The Gargle - Wiggles | Muskbot | Slug Gate

Episode Date: August 26, 2021

Sami Shah and John Luke Roberts join host Alice Fraser for episode 26 for The Gargle - the weekly topical comedy podcast from The Bugle - WITH NO POLITICS!🐌 Slug Plants🤖 Slow Robots🧬 Double WiggleThis is a show from The Bugle. Follow us on Twitter.This episode was produced by Ross Ramsey 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. When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced he would shortly be celebrating his 11th birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton. But that's nothing to the talk and excitement of The Gargle. All of the news, asterisk, none of the politics, asterisk, I mean, not all of the news, obviously, and clearly everything is political. The sonic glossy magazine to the bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world, this is The Gargle.

I'm your host, Alice Fraser, and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Sammy Shah and John Luke Roberts. Welcome. Hello. How are you both? I'm in Melbourne, so I'm not that different from you in Sydney, Alice. I am also in lockdown. Melbourne is in its sixth lockdown right now. We've done, I think, more days in lockdown than any other city in the world at this point.

I'm not sure if someone needs to fact check that, but that's what I heard on Twitter. And therefore, it must be accurate. And therefore, you know, as a result, I'm basically at this point so utterly and completely welded into my pajamas that I have not, you know, changed out of in weeks and weeks that when lockdown ends, people are going to have to deal with the fact that I'm a pajama man now. Yeah, I think there are two different types of people. The people who shower less than they would outside of lockdown and other people. Just going to make a point about your disgusting clinging onto any binary you can find.

Humans love a binary, like binary and non-binary. There's a binary. Some humans love a binary, but some humans don't. The front cover of the magazine this week is John Cleese posing provocatively covered in danger tape. The headline reads, He's not a culture warrior, he's a very naughty boy. And the satirical cartoon this week is a dam marked public attention with water spraying out and the water says Afghanistan

and a personified politician with exaggerated facial features that we all recognise is trying to plaster over the hole with a patch that says, watching the Paralympics. That takes us into the magazine. This week we start with an entertainment section. Sammy, I'm going to start with you on this because you're in Australia. You have a child. Tell us the latest devastating Wiggles news.

Well, look, the Wiggles have been through a lot. And I would say arguably have put us through a lot as well. And the latest assault on Australia is that they uh you know very recently they announced that they were adding more wiggles uh they were wigglesing up uh there was a an increase in the amount of wiggles but and that got everyone all upset but now if you weren't already outraged because the wiggles were now trying to reflect the diversity of the Australian viewing audience. Get ready to lose your f***ing mind. Because here it comes.

It turns out the Wiggles, who are famous for singing in pyjamas as well, which is something I do these days anyway, I don't know what the big deal is. It turns out the Blue Wiggle, Anthony Field, has been lipyncing the songs this entire time the words coming out of his mouth were not actually coming out of his mouth he was lip-syncing them this you know what Alice this is why anti-vaxxers happen it's because you put your trust in an institution and then you discover the institution has lied to you and you no longer know who to trust. If we can't trust the blue wiggle to be singing the songs that he pretends to be singing, then who the hell can we trust in this day and age anymore? I ask you, Alice Fraser.

I mean, this is the biggest wiggle scandal since when somebody suggested that their wiggly finger finger guns were actually an incitement to violence. It is astonishing, but I'm not sure. I've been reading this article where the Wiggle Anthony Field, captioned here in this photograph as Anthony Wiggle, much like Tim Apple of Apple. I'm not sure if he's not trolling because on one hand he says he's been miming for years and on on the other hand, he then goes on to say that the Simon Cowell in the most recent Wiggles ad is not actually Simon Cowell.

He's an exact copy of Simon Cowell. He's a guy in Coogee called Richard. And they did it digitally. To be fair, we've always suspected that Simon Cowell wasn't actually Simon Cowell and was just a guy in Coogee named Richard. So this part is the least surprising one to me. With Simon Cowell's head digitally placed on him. I don't quite know. I mean, I hope that he'll lip sync.

The Wiggles is a global phenomenon. It's not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Global phenomenon. It's not very global. Well, actually, no, I do. It does say in the article, they sold out Madison Square Garden for 11.

So I can't really keep up this pretense that I've never heard of the Wiggles. It was a comic position I was going to hold, but it won't work. One, I hope that he will lip sync his apology. I think that would be nice to get his friend to do the apology and then for him to do it.

But he's not the first children's entertainer who's been lip syncing. Mickey Mouse, since the beginning, has just been moving his lips to sounds recorded by some bloke in the studio. So, you know, I'm very worried that we need to have some kind of warning label on this episode, because there's a lot of listeners who might suddenly have their childhoods destroyed by this revelation from John. I'll be honest, I'm reeling right now. I mean, I was still coming to terms with the idea that America has never invaded a country that broadcasts the wiggles, which is a very famous statement about soft diplomacy. But now this. Can we do the trigger warning after the event and say, by the way, don't have listened to that if you think your children might be upset by it. I mean, anyone who is listening to this with their family

has a different approach to a family show than I would. I do like that John's idea of trigger warnings is the American approach to trigger warnings, which is shoot first and then apologize later. So, yes. That's all the time we have for our entertainment section because now it's time for your ads. Your ad section now because you can't take it with you after death,

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Did you know that Emu is the only bird with calf muscles? Which means it's the only bird who can show up at a ballroom during the 1700s without having to have his valet pad his calves with sawdust in order to build up the courage and leg glamour to ask a lady to dance. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by the emu. Now it is time for your tech section. This is the tech section in which elon musk has claimed as he often does to be about to launch some mind-boggling new technology sorry john luke well yes so he's he's come out in a one of his press conference things which looked very low tech uh which is ironic but then he said he did all these things oh we're doing this doing this, doing this. And then showed a video of a CGI model of a robot like white, you know, looks like an eye, an Apple product from about 20, 2010, you know, plastic, glossy white outer and then a kind of stereo speaker style head and shoulders.

And then a guy came out. i was going to say a dancer came out dressed as the robot and dance but it's clearly not a dancer it's a person dancing and elon said yeah we'd like to make a robot and i think that i don't think that that's really an announcement i mean lots of people would like to make a robot i mean george lucas effectively went i'd like to make a robot and then made like three films about it would be nice if he could make a robot. He didn't claim this was a... So Elon Musk has announced that hopefully next year, they'll have a robot which runs on the same system as the car. It will have the same self-driving car. Now, that robot is just going to be lying on its front, just dreaming of wheels as it doesn't move anywhere.

Little do they know that there already exists a robot with the emotional range of a car and it's all the actors in the fast and the furious series oh that would be actually they should come back for one more fast and furious where it's cars driving cars so the cars you know they're bendy cars so they can get in and they can sit in the car seats and do their seat belts up and then they drive the bigger cars because then of course you open it up for a whole new world where you've got cars driving cars driving cars and of course passengers cars as passengers in the in the passenger seat to sort of share the driving load over a long distance and to have some you know to keep keep the driver entertained well this is the thing about elon musk is that uh he does this is you know they say if you build it, they will come.

But Elon Musk's approach seems to be if you talk about it, then they'll build it and then I'll make money from it and then we'll perfect the model by iterating it after we've already sold it to many, many people and revealed its many, many flaws. It's a classic software approach to hardware, which is fine when your computer crashes and not so much when your robot goes mad and murders your whole family.

My only concern is, what's the use of this? Because Elon Musk says that the whole point is that now physical labor is a thing that we will choose to partake in. It won't be a necessity for us, right? So now if you want to get your house vacuumed, you tell your robot to turn on your Roomba. Or if you want your dishes washed, you tell your robot to pile the dishes in the dishwasher. So it's a robot talking to a robot, but it's a robot taking up space in my house that now, like, is the robot contributing to my rent? Like, not at all. This is now living space i am losing out on overall and it seems like the end goal for elon musk just seems to be that everyone else should do as little labor as elon musk does in his own life and just sit around coming up with dumb ideas like a robot that runs

on that runs slower than you do and thinks slower than you do or whatever his sales pitch is yes his sales pitch is that it's not scary because it's dumb and slow. But I know plenty of dumb and slow people that are quite scary. What? Halloween. Michael Myers. He's dumb and slow and he's terrifying. I've watched them all.

Except there's one which isn't about him. It's weird. They tried to change it into a different franchise and they went, oh, no, people just want this guy. Sorry, I've gone off on a tangent. This is the thing, right? They tried to change it into a different franchise and they went, oh, no, people just want this guy. Sorry, I've gone off on a tangent. But this is the thing, right? This is the robot is meant to do menial tasks

that are too boring or labour-intensive for humans to do, that humans don't want to do. Like hosting Saturday Night Live. Like hosting Saturday Night Live or being an influencer. The moment I get a home robot, I am strapping a pair of tits on it and making it sell active wear on instagram raking in the cash it's a shame uh elon musk didn't come up with this robot when there were humans trapped in a cave in thailand and he could have sent a robot down to go

get them instead he spent all his time you know calling the rescuer a child molester. So, you know, his best ideas, it seemed, come way too late. And then also aren't very good ideas to start with. But you know that if he'd sent the robot, it would have dived into that water and immediately seized up and sunk to the bottom. Then just leaving a robot to rescue as well as all those kids. Well, that's all the time we have for our tech section because now it's time for our reviews every week our guest editors bring in a thing to review out of five stars john luke what have you brought in to right now i would like to stress before i start this one i'm reviewing something i haven't been to or seen uh but i have very strong opinions on it all right so you can't it's the van gogh the

immersive experience and it's it's opening in london and they keep advertising it to me on instagram and it is rooms where they project van gogh pictures so it feels like you're sort of inside the picture but mainly so you can take a photograph of yourself in a room which looks a bit like a van gogh picture and put it on bloody instagram and it was advertised to me saying the purest way to experience art it is not it's not it's tangentially related to the art in the first place taking pictures which i don't believe are there and then making them up on a wall so you can photograph and show your friends oh look you know that van gogh and they, I've heard something about him.

Well, he's made these rooms with some projectors. So I think it's absolutely awful. I hate it. And I bet you Van Gogh is not seeing a penny of it. So I give the immersive Van Gogh experience no stars out of five. And I would like them to stop it and start making. But immersive, we don't have to be inside things. Immersive bloody theatre, it's ruined everything.

They'll work out one of these days, the way to do immersive theatre is to put all the actors on one side of a room and all the people watching the theatre on the other side of the room so they can look at it and follow the plot, rather than wander around a room buying expensive alcohol and after a while thinking, well, this must be about something. Oh, I've seen someone in a costume go by. Oh, no, they've gone. It's not the way to do to do it we need to stop it let's put paintings back on walls and

look at them like adults well the the purest way to experience art as we all know is having marina abramovich sneak in your window at night and hold your face and stare into your eyes until you wake up screaming in a cold sweat i think that's the purest way to experience art sammy what have you brought in to review um my review is based on the one thing that in the last few weeks i have spent the most amount of time uh watching and staring at and and immersing immersing if i may myself in and that is my neighbor's apartment uh just across the road because that's all I really have to look at these days. I am in lockdown. And as a result, they've done a wonderful job.

I saw yesterday they hung up a new painting, which wasn't a Van Gogh, surprisingly. I think from what I can tell at the distance I am, it's an abstract expressionist painting of a mountainscape. But it's, you know know and i would give it two out of three stars it's very bold it's very bold use of colors um i also like the way that sometimes they too roam around in their pajamas um and have hung up fairy lights everywhere on their balcony which gave me the idea that they put fairy lights on my balcony uh and now my balcony is a lot more

festive and makes me feel less like a creep when I'm staring into theirs. It's wonderful. And I highly recommend everyone try it. But not from my balcony because because of lockdown rules, you're not allowed to visit. How many stars was that again? Oh, well, I think it's on a sliding scale. It really depends on what entertainment they're putting on at a given night. So far, nothing's been more than two stars, but I am indeed hopeful. I like the way, Sammy, you've put up the fairy lights so that you can look at them and feel less creepy. But effectively, you just started copying what they're doing. By the end of this lockdown, you'll have a painting of a mountain up on your wall. Your entire flat will just look

like that. I think that's going to be creepier this is um i'm basically living the plot of talented mr ripley instead except instead of like killing jude law and turning into a jazz aficionado i'm just mirror imaging someone's apartment out of boredom the people who weren't spoiled by the wiggles miming revelation has now have now been spoiled by the talented mr ripley revelation uh i've also brought in something to review unusually this week i have a thing to been spoiled by the talented Mr. Ripley revelation. I've also brought in something to review unusually this week. I have a thing to review, which is my next-door neighbor's new boxing bag, which is a freestanding boxing bag that he has filled the base of with water, I assume about 200 kilos of water in the bottom of this boxing bag. And it's his lockdown indulgence.

And today while doing other work, I heard him punching it for six four-minute rounds, which is an impressive amount of punching. And then I looked it up online because I was curious, and it's a $700 boxing bag. So he's going to do a lot of punching, but it seems to be making him happy. And I look forward to the following weeks to see if he gets his money's worth. At this point,

I'm counting punches to see how much it costs per punch. So he's. ACAS powers the world's best podcasts. Here's the 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 helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com He's getting his money back, so I would say four out of five stars. That was an hour of entertainment for me.

Does he cry and yell out a name as he punches? Because I can't imagine punching anything without doing that. I mean, that is because you're recently divorced i'm basically yes yeah that's all the time we have for our review section now because now it's time for our business section so this is our business and animals section recently in australia a legal scandal known as slug gate has been going down. Sami Shah, you're in Australia. Can you explain this story for us? Explaining the story is going to be a bit of a challenge,

but bear with me as I try to unravel the complicated, almost, you know, the JFK assassination level conspiracy that has been uncovered here. Basically, it turns out there was a food service provider in a part of Melbourne that was cooking food and providing that food to lots of homes and lots of charities and lots of different organizations. And then they got accused of filth, of dirt, of poisoning the food because one woman got Listerine from apparently their food. And there's a photograph of a slug.

Listeria, not Listerine. Listerine is, of course, the mouthwash. She might have also gotten a mouthwash. We don't know. We're not casting aspersions on her halitosis. But she did find there also there was this photograph of a slug in the kitchen. And therefore the place got shut down. It was called iCooks because I'm assuming it was founded in the early 2000s when putting an i in front of everything was the best way to guarantee marketing success. And then another food provider got all the money

and all the success and all the power and everything that comes with being a food service provider in Melbourne, except it turns out the slug was never there. It turns out that the slug was possibly, potentially, allegedly photoshopped by people in the health department who'd been instructed to do so, so that iCooks would be forced to shut down and then someone else would get the contract and the other person, the other company would then succeed. Look, there's also more Photoshop involved. There's a woman who's a whistleblower who says she can only feel brave enough now to speak out. Now, there's been two years since she left the health department there's a lot of things flying around here and to be honest i'm worried just talking about this could put me on a list somewhere and possibly if if a red laser dot

appears on my forehead please warn me is all i'm saying truly not since the scandal of donahue against stevenson uh discovering the snail in the ginger beer bottle and extrapolating from that the duty of care to one's neighbour. Has there been such a slug-slash-snail-based food scandal? John Luke, you look like your head's sore. Well, it's taken me quite a while to get my head round this. I will say I've also recently read that the woman who was purported to be a whistleblower,

in fact, that whistle has been photoshopped in. She's not blowing it at all. But the only thing I really like, it seems so this is government level stuff. The government have actually been like they're the ones who planted the slug or made it look like there was a slug. I just that's extraordinary, isn't it? Yes. Allegedly, a Dandenong Council health inspector planted a slug on the floor of the iCook Foods processing plant. Whether they planted it or whether they photoshopped it post hoc

is still under dispute. I imagine the thing is a slug which has been planted to me sounds like a slug which is overeaten, you know? Oh, I was really planted that day. like a slug which is overeaten you know oh i was really planted that day um the one thing i do like about this is that i cook the the the guy who runs i and set up i cook is called ian cook he named i he named i cook you just thought well my initials i they do i ian podge made that music machine over in america why can't i set up a cooking company i mean this yeah this is truly an amazing story of of corruption at a government level

um but i i feel i feel like the underdog here is be Ian Cook. Oh, sorry. But this is the thing. On the other hand, this company has been going since 2009 and has been bankrolled by the federal and state governments to about the tune of $30 million since 2009, and yet they have lost money every year. So, again, the plot thickens, and this plot is now so thick, we need it watering down. So they're all the bad guys, is that?

They are all the bad guys, except for the innocent slugs who had to undergo either a Photoshop journey or a journey in somebody's pocket. I also want to point out that the controversy around whether or not the slug was there or planted or photoshopped comes down to CCTV footage showing one of the health workers

standing for 17 seconds in the corner of the kitchen where the slug was purportedly photographed. I haven't photographed many slugs in my life. I don't think, in fact, I've photographed any slugs to date. But I always assumed it would take less than 17 seconds to photograph a slug, which means I would say maybe 10 seconds to put the slug down,

one and a half second to photograph the slug, and then another five and a half seconds to pick it back up and put it in your pocket. Or I don't know what you do with it once it's been photographed photographed are you suggesting it takes 10 seconds to let the slug go from your heart well yeah it's so cute they got the little things and you gotta be careful there's no salt around you don't want that happening that's a whole slug murder suicide situation that no one needs to be a part of the the story I heard was that there were two government officials, one of them with the camera and the other one wearing a skin-tight green suit covered in little white balls.

And they then, the one with the camera took the photo of the one with the little white balls, and then in post, the one with the little white balls had a slug mapped onto them, CGI style. I mean, I cannot wait to see this go down in court when the slug is called as a witness and at some point takes its mask off to reveal it was Tom Cruise all along. Our next story is also in our business and animals section. This is the story from the Smithsonian magazine

that lonely fruit flies are like lonely humans in that they eat more and sleep less, not in that they blame their problems on other people. John Luke Roberts, have you been following this science? Yeah, I have. So they did experiments on fruit flies, which is what you do on fruit flies. They don't get to do anything else. They're constantly just experimented on. They isolated lone fruit flies in uh in test tubes they they put one in each test tube and they found that the fruit flies um over a period of of hours

would start dressing their test tubes up to look like the test tubes over the road the other fruit flies no they found out that fruit flies, when they're lonely, eat more and just are really restless and don't sleep as much and run around, which is, it's very like humans, isn't it? That's, so, you know, time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like having friends, actually.

So this is the problem with all science is that it's easy to do experiments on fruit flies but i'm not sure how much we can extrapolate that to human behavior other than you know because there's plenty of things that that the fruit flies were doing in that time that is not like humans uh for example you know dying every couple of days but sammy shah do you feel like a fruit fly in lockdown? I feel like fruit flies need to back themselves more. You know, you don't need someone. It's a very unhealthy and codependent way of going through life. One of the things you discover when you're alone is that sometimes you're the best company you had.

You're the only person who can disappoint yourself, fruit fly. Learn to love yourself before you love another. And I feel like that's what's missing in a fruit fly's life is the wisdom that I can impart. I am now going to become the fruit fly whisperer. And I feel like this is something that my new Kickstarter program would be really well funded for. Well, I like the fact that they've, the researchers have concluded from this study that loneliness can have profound pathological consequences for the flies and for humans too, which they have based on literally nothing. They did a control, didn't they? So they loaned fruit flies and then they also put two fruit flies in some test tubes to see how they would behave.

And they behaved not like the put two fruit flies in some test tubes to see how they would behave. And they behaved not like the lone fruit flies. But they didn't mix and match and do one fly, one human in a test tube and see how both the fly and the human would get on under those circumstances. I think that was a missed opportunity. Nor did they try buying $700 punching bags for the fruit flies to see how that interacted. Imagine that. They'd just be squashed right up against the side of their test tube. There's no room for them in there anymore. They'd be furious.

They'd come out with a mean right hook, though. Yeah. God, flies that punch. That'd be awful. That's all the time we have for our business and animals section because now it's time for our pull-out section. Our pull-out section is how to stay chic while shaming your neighbors whether you're reporting them for breaching health orders or photographing their naked feet on a train armrest it's impossible to negotiate the modern world

without publicly shaming a stranger parent or friend here are three tips for the most 2021 way to shame tip one if they're older than a millennial try shaming them on tiktok they'll never find out about it the algorithm will push you out to a brand new one, if they're older than a millennial, try shaming them on TikTok. They'll never find out about it. The algorithm will push you out to a brand new audience. And if it does go viral enough to leak out onto old people territory like Twitter or Instagram, that means it's already so popular that sponsored content is just around the corner. It's sad that your aunt got doxxed because of your little video, but you can mop up those shame tears with some half-priced gym wear. Hashtag PR. That said, the best shaming to be had on social media is of anonymous offenders.

That way the faceless person can represent everything we hate about the group we assume they represent. Flawless five-star shaming. Ideally, make them so faceless and the crime so generic that literally everyone has a split second of wondering if it was them before piling on with the relief of knowing it probably wasn't dot dot dot this time remember our online personas are our greatest treasure so make sure your own life is squeaky clean the last thing you want is to be

the first person to cast a stone and then have that same stone ricochet off a tweet you did in 2014 that you deleted last year but someone saved on tumblr and now it's come back to hit you right in the fucking eye speaking of which uh it's time for our social media section this is this is our social media section it's a sad story about facebook reporting hidden like a slug in a kitchen john luke you're on facebook still uh I am, yeah, because I've left Twitter. That was great. But what I've done is I've replaced the time I was spending on Twitter with time on Instagram and Facebook.

So I need to, like, each one I cut out, that time isn't going somewhere productive. It's just slipping further down these wormholes of self-loathing. And it's not just self-loathing. We're loathing other people too. That's the problem. There's no positive things coming out of Facebook. But this is basically Facebook have put out

what their most popular posts are. But earlier in the year, they were going to, and then they went, ooh, actually, no, these most popular posts don't reflect well on our sort of algorithm. So we're going to pretend this doesn't exist until we can set up things so that for a brief three-month period, our most popular posts are things about puppies.

And that seems to have been what they've done. I think their most popular post was a news article insinuating that a Floridian doctor, which I imagine is what you call doctors who come from Florida, had died two weeks after taking the COVID vaccine. That was their most popular, most popular, most popular of all the most. It wasn't like just really popular. It was their most popular post, which I think does show they're doing something slightly. I mean, I don't want to slag them off because they're listening, but they're always listening. But come on, guys, stop being b****.

Well, yes, and particularly that it was, in fact, a false story. Oh, it doesn't matter if it's false or it's real, one way or another. People do die after taking the COVID vaccine because people die, and some people happen to have just taken the COVID vaccine. So whether or not it's true, and it's not, it's not true. I already clicked like on the post that you started saying the man died and I clicked like and I moved on. I don't hear the rest of this. I've got Facebook marketplace to scroll through. Someone's selling a table because they're downsizing the house and I might need a new coffee table for four dollars.

And you're not even an anti-vaxxer, you just like hearing about other people dying. People in Florida for some reason, I love hearing about people in Florida dying. And with that news about the news, that is the end of our show for today. Let us flip through the classified sections

at the end. John McRoberts, have you got anything to plug? Yes, please. I would like to plug my podcast, please. I would. I'd like to plug my podcast, Sound Heat. That's Sound Heat, two words. It's a podcast which is a parody of podcasts. There's loads of made-up podcasts and loads of different comedians improvising the made-up podcasts, and it's good.

And you're both in it it is we are both in it it's a podcast within a podcast within a podcast like a car driving a car planting a slug in the kitchen that was the inspiration for it actually that was the inspiration and sammy shah have you got anything to plug um i do indeed i have my patreon, which is now finally active and doing things. The main thing it's doing is a new weekly satire column called News Weekly. W-E-A-K-L-Y is my stupid pun there. Thank you very much. My work is done. And soon a whole bunch of podcasts and things will be coming out of there as well.

And that's patreon.com slash S-A-M-I-S-H-A-H. I just bought a vintage typewriter for no rhyme or reason. So every month, a Patreon subscriber will receive a handwritten letter, a hand-typed letter on a vintage typewriter as I try to pretend like I'm Professor Grady from Wonder Boys, the movie. For some reason, that's my new role in life. I have a typewriter. I won it in the MS Readathon back in the day for reading heaps and heaps of books.

The MS Readathon is a thing we have in Australia. I don't know if you have it in the UK there, John Luke. It's where you raise money by reading books. And I raised a lot of money and I ended up getting a trip on the bounty with the cast of Home and Away and a typewriter. getting a trip on the bounty with the cast of Home and Away and a typewriter. And only many years later did I realize that going around with my mom and her walking stick and asking people how much money they wanted to give me for the chronic neurological degenerative condition of multiple sclerosis might have been slightly heavy handed.

Look, you got to do what you got to do to get on that home and away bounty trip. All right. Like, yeah, others are playing dirty, too, I'm sure. It just never occurred to me that the nice lady staggering along behind me might have had something to do with how generous people were. And I did warn them. I was like, I'm a very fast reader. Are you sure you want to give me that much money? That's it for today's show. I'm warn them. I was like, I'm a very fast reader. Are you sure you want to give me that much money? That's it for today's show.

I'm Alice Fraser. Find me online at at alliterative on Twitter and Instagram. That's A-L-I-T-E-R-A-T-I-V-E. Or look me up on Patreon. I feel like you can tell whether someone's in lockdown by whether they're plugging their Patreon or not. Look me up on patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. It's a one-stop shop for all of my podcasts, specials, documentaries and blogs, as well as my weekly tea with Alice Salons. The Gargle is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production.

Your editor is Ped Hunter. The executive producer is Chris Skinner. And I'll talk to you again next week.