The Gargle - The Gargle is BACK!

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

WE ARE BACKThat’s right The Gargle is back, the glossy magazine pull out to The Bugle’s audio newspaper for a visual world is back, and better than ever. Join Alice, and guest hosts Alison Spittle and John Luke Roberts as they bring you all of the latest from the world of science and technology.Alice Fraser: https://www.patreon.com/AliceFraserAllison Spittle: http://alisonspittle.com/John Luke Roberts: https://www.johnlukeroberts.co.uk/Subscribe to Realms Unknown - a fantasy, sci-fi and speculative fiction podcast from Alice Fraser and The Bugle!https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/news/realms-unknownYou fund what we do!https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/donateProduced by Harry Gordon, with Executive production from Chris Skinner Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're back, we're back. This is us. We are returned from the wilderness of not being a podcast, and we are now once more a podcast. Welcome to Season 2 of the Gargle, the fortnightly tech and science pull-out section of the Bugles' Audio Newspaper for a Visual World, now available in a visual format via our YouTube channel,

thereby directly contradicting the subheadline of the audio newspaper. To be fair, we're not the only newspaper going to, back on its tagline as the now orphaned Googles don't be evil and the Washington Post, democracy dies in darkness, are reported to be looking for new homes. That's a joke. They're not being reported to be doing anything anymore. There's no such thing as journalism, just comedians doing metacomontory on increasingly nested podcasts. Yes, the gaggle is back. We're back and no longer doing none of the politics, all of the news, because it turns out

it is impossible to do satire about tech and science news that does not touch on politics anymore because all the people doing science and technology, newsworthy things, are balls deep in fucking democracy. So it'll come up once in a while. We'll try to keep things accurate, but also light, because democracy dies in darkness. Do you like my new tagline? I got it in an Amazon returns box.

On to the news, but before that, I would like to welcome our guests. The grandson of Frankenstein Jr. And the godfather of alternative comedy, it's John Luke Roberts. Welcome. Hello, hello. Lovely to be here. And lovely to have an introduction to the podcast made, I think,

entirely of caveats. Yes. That's what I always say. Start on the back foot. Begin as you mean to have been going on. Mega quibble. And then we can start. And then we can begin. And welcoming back podcasters, extraordinary professor of the best of early 2000s entertainment culture. Alison Spittal. Beoboo, beo, beo, hello. How you doing?

I'm very, very excited to be back. It's strange. the gargle not existing for a while. Do you know what I mean? It felt like I was another entity. You know, that was just a god. And now the god has returned and it's seeking vengeance. That's us.

We are Zena Warrior Princess forged in the heat of battle. Let's have a look at the front cover of this week's Glossy magazine. The front cover of this week's Science and Technology Glossy pullout is K-pop demon hunters phenomenon joining the fight against climate change, trying to bring the hon moon by slaying pollutant big bosses with their catchy tunes, smiling into the camera, posed in cute proximity to one another, and the tagline is, let us show you how to recycle, open brackets, classic story tropes for an uncritical child audience.

And then the sub-tagline, seriously don't underestimate the power of a tech, savvy, ethically righteous youth fandom with spare money and time to whom mortgages mean nothing. On the front cover as well, teasers for the inside that include Big Bang Cocaine Corn Flakes, where to put your penis this spring, and Amazon's secret inner emotional battle revealed, exclamation point, does knowing you're hollowing out the book industry by fucking over authors make your golf swing better or worse.

And Disney Plus has added a content warning on some episodes of The Muppet Show and not because 90% of the characters are being continuously fisted. Our satirical cartoon. name. Our satirical cartoon this week is titled Crypto Riches, and it's a picture of Scrooge McDuck in his crypto vault, diving into a huge pile of constantly fluctuating nothing. Top story this week, Pink Squirrels News.

Alison Spittle, you are our pink squirrels correspondent. Can you tell us a little bit about this story? Yeah, Alice, I have pink hair and also on always. oral contraceptions. So this, these, these, these,

these, these, uh, these, there's been a, there's been a, there's been, I've been aware of this since I was a kid.

There's been a kind of battle between the gray squirrel and the red squirrel. Um, the gray squirrel is the brash American cousin of the red squirrel and have been, uh, have been released into Britain and, uh, are taken over the place. Uh, they are killing the red squirrels with a thing called.

squirrelpox and they're destroying trees as well. They're really, really efficient. Like Americans, they're really efficient at destroying the natural environment. So there's been a bit of a pushback. And what I love is I think this is the nicest pushback. They're basically putting humane traps in, filling it with hazelnut butter and a red dye that turns their fur pink. And hopefully in a couple of months, they're going to fill that with contraception. And they're going to do the coal that way, which is quite nice because they have tried coals other ways where they've had volunteers to come in and shoot the squirrels. And what I would love to know is like, who are these volunteers?

Do you know, like, who's volunteering to go postal against sentient beings? and yeah, they're hoping that this will help the red squirrel population thrive again, because at the moment they are in danger. The grey squirrels have taken over. They've done a bit too much. I think it's maybe red squirrels are like little incels, and they think that the pink-haired people have had too much power. And, you know, some people have shot them,

but now they've decided to call them the contraceptive way, which is beautiful. I'm very in favour of that. It is a humane way to sort of, you know, the oral contraceptive's way of keeping the numbers down. Although, as you say, in human societies, I think we know that the best way to keep a squirrel population down is to require two incomes to be able to purchase a house

and give women the ability to read. That seems to be the double. double knock. They should give the red squirrels like deodorant, you know, like I love the diary of a CEO guy. It's like, how do we, how do we help these in cells? And it's like by by making women, you know, have sex in them. And it's like, no, why don't you teach these men's skills like, you know, washing under their armpits and eye contact and maybe that would be helpful. Sorry, I was talking over here, Joe. No, it's okay. It's hard for red squirrel. I do want to defend the red squirrels a little bit. It's hard as a squirrel to

wash under your armpits because your arms are so little that getting them over to the other side is difficult enough. But this isn't, the pink-dyed oral contraceptives, which I think the pink dyes there to let you know they've been sterilised.

It's not the first thing they've tried. They did try before, like just going up to the squirrels and whispering about the eco-apocalypse so that they would think, oh, I probably shouldn't have kids, should bring up a world, kids in a world, this. And then there was the condoms. The condoms, I think, was trickiest to get close enough to get them on. So this, in many ways, is an improvement, is an improvement over that.

Well, certainly it was a worse list, the list of people who were volunteering to come in and put tiny condoms on squirrels than it was the list of people who were coming into massacre squirrels. You would think that you'd be more okay with the volunteers for the condom putting on, but that doesn't seem to have intuitively been the case. People seem to be morally more accepting of people who want to massacre squirrels and people who want to help them put a condom on. Yeah.

It's like when Great British Breakoff a couple of years ago, people on Twitter, RIP Twitter, were very interested in the size of a squirrel's balls. There was a squirrel used in like B-roll and it had massive, massive balls. and there was a whole national debate about it. I mean, that is an interesting squirrel fact when they drop their testicles.

That's how oak trees grow. That's why their cheeks are so full as well. But I love the idea of, like, in the article as well, they were talking about how different countries have dealt with different invading species. In Delhi, they tried the oral contraceptive method with macaque monkeys, but it didn't work because as we all know, macaque monkeys, they love the pull-out method.

Pull-out macaque. Very good. That's what you want to hear. That's what you want to hear from somebody. You're like, this, dude, I really trust him to do that method if he's going to say that beforehand. This is a person I don't want fathering my children. Actually, the first thing you say at that point, I think, is, oh, my God, a talking monkey. I mean, and then also have an existential crisis about whether you indeed are a talking monkey,

because you'd better be, because otherwise, why are you fucking a monkey? And that brings us to our Monster Stars news now, and this is where astronomers talking about things that happened billions of years ago make them sound exciting so that we care about them now. astronomers analysing data from Webb have discovered evidence of gigantic stars that formed right after the Big Bang. These supermassive big holes, black holes that have existed. There were supermassive black holes that existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. They couldn't hypothesize where they'd come from. But now they have hypothesized at pre-big holes there was monster stars that were between 1,000 and 10,000 times that of our

son. John Luke Roberts, you're our supermassive Holes correspondent. Can you tell us a bit more about this story? I've been losing weight. How dare you? No, that's a joke. As Holes correspondent, actually, I don't think it's quite fair for you to have a go to astronomers for trying to make us interested in things that happened billions of years ago, because that's literally all they do. No, that's me encouraging. Everything they tell is old news. Get over it. Get over it. Get over it, astronomers. they've done. So a supermassive black hole is like a massive black hole, but it's gone into a telephone

box and spun around. And they couldn't exist with normal size stars. So they worked out, they didn't know how these things existed just a billion years after Big Bang, but they've tested the nitrogen levels. And you find out that there's an imbalance of nitrogen around because you find those little metal canisters just in the gutter by the pavement. And so the astronomers looked at them and worked out that actually monster stars, yes, monster stars, which is what we call a star that's done terrible things,

because we can't tolerate the idea that an ordinary star would be capable of such thing, because that would make us doubt our own son's decency. Anyway, the monster stars, because they existed, that means that that's why supermassive black holes existed. And monster stars are 1,000 to 10,000 size the stars, size, the size of our own star of our son, which makes us, actually makes me feel a bit like, oh, I thought we were special and actually we're just next to this dweeby little star who's, who's nothing compared to these big old monster stars. And I guess it's, I guess that's good

because we're not going to end up next to a supermassive black hole. But that's the story. Because something, scientists have gone, that seems weird that those things exist now. And then they've gone, oh, that's why, probably. Well, I mean, yes, apparently these mega stars were just sort of wrongly calibrated. They burned very brilliantly for a short time and then immediately collapsed, much like the modern stars of our celebrity firmament. They say that like they burn bright for a quarter of a million years, which I think is the monster star equivalent to the 27 club. You know, it's just the year where they're gone. They're gone. If you're any kind of decent monster star, quarter of a million is where you're out. Or if not, you're just grow old and become like a red dwarf. Isn't it a red dwarf? What does a star become after it's a civilian? What's the what's the word for a star in retirement? I'm so bad with space. Like genuinely, anytime I try and learn about space, Brian Cox comes on the television and I'm like, I don't feel special about my seasonal affective disorder.

anymore. I don't want to know about how tiny I am in comparison to all these massive things. Well, I mean, the good thing about not being interested in space, Alison, is that we're all in space all the time, so it's okay. Good. That's it. So when I'm watching heated rivalry and I'm watching two hockey players live out their love, I could be like, that's space. They're just exchanging atoms. This is a, this is a beautiful space thing. Yeah, everything is science fiction. Yeah, do you think it's science fiction that two hockey players who are rivals from different countries? Have you seen Heated Rivalry?

I've not. I've only read the book because I'm a hipster like that. I love this. You're like, yeah. Well, well, I've just recently relearned how to read. So I do need to get back at the heated rivalry. but the TV series was quite fun, quite fun to watch. Sorry, I'm taking this away from space.

That's how little I want to speak about space. I'm like, have you seen the TV series where two men are riding each other? You just took it to personal space. Speaking of billionaires, fondling space, there was a pro-billionaire's march against a proposed new billionaires tax in San Francisco. A bunch of people came out in order to protest for the right, of billionaires, it being San Francisco, it was immediately met by an extraordinarily

large counter-protest of people who were not so keen on people who were keen on billionaires. John Luke Roberts, you've got a moustache. Can you unpack this story for us? Oh, does that mean I'm super rich? Oh, that's good. Oh, that's nice. Oh, then I'm against this tax. I'm coming out against it. Yeah, it was a 5% tax that they're having voted through, and somebody tried to organize a protest which was very small. Although, I saw one of the signs which said billionaires build the future. And that, I think, like, I mean, I don't think that. And it took me a while to work out that's pro-billionaire because I was thinking, like,

what, this future, thanks a bunch, billionaires. Didn't want this. No, but in their defense, because it was very small, that it's just because a couple of people were hoarding all the placards and they were arguing that this would trickle down to the streets but in the end that didn't turn out to be the way things work. No, I mean it is an interesting, they made some interesting arguments, of course. They suggested that this tax would chase billionaires out of the state,

that the billionaires are wealth and job creators for all of those people who very much enjoy pacing into a plastic bottle at the end of their 13-hour shift. important. I mean, there are good jobs that billionaires provide as well, but they come on the backs of the bad jobs. And I guess we all have to come to terms in ourselves with whether we are willing to deal with slightly less convenience in our lives or whether we would rather flush our ethics down the toilet and get that thing right now that we really want. And, you know... I prefer to put my ethics into a plastic bottle at the end of a 13-hour shift.

The other argument at the end of the end of the... speechifying at the end of the protest. Somebody said some people think that nobody should be billionaires. We believe that everybody should be billionaires, thereby proving he does not understand how money works. Totally. And making me feel sorry for him rather than angry with him about the whole March thing.

Yeah, that's an argument for hyperinflation, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, that is. One billion dollars for a Mars bar, please. I do feel like these people, they're doing this protest this, like, you know, this month. It feels like a very bad time to defend billionaires, especially this month of everything that's coming out in the news. It feels like starting a Gary Clitter fan club after his trip to PC world and the rest.

And they're like, well, we got to focus on how good the music is. Like, this feels, it just feels, it just feels very pointed. And where are these, I love this kind of thing of like, we're afraid of the billionaires leaving the area. And it's like, it's like they, unless you live on a small Caribbean island, they're not living in your area. They're living, you know,

they're living in these tax havens or, well, they never live in Ireland. They, they utilize all the, all the kind of lax tax stuff in Ireland, but nobody ever chooses to live there. We're not like the Virgin Islands or,

you know, any kind of beautiful place. No one is going to live in Navant. No billionaire is going to come to Nav. Sorry, Navan is for specifically Irish people. You know, I wouldn't live there and I have no house. So that's my view on it. Like, look, if you can see, this is a visual podcast.

I'm living in what looks like a tenement. I've got my washing out behind me, you know. I've got my little yoga mat and my bit of art. And this is what I pay 650 quid a month for. No sitting room. This is my life. I'm drying my clothes above my bed, probably getting a respiratory disease whilst doing it. But this is my life. I choose to be an artist. As do we all, speaking of which it is hard to afford a life in the arts. So it is now time for your ad section, your ad section now, because if we don't do ads, you have to pay directly for this. And let's be

frank, I don't trust either of us to like me enough for that. Have you lost fitness due to laziness or the irresistibly oncoming onslaught of age? Are you worried that your new sedentary lifestyle has left you unfit for the real world with its stairs and possibly incipient breakdown of civil order? Got some authoritarian goons to chase down the street in your dressing gown while you wave a menacing saucepan? Well, get right back to cardiovascular spectacular with the miracle instant health treadmill solution. Have I got the product for you?

Have I got the product for you? I have got the product for you. It's a secret surprise in nice wrapping paper and it's on the end of this stick and it's on a string and I've hung it off the front of this here treadmill. If you can reach the miracle solution, it's yours.

Until then, or you figure out how to walk around a treadmill, you'll just have to keep running and reaching. Miracle instant health treadmill solution. You're nearly there. Spoiler alert, the secret surprise is half a glass of water. The great thing about getting older is that as you get more blotchy and worn your eyes, get worse, so you have a built-in beauty filter when you look in the mirror. The only problem is you can't be sure the rest of the world will look at you so kindly.

Introducing the Blurtiful Acid Mist, an algorithmically intelligent decommissioned Russian chemical nanoweapon, which will proceed you into any room and mildly blind anyone with too piercingly perfect a perspective on your hideous face. The Blurtiful Acid, available online at Ah, I can't read the website. And that brings us to more of our science and technology news. This is the news, which apparently is new news and excitingly new scientific news about the fact that early morning inductions seem to shorten labor times and reduce the need for cesarean sections by aligning the process of labor with your circadian rhythms.

People tend to naturally go into labor in the early hours of the morning. and so it turns out that if you do the artificial induction in the early hours of the morning, similar to how your body would normally work if you were a person planning to give birth that morning, it would be easier and better for you. And it is just so good to find this out now after we've been giving birth for hundreds of thousands of years. It's almost like we might have taken an interest before this. Alison Spittle, you're our early morning correspondent. Can you tell us a little bit more about this story?

Yeah. So this is basically, but the circadian rhythms, I've always, I'm a bit of a morning person myself. I have a morning routine. And I'm sure to include this into my early morning routine by giving birth. I feel like I was, what time were you born at? Like this feels like a very kind of as a woman. And I know what time my friends were born at because they tell each other and ask me when they're trying to figure out their horoscopes and stuff. But I was born at like 8 o'clock in the morning. And I do feel like I am more of a morning person. And it's just once again is kind of showing that like medicine is not bothered to do kind of any research into women's health, really. and we're finding out so much so late in the day, if you get me. And this is like, it's about a third of labours in the UK and the US are now induced. I mean, they're brought on them.

So a third of all labour is in the UK and Australia and the US is induced. And they're commonly recommended if the baby's overdue. Also, I think it's like four out of five first pregnancies are more than a week over due. you, which means that they just tell you the wrong length for a pregnancy. They've just been telling us. Really? Yeah. Oh my God.

Yeah, because you are the only person, I think, that has given birth on the panel. Like, how did the news affect you? Which panel did you give birth on, Alice? Podcasting has gone too far. I should check that, given that this is a science podcast. I should check that fact. But somebody told it to me, and I believed it. Well, when I read that they found out that you should induce childbirth in the morning,

I did panic because I thought, well, every morning. And I always would find when you're up hard enough without going to go through this as well. I know, I have to floss my teeth and do vitamins without a tell of it is. How do you find enough time in the morning to do all the things that we're supposed to do anyway? And that brings us to our penultimate story. This is the story that I'm entitling, the dogs of war, which sounds like it's a cute story, but it's actually a very sad story. Apparently, exposure to the conflict in Ukraine has very quickly transformed pet dogs into wild dogs.

They behave in ways that are seen in wolves, coyotes or dingoes. So there was a survey done of a number of dogs surviving in the front lines of the battlefront in Ukraine. Don Luke Roberts, you like bones. Can you unpack this story for us? Yeah, it is a sad story. So I will try and make it unreasonably jolly. They've gone around to dogs and they've done a survey saying like, hello, would you mind spending a few minutes doing a survey?

Well, I don't want a little survey for you, is what the dogs say. And then they say, do you feel that war has changed? You would say, oh, yes, the horrors of all have changed me. That's the story. Basically, people have had to abandon their pet dogs. There's dogs who have ended up feral on the front line. Dogs, but, well, this is the problem. One of the ways looking at is these dogs are saying,

well, now they have more dog-like features. They're like more of the dogs who are there have longer snouts and are kind of built like traditional wolf dog coyote, you know, the thing that they came from. But that's not because they've like evolved in some super quick way. It's because all the Daxons and all the French bulldogs have died off because they're not made for war and they're too easy to load into an artillery cannon.

So it's just, it's quite a sad story about these dogs trying to get on, try not to hit the landmines and the doggier dogs are the better one at it. So in my head, I've just said it's a story about dogging on the front line. And that's funnier because it's really hard to dog on the front line because how do you see in the tank? You need a periscope.

Yeah, a little periscope. One at a time comes along, looks at the periscope, the one way around, sees what's going on in there. Yeah, there's a glory hole periscope as well that only a few people can use. I was particularly impressed by this story's Oh, she's taking it away from dog and she's taking it away from dog and she's taking it back to dogs. To suggest.

That's professionalism. That's what a host does. I know. It was very gently sort of suggested that these were not evolutionary pressures at play. These were selection pressures at play. And they managed to sort of get through almost the entire article without suggesting that any of the dogs were, you know, doing anything as sort of upsetting as dying. but they did not steer clear of the fact that the way that some of these dogs are surviving is by, quote, scavenging some of the bodies of the human organs.

I feel like whoever's written this story maybe has their priorities very slightly wrong in almost exactly the same way as the people who are more upset about the volunteers for putting on tiny squirrel condoms. Oh, they're not tiny squirrel condoms. And normal-sized condoms, you just put it over the whole squirrel. So it looks like PPE gear or something. It looks like these little squares are involved in a crime scene or they're like trying to clean out a little squirrel crime scene.

Yeah, that is a... My family own a few different dogs and none of them are surviving war. Like they can't even survive being the breed that they are, never mind surviving war. They're very interbred little dogs. dogs who are slowly falling apart over an eight-year cycle. No way are they dealing with Putin or anything like that.

Fair play to these dogs. Fair play to them. Well done dogs. And it does show an egregious lack of foresight in our breeding protocols over the last couple of hundred thousand years that we've been breeding dogs to be our companions and increasingly useless accessories. We were not thinking about how they would survive in a wartime situation. We were not building towards, you know, bomb-proof dogs.

We were building towards, you know, ones that have the faces of squished in bats. Exactly. I don't like some of their little dogs. Well, oh, so I guess you're in support of Putin's invasion of Ukraine then. Sounds like you are. Oh, he's finally seen off those French bulldogs. You people appal me, you podcast hosts. Are you looking for a person?

poet who always has the last word, it's P.S. Eliot. Are you looking for a crime novelist who'll sell well at an auction? It's Agatha Christie's. Are you looking for an author who always swims upstream? It's Salmon Rushdie. That's, oh my gosh. The P.S. The P.S. in P.S. Eliot is always anti-Semitism. Speaking of a.

Pauling, the patients who have more than one medical record are far more likely to experience serious harm after being admitted to hospital, according to US. Journal, BMJ Quality and Safety, a research that was published in the BMJ Quality and Safety Journal indicates that people who have mixed up records, duplicate records, or their information being kept in a number of different places, are more likely to die. 11% of those who are inpatients die compared with 2.5% of people whose records are all straight, which feels like an extremely significant, statistically significant number. They're not sure if it's causation or correlation if you are more likely to have mixed up records.

If you are less good at staying alive, I don't know what the causal link would be. But Alison Spittle, you are impatient indeed. So can you unpack this story for us? Yeah, so it seems like people who move around a lot are going to get punished. And it's basically that it seems like if you stay in the one place, if you stay in the one place, you're less adventurous. So you probably have less reason to go into hospital. I feel like most of the people who go into A&E through accidents,

through jumping out of a plane or something like that will be people who go. go on a gap year or something, you know, you're not really going to, if you're staying in your small town, you're not bungee jumping, you're not doing parkour, you probably have less reason to go to A&E. So I'd like to see these stats property. But it does feel like, once again, with health, you're kind of being messed about if you do have to move around a lot. People who have to move around a lot are people who maybe go for economic reasons. stuff. So I don't know, every time I read any of these news stories, I feel like once again, poor people are getting fecked over, really. Well, so it's not just people who are moving around.

It's people who have sort of medical admin problems at various times. They might have come in different times, but not been put on the same record or had a number of files open for them or gotten in some confusing situation and been unable to wade through hospital admin to resolve it. And then, of course there is the 90% of people who go into hospital who are Jack Reacher and have no records at all. He does fine though. He seems to feel well. I mean, we don't know how many Jack reaches there are. That's the problem. And maybe there are duplicate Jack Reaches, but only one medical record. John Luke Roberts? Yeah. So it seems like the problem is you've got two sets of notes and one of them will say like oh and by the way their bones are dissolvable in water and

the other one won't mention it and you get the wrong notes and then you you give them a bed bath and they sort of dissolve that seems that's that's that's basically the problem it's not having it's not having one set of complete notes but having sort of oh this wasn't mentioned here and so this that's what would you would assume I mean as I say that we don't know if it's correlation or causation it's just statistics So I would like to see the data, although I would say if I did see the data, I wouldn't have a clue what to do with the data. So probably show it to another statistician. It's probably the thing to do.

Well, at least they don't have to rely on my mum. I remember I went into hospital last year. And I had this, I was kind of, I had sepsis, so it was pretty serious. And the doctors were saying to me that, are you allergic to penicillin? Because we need to give you penicillin. I was like, I don't know. I've never, I don't think I've ever had penicillin before. I'll ring my mom.

So I rang up my mom and I was like, mum, mom, my allergic to penicillin. And she goes, oh, I don't know, Alison. Is either you or your sister. Either you are your sister? So I rang up my sister and I said, are you allergic to penicillin? And she goes, yeah, yeah, I am. And so I said to the doctor is like, give me the penicillin. It turns out both of us are allergic to penicillin.

Oh, no. Mom has multiple daughters. I should have rang all of my sisters. And I was, I looked like bagpuss, genuinely. I looked like the devil himself. I was just expanded and read for about a week. So, like, you can't even rely on your mum to keep proper hospital notes. And she loves you the most.

So how are you going to rely on the medical system? Well, she either loves you or your sister the most. It's hard to know. Yeah, it's either me or my sister. Which one are you again? You're the one who's allergic to love or the one who's allergic to penicillin. I wouldn't know. I haven't had either.

I haven't had either. Both of them grow on moldy bread. That brings us to the end of this week's returning season two, episode one of the goggle, with our wonderful, wonderful, returning friends of the podcast co-hosts. Alison Spiddle, have you got anything to plug? I've got so much to plug. I've got a tour called Big,

which is a bit about that sepsis that I had. I'm hitting Ireland at the end of February and then the UK. in March and then Australia in April and then in June I'm at Leicester Square Theatre so please come along to that I've got a new podcast called Ignore That Feeling with Fern Brady and the first episode is out this week and another podcast called Magazine Party

with Poppy Hillstead. You can go on Instagram, find out everything about me and yeah and have a great day. Pugh, pew, pew, pew. Pew, Pew, Pew. John Robbins, have you got anything to plug? I was listening to Magazine Party on a car trip recently and it's a lot of fun so I recommend magazine party. Oh that's great. What have I got to

plug? Well there's my podcast sound heap which you know but at the moment it's the um god there's no way of talk about this and that sound like an utter arsehole um it's the 30th anniversary of infinite jest the book being written and published and that there's a few things but basically I made a documentary about it a few years ago which I we made to sort of listen to to find out whether you'd like the book or not, because you can't recommend the book without it being problematic. And I wouldn't recommend the book necessarily. But we made quite a fun podcast in which I include the line about Infinite Jest. It's a bit of an unread flag.

And because of that alone, I think you should listen to it is on BBC Sounds under the Exploding Library documentary series. That is an excellent podcast. I've listened to it. I've also listened to magazine parties so I can recommend both magazines. Party and SoundHeap podcast and The Infinite Dess podcast. So please seek them out if you're a podcast listener and you are. This, I, me, I am on patreon.com slash alice Frazier.

It's where I put all of my stuff because I don't trust the algorithms anymore. So basically it's a functionally mailing list you can subscribe there for free or for money. I won't object if you do it for money. If you do it for money, you can join my twice weekly writers meetings. Occasionally I do bonus writers meetings like this week. I'm doing a writer bugle with me on that. So if that sounds like up your alley, Patreon.com slash Alice Fraser

and join in the writers' meetings if you're writing anything or if you want to be writing anything or if you don't want to be writing anything but feel you could be convinced to write something. I am on tour as well. I will be in Newcastle, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne,

London and Edinburgh. If you head over to alicephrazer.com, there is a gigs page there which will tell you if I'm in your town or not. You won't know otherwise. I'll just be standing directly behind you. This is a bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Harry Gordon.

Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week.