The Gargle - Thumbs up | Robotaxi | Ship kites

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

John-Luke Roberts and Eleanor Morton join host Alice Fraser for episode 120 of The Gargle - the glossy magazine to The Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world. All of the news, none of the politics!👍 Thumbs up contract🚕 Robotaxi cones🪁 Giant ship kites🐁 Transparent mouse🚽 ReviewsHOW TO SUPPORT THE GARGLEAdvertise YOUR business on The Gargle with an Alice Fraser ad read. Contact [e-mail]-order the D'Ancey LaGuarde Reader book here! http://l8r.it/DHhGBuy tickets to The Gargle Live at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival - Tue 15 and 22 August - go to https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/liveCONTENTS0:00 Intro01:18 Front cover01:28 Satirical cartoon03:12 Story 1: Thumbs up emoji is a contract agreement10:05 Ads11:46 Story 2: Robotaxi haters are disabling them with traffic cones19:24 Reviews24:23 Story 3: Giant kites on ships could slash carbon emissions27:37 Story 4: Transparent mouse could improve cancer tests32:18 Bye! Anything to plug? 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. A rudimentary feudal system has formed, the strongest and most organised, achieving a sort of government, preventing the most depraved of depravities in the interests of keeping some semblance of control. Let people lose that vast scrap of humanity and you can't keep them on the leash. Their jailers orbit in the sky above, very little supervision is needed, yet below the movements of the prisoners begin to achieve a sort of rhythm. A sense that rises from the mass of starved humanity, some shared song of victory or achievement. The Imperator looks down at the screen.

Corporal, what's going on down there? The Corporal salutes carefully. Sir, I'm sorry, sir. That is the gargle. And this is the gargle, the sonic glossy magazine to the Bugle's audio newspaper of the visual world. I'm your host, Alice Fraser, and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are John Luke Roberts.

Hello. Hello. Hello. And Eleanor Morton. Hello. Hi. Before we chain ourselves together and start breaking the rocks that are this week's top stories, let's have a look at the front cover.

The front cover of the magazine this week is a tower of live human bodies reaching upwards, representing the deep and profound shared struggle to acquire Taylor Swift tickets. The satirical cartoon this week is the launch of the Barbie movie with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, with a group of scientists in lab coats drawing a graph that explains where participating in the Barbie movie's rave reception falls on the scale between irony,

nostalgia, post-irony, kitsch camp, post-kitsch, sub-camp, post-post-irony and post-post-modern, post-pre-post-pre-irony. So, good to know exactly where you fall. Where's Susan Sontag when you need her? I'm all of them. I'm every single one. I'm so excited about the movie.

I mean, there you go. That's the thing. Are you genuinely excited or are you ironically excited all of it both yeah both it's so i'm so i'm gonna wear pink to the to the shot it's gonna be great i'm so excited i'm gonna wear my bomb bag if there is not a sequence i i can't i can't watch the barbie movie because it won't be it won't be true to life if there's not a sequence where two two of them clash groins aggressively for at least 15 minutes it's not it's not real is it yeah or or you know i hope one of them at least will have like gnawed off feet swapped heads yeah let's go with the real realism yeah i was i was more of my little pony's boy so i have no point of contact here

well I mean there's a welcoming community for you if you wanted to reach into the nostalgia of bronydom I'm not sure that's for me I think that's a trap I think that's a trick

I'm not going in it's a Trojan my little that's a trick. I'm not going in. It's a Trojan My Little Pony. Oh yeah, what can you get inside a My Little Pony? You'd be surprised. That's probably to my guess, yeah. It really is. Top story now, and this is the news that legal contracts have been updated for the modern age, with a farmer being held liable for using a thumbs up emoji on receiving a contract as saying that he had accepted the contract. So John Luke Roberts,

you've accidentally agreed to a contract with a thumbs up. Can you unpack this story for us? Yes. So it's in Canada. A judge said that counts. That's basically it, isn't it? There was a farmer and somebody had a longstanding business relationship business relationship with, the guy sent him, the buyer said, here's a contract for buying that grain. And the farmer replied with a thumbs up. And the judge has ruled that to mean that that is legally binding. Whereas he was arguing that the contract was just, he was just saying, yes, I've received that. Which I think actually, I am kind of with the judge on this. I think a thumbs up on a contract for yes, I've received that, which I think actually, I am kind of with the judge on this. I think a thumbs up on a contract for yes, I've received that does not mean yes, I've received that.

It is worrying, though, as precedents go, because this means that legally when I reply to a joke with a cry laughing emoji, it means I actually have laughed at the joke and I can assure you that I haven't. You're contractually obliged to laugh until you cry, John. I guess that's it too, isn't it? But just two tears, just two tears.

Well, although they do have to be from separate eyes. Separate eyes. If I can only get like one eye crying, then it doesn't fit. Then you'll be like the statue of the Virgin Mary. In many ways, I am. Stoical, unmovable. Look good in blue. Yeah.

So yeah, that's sort of it. And I like it. I think we should dispense with contracts altogether and aim towards an entirely pictographic language again, back to sort of hieroglyphic things. So just picture of wheat picture of wad of cash thumbs up that's all we need yeah yeah just bring it back to leaving complex cursors on your graves for people to find and then uh deduce in year three for some reason

that i feel like year three is the prime age for a hieroglyphic translation. Huh. Was that just me? Well, I'm sure it's probably really good observational material, but again, I have no way of, no contact with this. I can't... If you didn't specifically do a project on Tutankhamen when you were in year three, this joke's going to go over your head.

I don't know what age year three is but I definitely did one Yeah Oh I'm sorry, I'm really sorry, I completely misunderstood. I thought you meant 3 AD I thought there'd been a search in Egyptology at that point Right, this makes far more sense now

Oh no, this is like the cryptocurrency thing all over again. You thought it couldn't possibly be as dumb as I was saying it was. This is three different school systems, and this is why this podcast is so problematic, because none of us really know what ages we talk about with each other. It's really difficult. Which is why we need to go back to emojis.

No room for misinterpretation there. Exactly. Have you ever signed a contract with a thumbs up ever I mean I I've I've done the equivalent which is not really read it and then scribble my name very quickly um and I have to say uh an emoji emoji response is great because sometimes uh if you sign a contract for some reason some people still want you to print it out sign it in real life scan it and upload it again and um and that is that is it's exhausting to do all of those things and still not read it at the same time you basically have to be trying really hard not to let your eyes skim the page the contract could be paying me a million pounds but if i had to print it out sign it and re-scan it i wouldn't

it'd be off i don't know what it's for i think you need to reassess your priorities i just got rid of my printer i wasn't using it and um nobody sent me nobody sent me anything to print off anymore no um i feel like i've sent luke definitely plenty of text messages where an emoji has been the entire response. And I'm glad there was no legal precedent there because God knows what I could have meant. I'm going to have to scroll back through my WhatsApps. Yeah. There's a hierarchy now because now you can do a reaction emoji on the body of the previous message,

which is less commitment than a full emoji in a separate message, which implies that you've engaged more fully and emotionally with the message and have taken the time rather than just attaching your emotion to their original thought. Well, there's also, like, if you reply with the emoji as a separate message, it's bigger. So if I'm just doing a tiny cry laugh at one of Luke's jokes, that's more realistic.

Just a little bit of a chuckle that made you feel melancholy towards the end. If it's a separatele that made you feel melancholy towards the end. That's his brand. If it's a separate emoji that's massive, that really oversells how much I enjoyed. Yeah, all right. Well, it's interesting you're bringing this up. And then, of course, the next level up is saying the emoji that you would do if you were able to navigate the emoji menu, which is mainly for boomers, but also for people who like to think of themselves as literary, incapable of engaging with the confusing world of pictures. So just like typing, cry laughing.

Typing, sad face emoji, yeah. Oh, yeah, or disassociation emoji. Yeah, yeah, eggplant, eggplant. And that's one of my favourites, the disassociation emoji. What does that look like again? It's got a dotted rim on the outside of it. Oh, is that what that is? It's a smiley face with dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. That's what I my favourites, the disassociation emoji. What does that look like again? It's got a dotted rim on the outside of it. Oh, is that what that is? It's a smiley face with dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

That's what I think of it for. I think before that people used the melty face for disassociation, but now I think it's the dot, dot, dot. I prefer monocle man. I feel he's enigmatic. I like monocle man, although I do wonder... You're doing monocle man face right now. I am doing monocle man face.

And then there's the one with the finger on the face. The not monocle man. Man who. I am doing monocle man face. And then there's the one with the finger on the face. The not monocle man. Man who wishes he had a monocle because then he wouldn't have to raise his hand to his face. I feel they're similar. But no one actually ever does that. Do you guys do the face of the emoji you're trying to look for when you...

In order to seek it out? Yeah. I don't think I do, no. I think I do. No, but when I'm doing a talk to text i imbue the talking text with the emotion uh in my voice as i deliver it which apparently is weird apparently you're meant to deliver it in a robotic monitor okay does that translate into emojis or does it you can't you can't um talk to text and emoji no by, by its very nature, text is stripped of external signifiers.

On the monocle man, I do think there should be more emojis with obsolete technology in. Like, I want a trebuchet man. I don't just want... Steam engine man. Yeah, yeah. Well, the only thing that can beat a bad man with a trebuchet is a good man with a trebuchet on slightly

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now it's time for your top story in the next section which is our robo taxi news and this is the news that robo taxi activists anti-robo taxi activists uh have realized that they can disable cruise and waymo robo taxis by putting a traffic cone on the hood of the vehicle and they've started doing that and are encouraging other people to do it too, standing in the way of the robot future. Eleanor Morton, you've done some suggestible things with traffic cones before. Can you unpack this story? Yeah, sure.

Yes, I have. Put them on your head, pretend to be a witch? Come on. I mean, they're very heavy though. You don't want to do that unless you've got a robust head. So this is in San Francisco where I believe basically because it's in like is it the tech valley is that what you'd call it um it feels like they seem to get all the weird products and new tech as like it's like the experiment ground for that so the locals of san francisco are always having to deal with

whatever weird nonsense um tech bros are coming up with. And obviously electric cars are... Not electric cars. They might be. Are they electric? They probably are. Driverless cars are the big thing. What does Waymo stand for? Waymo.

Waymo good at driving than human piloted vehicles. And people aren't happy with them because, know i think uh i'm all in favor of progress but there is something a bit a bit stressful about a car without a driver um it has killed a dog not on purpose accidentally well maybe on purpose um we don't know the car's um intentions but uh yeah they are a bit a bit weird and freak people out and basically apparently if you put a cone on the hood i don't know i guess its navigation system freaks out or something yeah but to be fair if you put a cone on somebody who's driving a car their navigation system will probably freak out too yeah exactly that that wouldn't work either so um so people have been

doing this to kind of stop these cars and sort of do a kind of very gentle protest i think the the waymo people have argued that this is vandalism but i don't think that count i don't think putting a cone on a thing is vandalism i don't think you could take that to court yes and any more than if a graffiti artist just put an easily removable decal on the side of a train. Yeah, or chalk or something. So everyone's all up in arms. And I have to say, San Francisco feels like the worst place to test a driverless car because it is all angles and slopes. And I just feel like that's a disaster waiting to happen. Not just that, but also you've got that divorced dad who dresses up as a nanny

and he's always running back and forth between two places to change costume and you don't want that happening when cars are going quickly well i don't know maybe that would speed up the process if he had a driverless taxi to take him between no because that's a lot to put into the trolley programming programming of the internals of this vehicle these these vehicles have to make split second decisions about whether to run over a man or an old granny and they can't tell which that person is when they're running across the road they could malfunction as badly as presumably they'll be programmed to calculate well better to kill the granny because she's had more life than the young man who is a more productive member of society and has more years to live oh no no no i would say the opposite I feel like the granny depends on how lovable

she looks, but she probably has, you know, a loving brood of a family. Whereas if it's like a cold hearted businessman who loves nobody, get rid of him. No, I know. But remember who's writing these algorithms. They're generally in favour of the cold hearted businessman. Valid. Alice, I feel like you're very techie. you keen on driverless cars they kind of scare me but i guess maybe that's how everyone feels about new technology well look i think that the great thing about um startup culture generally is that it's looking for efficiencies in the business

world so you're looking for an efficiency in the business world you're thinking well i can close that uh gap in the world with by computers i can use that to you know i see this thing i can make it more efficient using technology i can use this make this more efficient using uh programming and eventually the goal is that you can make something so efficient that you can stop paying the workers um which is of course all of our ambition yes um if only there was a way of cutting the consumers out of it as well. Well, they try. The thing is, a driverless train doesn't scare me because the DLR is the greatest experience anyone will ever have.

Thank you. Oh, sorry, DLR, sorry. Pretending you're the driver on the DLR is Docklands Light Rail, for the uninitiated, is one of the greatest joys in life. But a train is on tracks, and there's really only a couple of things that can go wrong. There's only limited options. A car's just out there, free in the wild, and it just doesn't fill me with confidence. See, I'm old enough that I've rewound a cassette tape using a pencil.

I wonder if children of the future will look back fondly on times when you could disable a self-driving car with a traffic cone yeah all the days when you put the traffic cone on it immediately shot you in the head i imagine they'll eventually become transformer cars and if you put the cone on it it transforms into it you know an optimus prime type and then it it will take you down any any car is a transformer if you've got a good enough monkey wrench and a dream it did uh it did occur to me that it would make quite a good robocop sequel if you could disable robocop by putting a cone on his head it would certainly be like yeah a lot of fun again i feel like you could disable a regular

police officer by putting a cone on their head hard enough yeah hard enough i guess i've also like many british like cities for years on friday and saturday nights people have been like disabling statues by putting cones on their heads yeah i've never seen a i've never seen a statue with a corner of his head moving exactly exactly and so you've got to say well done guys the thing about america though is is that maybe not what's the thing about america guys guys listen the thing about them they've got they've got endless mile literally hundreds of miles of straight road you i don't want a driverless car in Northumberland, is what I'm saying.

It's not a car for twisting, turning roads that the Romans built. Although the Romans also like a straight road. But you know what I mean? We're not a country, I don't think, built for driverless cars. And I'm sure Australia, you can also go for miles in a straight line.

That's the plot of Mad Max Fury Road. Literally is. There you go. Imagine how boring that film would be if that was a driverless car. All driverless cars. Hey, wait, driverless car chase. That would be fun.

Just two driverless cars chasing each other. Have you seen Fast and the Furious? That is some driverless cars and then other have you seen fast and the furious that is right that is some driverless cars and then some men in a small booth moving their hands like this they um my sister's an extra in the ninth one because they filmed it in edinburgh and uh again i have no idea why you'd want to film a fast and furious in edinburgh it is it is possibly only known for being a terrible city to drive in so oh i mean yes i was going to say it's known for being a terrible city to drive in so i mean yes i was going to say it's known for being uh slow and calm yeah unless you're on the bus in the middle of town and you

need to get half a mile away and the traffic means it takes an hour then you're angry very angry but i'm fine and now it's time for your reviews as As you know, each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review out of five stars. Eleanor, what have you brought in for us? Seagulls. Yeah, I've been living in my new flat. There's a lot of seagulls around. And, you know, I didn't really think about them a lot before now.

Is your new flat a clamshell? Oh, do you think that's attracting them they are really really noisy and i don't i mean like i mean like it sounds like children it might be children children screaming non-stop all day every day i don't know what's happening but it's i've never i might be anti-seagull now because of this experience. Everything else about where I am now, great, lovely. The seagulls, it just feels like they have a personal vendetta. They are so big.

They keep swooping at my windows and I keep thinking like a pterodactyl is outside. So, so far, it's not been, I'd say, like a one star out of five for seagulls. Also, they're not like, you don't live by the sea. I mean, I guess I sort of do, but yeah, not on the seafront. Then I think if it's not the seafront, they're not sticking by their job title. No, exactly. Of seagull. My dad says that they are lesser black-backed seagulls.

And that means that they hopefully won't be here in the winter because they migrate but then he said that because of climate change they might stop migrating so this could be all year round now so just and this isn't just any dad your dad's a bird man he is a non-orthologist yeah yeah no sorry yeah i don't just i don't just go to him what's your thoughts on this? He knows what he's talking about. But, yeah, seagull's bad. A seagull once got its beak underneath my entire fish just as I walked out of the fish and chip shop on Brighton Pier

and flicked it out for him and all his others. He really planned this thing. I was so sad. I was this thing. I was so sad. I was so sad. They are clever and vicious and big and you know what? I'd like a nice kitty wake.

It's like a seagull but it's small and delicate. That's what I'd like to replace them with. It's also what happens after a funeral for a cat. He's never off. John Luke, what have you brought in for us? I'd like to review portaloos, because I've been thinking about them. I don't know why.

I haven't managed to go to any festivals this year, and I think it's made me nostalgic. Because their greatest asset, right, is their portability. So you can take them and put them in a field or wherever you need them, or, you know, whether it's a building site or anything like that. But it's also what makes them the scariest type of loo to use.

Most loos, you can count on the security of going into them, sitting on them and thinking, well, great, this loo certainly isn't going anywhere. So that's a remote uncertainty in an uncertain world. But a port-a-loo, you can't be sure that you're walking out that door in the same place you went into it. They're too portable. So for their convenience, I would give them a four. For the insecurity, I would give them a two.

So I give port-a-loos three stars out of five. Fair, very fair uh i have been in some extremely fancy portaloos which feels uh morally wrong brick portaloos inside houses my gosh no no i i when i when i had i had a scholarship at university and there was like a fancy do for it and they had these they're sort of in uh demountable kind of shipping container style boxes and you walked in and there was like music playing and real towels for wiping your hands on and, you know, gold plated. Real towels instead of toilet paper. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, that's not what you expect in a port-a-loo. So, yeah, it was very upsetting, actually. It sort of felt discombobulating. You're like, I know what to expect from a port-a-loo and this ain't it like imagining a goose and getting a swan yeah exactly both of them can break your arm if they try hard enough

they both can, they're pretty vicious my dad says they have fancy ones on TV sets but I'm never sure if the rare occasions I've been on TV sets I'm not ever sure if I'm fancy enough to use them like is there a secret

portable like normal portalo that I should be using and this is for the fancy actors because I did once join the wrong food queue when I was an extra in something I joined the food queue for the real actors and then someone had to come up and be like this is the queue you're not a real actor you have to leave you get a muesli bar and a slap in the face yeah

no to be fair the food's good but they they let you know your place when you're getting it fair here's your delicious food scum now it's time for wind news and this this is the news that the Sea Wing, a technology being developed by a French company, is a kite, which they're planning to attach to ships to bring them across the ocean, and not just normal ships like a sailing boat. This is not just the invention of a sailing boat. They are currently testing these massive kites on cargo ships

travelling transatlantically between Europe and the US. John Luke, you've set sail on the high seas and lived the life of a pirate can you unpack this story for us? Dread pirate Roberts in fact yes yeah so they've called it the sea wing they're attaching it to shipping containers they think it will lower emissions by 20 percent um which is just that like i think i always think 20 percent is it's sort of borderline ignorable in terms of reduction like if there's an online sale which is 10 you'll go definitely not if it's 20 you go oh i'll have a look you know so it's it's achieving that amount uh but in um in lowering emissions for boats but right what they've done right they've invented sales haven't they like this is just this is how boats used to get around

they've invented i mean is the next thing saying oh we can save some emissions by well with our new innovation of 30 pairs of oars and a bearded scandinavian with a drum like this is a gritty reboot this is a gritty reboot of ships. Yeah. So they put a big kite on, so it looks like a kite surfer, but it's not a fun one. It's a massive shipping container boat going chug, chug, chug. Oh, and saw a kite surfer get lifted way off the waves and carried away into the distance.

That's fun. Yeah. I think it was intentional, but it looked worrying. It does sound fun. Oh, also, the sail is powered by an autopilot, so it's really easy to stop it working just with a traffic cone. To be fair, if you threw a traffic cone into a kite, it would probably do some damage.

Oh, it's also, kites have also been shown to lower the emissions from Edwardian children and their fathers by 25% and up their sense of narrative conclusion fivefold We've gone so far forward that we're kind of going backwards because sails are quite efficient at taking boats You know, the problem wasn't so much with the sales it was with the lack of hygiene and food sources and um you know kraken's so um i do wonder if the thing about like so you know we seem to be moving forward and i mean not forward but you know we're advancing in the terms of the the driverless car but then we want to go back to sail ships because they do have

zero emissions. So maybe that's also the answer for the driverless cars. We could get horse and carts back in or a sedan chair. That's fun. No, actually, I think you may be onto something. Because horse and carts obviously aren't 100% fuel efficient because you need to feed the horse. But if you put sails on cars, on four-wheeled vehicles, maybe that's the way forward. There you go.

You see? It's all sails from now on. Wind is everything. Yeah. And jelly mouse news now. This is the news that scientists have figured out how to make currently dead mice transparent in order to be able to examine their little tiny corpses for disease things after they're dead

in the context of cancer research. But basically, they've managed to turn mice invisible, sort of. Eleanor Morton, you like jelly. Can you unpack this story for us? I don't like jelly anymore. So what I can... I mean, I'm not... This is going to surprise you i'm not a scientist but what i could gather from this was that the problem with current cancer research is

that it can only detect uh tumors once they're big enough for our current science to see and what this guy has or this team has done is they with this jelly mouse is that they can see very, very, very, very small cancer cells and target them before they get bigger. I'm not quite sure how... So the mouse thing is that you can see inside the mouse because they've made it transparent. You can look this up. It is like a little jelly mouse,

but not like a fun one from a sweet shop, like from some kind of The Thing remake. So you can see inside and you can see where the cancer cells are i don't really understand how someone might be able to explain this to me how um this helps humans because would we have to go see through to look at our tiny cancer cells what's the technology that um what how does that translate to but everyone seemed very excited about it like it was a real breakthrough but I'm not quite sure how that translates to non-mice

well I think the idea is you look at how the cancers grow like by examining them in the mice you maybe learn things about how cancer moves so we don't need to go see through I mean I kind of am but well that's because you're Scottish but that's

the fear of the sun. And I'm half mouse. And half mouse, yeah. It's all very I mean to be honest I've always thought mice were pretty transparent I've not had one mouse show any interest in me without

knowing that's because of the cheese. You just want the cheese. This guy is, what's he called? He's called Professor Ali Ertug from the University of Munich. And I bet all the other scientists are absolutely sick of his stuff. Like, what are you up to, Ali? Oh, I'm fighting cancer. Oh, yeah, how are you fighting cancer?

Oh, I've made a mouse invisible. Oh, right, good, Ali. How are you fighting cancer today Oh, I've made a mouse invisible. Oh, right. Good, Ali. How are you fighting cancer today? Oh, I've taught a squirrel to tap dance. What about... I put gills on a capybara. Yeah, OK, Ali. Do you want to...

I've made a tortoise that constantly spins. OK. Do you think it's the same guy who put the ear on the mouse? Almost certainly. Almost certainly. If not, then there's a problem. If there's just one rogue scientist that it's like that's one bad apple if it's all scientists doing these things the mice

we really need to look i think what kind of person anything from the gargle it's that there are scientists doing some very strange things specifically to mine but it is a is to be fair a question alice as to whether we've learned anything from the gargle if you have if you have please write in to us and we'll give you your money back immediately that is the opposite of our intention I've learned that I don't want to see a see-through mouse

that wasn't as whimsical as I was picturing you don't need to see a see-through mouse we just piled over each other to get to that one, didn't we? No, it's... I mean,

my family, we're a gerbil people. No, my family was a sitcom on BBC One. Alice, I talked about this. I can't put it in the garble. I'm so sorry. We like gerbils in our household. We have had numerous gerbils.

And if they went see-through, I think the only thing you'd learn is that they shouldn't eat grapes. What's the difference between a gerbil and a hamster? People always ask this. I feel like it's pretty obvious. They're totally different. But people don't seem to know much about gerbils they're they're gerbils are desert mice so sorry uh sidebar um so desert mice so they are basically like a mouse but slightly differently designed in that they've got bigger feet for scurrying around the desert and um they've got a long tail

and also they're just more fun hamsters are really shit if i'm totally honest hamsters are rubbish they're nocturnal they're aggressive they don't like hanging out with anyone else they they're just more fun. Hamsters are really shit, if I'm totally honest. Hamsters are rubbish. They're nocturnal, they're aggressive, they don't like hanging out with anyone else. They're rubbish. Sorry. I just feel quite strongly about it. I mean, I can tell.

That brings us to the end of the show, unfortunately. I'm flipping through the ads at the back. Eleanor, have you got anything that you'd like to plug? Only my current and forever online presence, which you can find just by Googling me, and I'm now on threads,

like all of us, so that's an extra thing to add. And then I will be doing a one-off character show on the Edinburgh stand, 14th of August, during The Fringe, and a three-day,

14th, 15th, 16th work in progress show about ghosts at Monkey Barrel at the Fringe as well, at various times. So please just Google me and you'll find all the information. Excellent. John Luke, have you got anything to plug? This Sunday, the 16th of July,

I'm recording my show, A World Just Like Our Own But... at the Moth Club at 9pm and that's the last time I'm going to do the show for a while so if you're in or around London please come to that tickets are very cheap

£5.50 and you can find them by googling Dice and John Luke Roberts Dice? Dice, it's on the website Dice. That's the ticket website. And it seems if you just Google John Luke Roberts filming July 16th, it won't bring it up, which is something I think probably wrong

with how Dice are setting their website up for internet getting at it ability. Their search engine is unoptimised. Yes. Thank you. at it ability the search engine is unoptimized yes thank you and you can also see me all through the summer in a show called hairy which is a children's theater show in south wimbledon made with spy monkey who are a brilliant comedy troupe and the only comedy well in fact probably the only people who could get me to do children's theater in South Wimbledon. But it's really good, I think. It looks like the images. It looks amazing.

I know that much. And I think it's also pretty, pretty, pretty damn good as well. If you have children between the ages of five and 12, or even if you don't, I think it's quite fun. And we, the gargle, will be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. You can find tickets and details for that at thebuglepodcast.com. Also, I'm Alice Fraser. Find me online at patreon.com slash alicefraser. It's a one-stop shop for all of my stand-up specials,

podcasts and blogs, as well as my weekly writers' meetings if you want to come and write with other people. It's a really fun thing to do. We have a little writing session, a little workshop. I enjoy it very much. This is a Bugle Podcast, an Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Ped Hunter. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll it very much. 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.