittier tombs because it's hard to build one when the architect has already died i suppose what you do is you draw a triangle in the sand and

then you do your best to make that but again and i hate to hark on this as someone who i would say is not a fan of unleashing eldrick horrors onto the world i would ask that we stop opening things inside tombs in general leave the tombs alone rest, some might say. But if we are doing this, if we are opening the jars of food inside the tombs, don't just smell it, eat it, coward, taste it. I don't care if it smells nice. Lush soap stores smell nice, but the taste leaves a lot to be desired. And yes, I did Google if there are lush stores in the UK, and apparently some. They sell soap, work it backwards from there. The other part of the story I love is the sweet-smelling food

wasn't even the big-ticket item. It's not the headline for me. They also found the embroidered underpants of the entombed architect, which is very clever. The last thing you want is to get to the next world and not know whose underwear is whose. It's very embarrassing for your first day in heaven. Though, as someone often guilty of leaving a gin bag unopened for a week

and then having to open it and clean everything inside, I can only imagine the noxious smells of ancient underwear. And I can't imagine any sweet jams or jellies you're finding is going to do any damage against that tsunami. Well, I feel like embroidered underwear is a sign of great self-respect. There's something sort of arts and craftsy about it. It's just for you and I guess the jackal-headed god of death. I think the self-respect element, it depends on whether you take them off before embroidering

them. It could be real self-hatred. I would say also, as someone who is, as a proud Australian investor in Bonds underwear and enjoys saying the phrase Bonds, James's Bonds every day, I feel like I get more out of that than I would out of my actual name. That's the thing. You can embroider any underwear. You could embroider Bonds underwear.

All you need is a needle and commitment. Can I say? Yes. I'm surprised that architect is such a high enough role in Egyptian society to get your own like burial place because it must be the easiest job in Egyptian society. You can be an Egyptian architect if you can draw a triangle. That's all the job is. What should we do this time triangle great occasionally you throw in a cat but then they don't like that enough to do more than one the great thing about

being an egyptian architect is it's all promises right oh sure i'll build you a tomb after you're dead oh it'll be huge it'll be magnificent and then you just get like a hundred people to sign up for the tomb that you're not intending to build and eventually you get enough money to actually build the tomb then as long as they keep bringing other people along then everyone profits in the end i just think that's a magnificent plan for the architect of course they're going to have heaps of money wait why didn't you do the hang on you didn't do the punchline about a pyramid what happened i assumed my audience was clever enough to put it together themselves i'll never assume that never assume that in the same way as the architect just vaguely

points at a patch of sand and assumes the slaves are clever enough to build it i'm gonna do all my punch lines once i'm dead the pyramids were very much not put together themselves someone was forced to put that together against their will and as all comedy should be delivered i want to know what architect makes like 12 pyramids and then he's like you know what i'm just going to go for a sphinx i think i've worked my way up to speak like at least give me a cube once let's work the difficulty scales up slowly one of them might be a cube just with half of it under the ground we just don't know and we never will After our ancient smells section, now it's time for our modern spells section.

There is a police department using witchcraft to find dead bodies in Tennessee. John Luke Roberts, you're related to a witch. Can you unpack this story for us? Sure. I'm married to a witch. The police forensics department. I don't know about this personally. That's just a connection. Like I have like I'm looking around the room.

I mean, there's various like crystals and brushes and stuff. They're teaching police to use dowsing rods to find dead bodies. So to walk along with the dowsing, it's called witching. Apparently, I think it's fairly reductive. There's a lot more to witching than just walking along with sticks to fight. Flying along with sticks, at least. Like when you're dousing for water. Yeah.

Then that means there's a dead body underneath you. I think this is quite a good thing to give to police officers do, because it stops them doing all the other things they do, which end up with minorities dead. So, and majorities dead, with people dead. Look, I think it's good it's also coincidentally the plot to police academy 9 hail bafflement there's scientists who've rubbished this saying you can't do that it's not actually working i think it's fine look if you anywhere

like probably in usa given its violent genocidal beginnings pretty much anywhere you stand there's a decent chance that something terrible has happened underneath you so you've got to start somewhere dowsing is usually used to find water if you're using the spell where you find something to drink to find a corpse doesn't that just mean they're vampire cops oh it's just the traditional thing that when someone says you want to see a dead body they're going to lead you to the creek and the rest of that i'm not allowed to talk about anymore dowsing rods are huge though in particularly like I know them mostly from tedious Australian fiction and what they do in those is let you know that the rest of the book is not worth reading because

it's always someone's come to town with a dowsing rod and they're going to find some water and then Russell Crowe will win World War I on horseback. Something like that will happen. I think you're on the right track here. Like this is what happens when we push to demilitarize and defund the police. Because like any good RPG or Dungeons and Dragons player, they will simply pick a new build. I can't afford armor. I'll be a mage and cast a few spells. This is a joke that I have researched by playing an insane number of hours of the game Elden Ring, which I mentioned for two reasons.

One, it's now a tax write-off, and two, in the future, my daughter can listen to this and find out why I never taught her to read. That's all the time we have for Modern Spells news, because now it is time for our art news. This is our half-a-glass-of-water art news, completing our, I think it's, what is it, a royal flush of fan service stories that have been sent in by our roving reporters.

If you are a roving reporter, if you find a story that you think would be suitable for the gargle, tweet us at HelloGogglers. The Louvre has prevented the $26.8 million sale of Chardin's record-setting strawberry painting, known not just for its strawberries, but for the not quite full glass of water standing next to the strawberries presumably to soothe your mouth from the

strawberry burn that you would receive from eating all of the strawberries. James your child is about to start solid foods unpack this story for us. Okay so this is a still life by 18th century French artist Jean-Baptiste Simon Chardin, which is how it isn't pronounced. And he has had his $28 million sale of his artwork blocked. And it's been given national treasure status. Now, national treasure status prevents paintings from being moved out of France

unless some Germans decide they just want it, which historically means they will just take it. Not much, I have to say. So the painting, as you've mentioned, is of strawberries in a glass of water, decide they just want it which historically means they will just take it uh not not much upset so the painting as you've mentioned is of strawberries in a glass of water which makes the price ridiculous because you could easily just buy those things for less than half the cost of this painting uh but instead it will now be inducted as a french national treasure joining other french national treasures which include sexually aggressive skunks, those big sticks you can smoke out of, black and white striped shirts, rioting, cheese which smells like it's been in a pyramid for 3,000 years,

throwing one of those big smoking sticks into the Notre Dame, Roman Polanski, withering looks of disdain, World War participation medals, Zinedine Zidane's zine, he makes zines now, and of course, this laugh. Very nice, very nice. nice of course they can just sell an nft of the painting and receive exactly the same value for none of the quantification john luke when you said then when you launched into the list of french things i was so convinced you're going to start with gerard depardieu that when you said sexually aggressive skunks i thought

the same thing it's called uh le panier de fraise des bois which translates as the basket of my boys the strawberries and there's white flowers there's water and there's strawberries as you say like things that they you can get them quite i think we should stop artists drawing or painting paintings of fruit we know what fruit looks like by now they should move on to something else we've got this one covered and also as you say it's not quite a half full glass of water it's more than half full it's unfortunately more than half full but I like to think because it's not it's not quite full that it was full when he started painting but he got he got a bit thirsty while he was going and maybe there were even more bloody strawberries, but he couldn't help but put them into his big old painty mouth.

I mean, the great thing to know about any glass that is more than half full of water is that it was once, however briefly, half full of water. It's also nice to know that this painting will become more relevant to future generations as they aren't able to access things like fresh fruit or a glass of water. These will be as fantastical as a painting of a unicorn to them. Did these ever really exist?

Yes. How did people have the time to do oil paintings between desperately trying to pack Amazon orders to the other side of the warehouse where the other person is working who desperately needs a bottle of water? I don't think I explained that properly. In my head, it's somebody working for Amazon and yet having to use Amazon because they're time poor. So the convenience of Amazon is sufficient for them to feed into the system that oppresses them. So they're on one side of the warehouse ordering something from the other side of the warehouse to be shipped to them while peeing in a bottle. The Amazon Ouroboros. Yes, yes. And peeing in a bottle and then drinking that is another way to make the human Ouroboros. These, yes. And peeing in a bottle and then drinking that is another way to make the human Ouroboros.

These are all wheels within wheels within wheels, and the wheels are snakes. That brings us to the end of the show. We've run out of time for all these magnificent stories. If you like podcasting, try podcasting. James Colley, have you got anything to plug? I've been trying podcasting, frankly, too much, so if you'd like to listen to Vanity Project, which is where

me and comedian Bridie Connell go through albums made by people who otherwise should not have been making albums, or The Colley Problem, which is my five hours of talking to various people about things. That one is a war of attrition.

Good luck getting to the end. And, John Luke, have you got anything to plug other than your fancy BBC award? Well, I did win an award. I won a BBC Audio Drama Award for Best Sketch Show for my podcast, Sound Team. It's now endorsed by the BBC, who didn't make it. And I quite like that because we beat BBC shows to the award so that's

nice I'm doing Edinburgh this year if anyone's going with a show called a world just like our own but dot dot dot so come and see that in Edinburgh 345 monkey barrel all August excellent I would like to say thank you to our roving reporters especially Alex, Mark, Peter, James, especially Alex, Mark, Peter James, Audrey, Sam and Carlitos who all sent in the story about the Slurm aka the sentient robot, sentient metallic

robot. If you would like to know the reference to that that prompted people sending that in many times go and listen to the entirety of the last post of the Davis Jekyll News podcast set in an alternate dimension that I spent an entire year doing and has never thought about since. We'd like to say thank you

to Head Nutcase, Chuck on Piggott and William John Moore for the Fugitive Flamingo story and Mammal of Mystery for the Ancient Smells story as well as Mike Espinos for Witchcraft and AP for the Half a Glass of Water art story. So if you would like to be

a roving reporter, tweet us at HelloGogglers, or if you just have a comment or want to say hi at HelloGogglers on Twitter, or find me at Alliterative on Twitter and Instagram, that's A-L-I-T-E-R-A-T-I-V-E, or patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. It's a good place to support me because people are certainly not buying tickets

to my Melbourne International Comedy Festival show, which is happening now, and the rest of this month, after which I will be in Sydney and then Perth and then London and then also Edinburgh. This is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Pet Hunter. Executive producer is Chris Skinner.

I will talk to you again next week. You can listen to other programs from The Bugle, including The Bugle, The Last Post, Tiny Revolutions and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts