The Gargle - Swamp romp | Plastic clouds | Meta chatbots

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

Joz Norris and Ania Magliano join host Alice Fraser for episode 131 of The Gargle - the glossy magazine to The Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world.All of the news, none of the politics!🐊 Swa...mp romp☁️ Cloud microplastics 🤖 Meta chatbots🚙 Kids' Court🌼 ReviewsHOW TO SUPPORT THE GARGLEKeep The Gargle alive and well by joining Team Bugle with a one-off payment, or become a Team Bugler or Super Bugler to receive extra bonus treats!Pre-order the D'Ancey LaGuarde Reader book here! http://l8r.it/DHhGAdvertise YOUR business on The Gargle with an Alice Fraser ad read. Contact hellobuglers@thebuglepodcast.comCONTENTS00:00 Start01:12 Front cover01:21 Satirical cartoon03:42 Story 1: Crocodile sex frenzy triggered by Chinook helicopters and thunder08:12 Ads10:39 Story 2: Scientists find microplastics are present in clouds15:25 Reviews20:14 Story 3: Meta is using celebrities to get you to like AI25:53 Story 4: Kids' Court anti-speeding initiative hailed a success30:48 Bye / Anything to plug? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 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
Starting point is 00:00:22 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.
Starting point is 00:00:49 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.
Starting point is 00:01:20 Acast.com. This is a podcast from The Bugle. Journalists keep an eye on the clock, waiting for a drink to make those clothing and shoe heel choices photogenically perilous. Outside the stadium, in more sensible shoes and clothes, protesters protest the cruelty of the sport. An official raises the gun, but the hush that falls over the crowd is not just of anticipation. A shadow obscures the sun. Is it a zeppelin? Is it a cloud? No, it's the gargle. This is the gargle. Welcome to thegle welcome to the gargle the sonic glossy magazine
Starting point is 00:02:05 to the bugles audio newspaper for a visual world i'm your host alice fraser and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are jaws norris welcome back hello thanks for having me it's a great pleasure and anya mariano welcome hi uh thank you so much for having me that's again i'm excited to have you on the show. Before we all put our hands on each other's shoulders and engage in the awkward massage that is this week's top stories, let's have a look at the front cover of this week's magazine. The front cover this week is a French bedbug smoking a Goloise cigarette and refusing to bite a German tourist because it's not locally sourced. And the satirical cartoon this week is Nobel Prize winner Katalin Kariko posing provocatively
Starting point is 00:02:51 with a number of rejection letters from prominent scientific journals and Penn University tenure track. Have you been following either of those two stories, Jaws? I don't know anything about either of them, but I love the bed bug one. That's a hell of an image. I've never empathized with a bed bug before, but I feel like you gave it a real kind of, I feel like I know him now. What did he do? He wouldn't eat a German. No, there's a massive rash of bed bugs in Paris at the moment. But I assume if they're French bedbugs, I mean, the joke of the bit is that French bedbugs wouldn't bite German tourists because they're racists. Got it. Got it.
Starting point is 00:03:31 Now I know. You know, they make you insane, bedbugs. They like make you hallucinate and think that you like you see things apparently. Really? Yeah, there was something. So we had a terrible bedbug infestation in our flat once. And only, I think one of my flatmates discovered it first, but it was also making her hallucinate mad shit.
Starting point is 00:03:52 So we didn't believe her. We were like, no, there's no bed bugs. Because she was also saying like, and why is this like headless man in the flat? I mean, and now I say it all out loud, this sounds crazy. And I can't remember whether this actually happened, but I'm pretty certain. You were hallucinating.
Starting point is 00:04:06 It might just be the bedbugs talking. Yeah. I've got them now. I've been bitten by bedbugs in Wales. I have a beef with Swansea because I got bitten by bedbugs in Swansea, but I didn't hallucinate. At least I don't remember hallucinating. Okay.
Starting point is 00:04:22 Maybe I'm talking shit. What I do remember is I went down and I told the lady at reception and they said they'd pay for dry cleaning and all that sort of thing and then I went to a breakfast place in Swansea and they said they had avocado and eggs and I thought, you know, as a Sydney girl from Australia, this will soothe my hideous bed bug distorted form and what they did was they halved the avocado, they put the egg in the hole and they microwaved it.
Starting point is 00:04:50 What? Oh, my God. No. That's so strange. It might be the worst thing anyone's ever offered me to eat. So I feel like maybe Swansea has some work to do to get back into my good books. Our top story today is Swamp Romp News.
Starting point is 00:05:09 And this is the news of a crocodile sex frenzy that was triggered by helicopters flying low in Queensland. Anya, you've had a wrestle with a crocodile before. Can you unpack this story for us? I'm almost always wrestling with crocodiles, it feels like um I can't get away from them well the main thing that struck me about this story which um is like the the article that kind of talks about it is written in such an intense way it's like reading Paradise Lost which I haven't read but I imagine it's like reading Paradise Lost which i haven't read but imagine it's like reading paradise lost it's the sort of like um the evocative writing it took me about three reads to actually
Starting point is 00:05:54 understand what has happened and now that i've read it like three times it's like the person's just discovered a thesaurus basically the crocodiles get horny because they hear helicopters and they don't really know why it does that but it's sort of like the crocodile equivalent of when Jason Derulo comes on in the club. Again? I imagine. People get excited when Jason Derulo comes on in the club.
Starting point is 00:06:20 Yes, I go into a sex frenzy. I only know that bit in Cats where he shouts milk and then he shouts no more milk so i didn't realize it happened at the cinema as well but good for them i think like they they get turned on by the thunderstorms they get turned on by the helicopters like that's a nice life yeah it's easy so many people are afraid of thunderstorms so many people are afraid of helicopters uh so many people are afraid of helicopters uh and you know as they say the line between fear and horniness is narrow indeed
Starting point is 00:06:50 yeah and it's funny because i think like i can imagine thunderstorms being an aphrodisiac for humans in the sense of like maybe it means you like stay in and it's like a bit cozy and you're warm and outside is cold but like they're not staying in anywhere they're already in the water like it's not cozy for them are you suggesting that crocodiles spend their whole time just being like oh i'm so wet yeah why don't we live in houses we're like, I wish I had a duvet. Joss? I'm quite grateful to this story because I think it's been quite healing for me because I hate crocodiles. They're kind of my favourite animal, but I'm mortally afraid of them.
Starting point is 00:07:37 And whenever I see one, I get like a real chill. So now, you know when you scroll through Instagram or whatever and it gives you random content, like short reelsels and stuff it only gives me videos of crocodiles now because whenever one comes up i like freeze and have a real like oh shit oh shit instinct in my in my guts uh and instagram thinks that that means i love it because i always stop on them so now it just gives me crocodile after crocodile and i they really i think i'm gonna die i think that's how i'm gonna die i think they've like taken on this mythic kind of um uh role for me but then the more i learn about them the more i've started to think of them as like quite pathetic in a way because first there was
Starting point is 00:08:18 that thing about you know you can like uh hold their mouth shut with your hand and then they can't open their mouth but if you put a rubber band on and then they can't open their mouth but if you put a rubber band on it then they can't open it because they're actually quite weak and now I find out that if you if they hear a helicopter then they're reduced to a kind of like gibbering corny wretched state and I find that now I just I just find them quite funny now because I used to think they were like the Terminator they kind of felt like the Terminator to me and then I imagine the Terminator like humping your leg every time it hears a helicopter or whatever and I'm like yeah that's not that's not scary anymore so I think they've turned them into these quite foolish characters I now think that they're buffoons
Starting point is 00:08:56 crocodiles yes their down bite is very strong but their opening bite yes that's it yeah they can't like open their mouth yeah it's like if the terminator was still the terminator but if you just put your finger on his forehead he couldn't keep walking yeah he can't lift his arm he can punch you really hard but he can't get it up there in the first place um so i think i've this story's done a lot of personal growth for me i feel slightly less um horrified by them and maybe I'll even befriend one now. I won't try to get off with it or anything, even though like I know how. I'll draw the line there, but I will, you know, maybe I'll hang out with one for a coffee.
Starting point is 00:09:36 Your ad section now because you can't be what you can't buy. And this section of the podcast is brought to you by washable markers, just very slightly less washable than you'd like them to be. But if you do have a washable marker disaster on your hands or legs or feet or stomach or walls or floor or toddler, try resolving it with a small towel and half a glass of water. And a new novel is out by self-published romance maven and online bestseller Dancy Lagarde. The Heights of Longing is a standalone in Lagarde's Those Magnificent Men series of standalone novels about Victorian aerialists with an industrial revolution twist. Jack Haggerty is the king of the sky, a well-known exhibition balloonist. He's got room in his heart
Starting point is 00:10:22 only for his balloon and the clouds. Sangeetha is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy East India company partner sent to London to earn her way running the books of her father's silk warehouse. He's got a head for heights and muscular thighs. She's got a head for business and a bottom for adventure. When Jack comes in to finger her silks, it's lust at first sight. But the course of true love never did have a hitch-free launch with Jack pursued by a newspaper journalist seeking a sensational headline, sky-high sabotage and thrill-seeking women dazzled by his celebrity and massive thighs. Meanwhile, Sangeeka's hand in marriage is ruthlessly bartered for by a rival cloth house boorish yet lordly owner's vile Viscount son, who offers both her father's approval and a way to
Starting point is 00:11:04 enter, however conditionally, the highest echelons of British society. When a lustful balloon fan lordly owner's vile Viscount son who offers both her father's approval and a way to enter however conditionally the highest echelons of British society. When a lustful balloon fangirl's tangled scheme goes awry Sangeetha finds herself literally caught up in a runaway hot air balloon incident with a hysterical teen, an outraged Viscount and the one man she knows she shouldn't let ruffle her bustle. Compromised midair, crash landing in a village, abandoned by her horrible fiancé with Jack injured in the groin and feverish from chivalrously giving her his coat midair. She must nurse this wounded yet muscular aerialist back to health in a rustic inn, soothe his fevered groin,
Starting point is 00:11:36 and figure out how to save her father's business prospects. But how? Find out in The Heights of Longing, available at Altitude and up the back of all respectable bustles. I've got to read that. Yeah. Sounds exactly my kind of thing. Well, you can read it in The Dancy Lagarde Reader, which is available on presale now at unbound.com.
Starting point is 00:12:01 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.
Starting point is 00:12:24 It's a story of'd like to forget. Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com Japanese cloud news now. And this is the news that Japanese scientists have discovered that not only do clouds sometimes look like fluffy pieces of marshmallow, also they are full of microplastics, which is a terrible tragedy. Jos, you've tried to drink a cloud before. Can you unpack this story for us? All the time it went very badly. There's a lot of liquid in a cloud, it turns out, more than you can realistically stomach. Yeah, I initially just found this story quite sad uh it made me think of you know it's yet more evidence that our consumerist society has kind of destroyed the
Starting point is 00:13:32 planet as we as we know it and then i was struggling to kind of get past that but then i remembered the barbie movie and i thought actually what if the fact that there is plastic in the clouds isn't evidence of how much we've kind of destroyed the environment, but is a scrap of evidence for the fact that maybe we ourselves are dolls living in some kind of simulacrum of the real universe and we're being played with by children somewhere out there. And that might actually be some sort of explainer for the sort of the random cruelty of the universe, perhaps. So that cheered me up a bit. And then actually, the thing I liked most about this story was there was a there's a bit where it says that previously scientists have found microplastics in the snows
Starting point is 00:14:17 on top of mountains. And this thing about the clouds finally explains how it got there, because previously they were thinking, how did, how did the plastic get to that? And to me, I feel like. Surely the turtles can't get that high up. I was kind of like, what was the working theory before they found out it was clouds? Because you'd think if it was in the snow on top of mountains, you'd go, oh, we'll have, we'll have come down from the clouds.
Starting point is 00:14:38 But maybe the previous theory was like, there was some Yeti that was like raiding the billions of the cities and coming down into the foot and then carrying it to the top of the mountain. And now finally they can go, oh, great, we can we can debunk the Yeti theory officially. It's in clouds. Yeah. Or just a lot of a lot of makeup influencers going to the top of mountains to use their exfoliating microbeads. It might be like Shawshank Redemption, you know, when he digs that tunnel and then he has to like shake it out into the yard in his trousers. Maybe there's people acquiring too many microplastics and then they go to the top of the mountain and kind of shake it out and they go, hopefully nobody
Starting point is 00:15:13 will notice all these microplastics I'm dumping up here. But they've been rumbled. And I don't know why they're gathering so much of it anyway. I don't know what they're up to. Sounds mad. The question about what scientists are up to is a big question for our times yeah i feel yeah yeah and yeah have you ever looked at the sky and thought that looks particularly plasticky cloud yeah well i guess like clouds they don't like seem super real anywhere like i think in your life you already go through like one big sort of sad realization as a child when you find out that they're not fluffy and you can't like touch them or sit on them so it's like everyone has already experienced like one major betrayal by clouds um so i think this is it's just another one to add to the list so this one is our
Starting point is 00:15:56 fault and i had the same experience of as jaws like i did find it quite sad to read and also all the like suggested articles were like air pollution is going to kill everyone in like five minutes sort of thing along the side and i was like all fish are dead all fish are dead indonesia's president has a cough um and but the one thing that stuck out to me and i know this isn't going to reflect well on me but in one of the sentences it's describing the amount and it says it ranged in size from 7.1 to 94.6 micrometres
Starting point is 00:16:33 and I didn't know about micrometres. Yeah, I assume that meant millimetres. Yeah, metres, centimetres, millimetres. Is it micrometers below that? Wow. See, that's good news. Surely too small to bother caring about. To worry about, yeah.
Starting point is 00:16:55 I just remember when I was younger, like, millimeters, the whole thing with millimeters is like, these guys are pretty small. And to find out that there's a new one that's blown my mind and i know that's not the takeaway from the article but it's it's definitely it's definitely up there for me the takeaway from the article is whatever you want it to be the takeaway from the article for me is that maybe we're coming full circle on that betrayal uh about clouds not being touchable or sitable on maybe if we get enough microplastics into the cloud, they will be. Yeah, make them tangible and live out our dreams.
Starting point is 00:17:28 Well, I'm currently under the flight path on the way to the airport here in Bologna in Italy where I'm staying, and I just like to imagine all the planes sort of bouncing softly from one cloud to another. And now it's time for your reviews. As you know, each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review out of five stars. Jaws, what have you brought in for us this week?
Starting point is 00:17:51 So I've decided to review my experience of having to do physio exercises on my shoulder now because I have quite bad posture when I sit at my desk. So my shoulder hurts quite a lot now. So I now have to do these physio exercises. And what I've worked out is they've told me that I have to do about half an hour of exercises roughly every two days in order to kind of get it back to full strength. And nobody at the physio practice has actually told me you're going to have to do this for the rest of your life. But they have sort of strongly implied that if I ever stop doing them, and then
Starting point is 00:18:26 it starts hurting again, then I'm not allowed to complain to them about it, because they've told me what I should be getting on with. So I did some maths. And I've worked out like, ideally, I'd like to live for like another 60 years ish. And then I'd like to die very quickly in a kind of an exciting hang gliding accident when I'm 94. That's how I want to go out. I fear it's going to be a crocodile sooner than that, but I'd like it to be a hang gliding thing in my 90s. So if that works out and I have to spend 30 minutes every two days doing these exercises, I have to commit to spending 5,475 hours of my life, which is 228 days, just stretching my shoulder. And that's roughly enough
Starting point is 00:19:08 time to watch the full Lord of the Rings trilogy 608 times. And I'm quite bored of these exercises now. Like I'm already bored of them. And they can't even guarantee that it will definitely make my shoulder better. But what they have said is I'm not allowed to complain about it unless I do it. So it sort of feels like I have to commit to 228 days of boredom just to preserve my right to moan about my shoulder in the future, which feels like just a very negative thought trap. It feels like I'm doing this thing I don't like in order to preserve the negative experience of complaining. And it feels like maybe I'm better off doing none of it and just getting on with my life.
Starting point is 00:19:48 So I feel like they've put me in a very difficult... In constant shoulder pain. Yeah, that's the flip side. But unable to comment on it, like Cassandra or something. Did she have a bad shoulder? I think she had a bad shoulder. She foresaw a bad shoulder, but the physios wouldn't believe her. So yeah, I feel like I'm not a fan. I don't like it so um so yeah i i feel like um i i i'm not a fan i
Starting point is 00:20:08 don't like it but i'm allowed to not like it because i'm doing the exercises so the moment i still have the right to give it one out of five one out of five stars uh for shoulder physio and the attendant complexities um anya what have you brought in for us this week i'm reviewing flowers um kind of as a general uh concept i guess um because i got some flowers um for myself from for my flat the other week because i was like a bit sad had a bit of a bad week and i really didn't like being being in the flat and so i i thought getting some flowers like putting some life around around the house will make it feel really nice um and it worked really well I got like these amazing like big orange flowers and like some blue ones as well and I was like this is so nice when I was
Starting point is 00:20:57 buying them I felt like I was at the start of like a rom-com or something there's something about buying flowers where you're like this is like such a waste of money um there is no way that anyone normal in real life would do this so it feels like inherently sort of cinematic to do it um and yeah they made like such a difference every day we had we had some like friends over and everyone was like oh the flowers are so nice and i was like yeah the flowers are really nice um and then that was on a Sunday and then by the Wednesday they kind of started to rot and started to wilt um and by like Thursday evening they were pretty much dead and I haven't cleaned them up yet because I spent I spent like 11 pounds on them so I think they should last for longer um so they're still up so I'm kind of living in like a graveyard of rotting flowers at the moment um and they make the room look like pretty emo um because there's like these
Starting point is 00:21:50 wilted flowers with like all their petals kind of like scattered on the tables around them um and yeah it kind of makes the room look worse than it did before so they've kind of slid down the scale initially they were a five star for me but i have to say i will give them four stars um but i would give them five if they were immortal but i don't like plastic flowers so like that won't that would that won't i've got some plastic flowers and they don't do the trick so it's it's another case of the sadness of um end of life the sadness of end of life. The sadness of end of life. Four stars.
Starting point is 00:22:32 Now it's time for your tech news. And this is the news that Meta, ex-Facebook, is using AI of celebrities as chatbots to help you play games in order to lure people back into the metaverse uh anya maliano you spent a lot of time uh on your phone can you unpack this story for us yeah that's completely true um i so i didn't i didn't fully grasp exactly what this meant but like what it means by having celebrities play them because i'm not sure i fully understand ai and i don't really engage with it but the thing that struck me was that mark first name terms
Starting point is 00:23:13 says at one point he says uh like we just want to do this because like actually most people have not even been able to experience ai it's like there's plastic in the clouds like we don't we don't need to worry about like it's fine it's fine if people aren't experiencing ai um and i just think it sounds like a massive waste of time and money and a completely stupid thing to do um that being said if they are, my agent is available to be contacted. Jaws? My favourite bit of this story was there was a detail about a meta employee who tested, he did a beta test of one of these AI bots. And he said that he found the AI bot to be rude,
Starting point is 00:24:01 and said that he didn't understand its personality which i think is such a funny like comment to make about it because it feels to me like that points out their like total failure to make a convincing human consciousness because you would never say i don't understand your personality to a person there's like you might think that somebody has a weird personality or you might not like someone's personality or you might make a snap judgment about somebody's personality based on like first impressions and then later find out you were wrong and they're slightly different to what you thought. But I don't think you would ever meet somebody and then say, I don't understand your personality. So it suggests that whatever this AI bot was doing was just like wildly inconsistent. And the tone, I was trying to work out what it could have been doing.
Starting point is 00:24:44 wildly inconsistent and the tone i was trying to work out what it could have been doing and all i could get in my head was the idea that maybe it starts as a very kind of authoritarian teacher figure that's quite militaristic and goes like hard work and perseverance will will get us through or something and then it tears its clothes off and rolls itself in flour and makes bird noises or something and then maybe this meta employer would be like yeah i don't understand the personality of this guy but i thought that was such a telling comment um and i also thought it was weird that because mostly you look at the list of celebs that zuckerberg has got involved and they're all they're quite clearly geared at young people it's like it's people i've never heard of it's kendall jenner uh naomi osaka uh i'm sure they're all brilliant, but I think they're all people
Starting point is 00:25:25 that have passed me by. But then Snoop Dogg's in there. And I was thinking, how is Snoop Dogg still of eternal relevance to young people? What's he done to keep himself so in the public eye? He's like a cockroach, and I mean that in the best way. He's just operating in slow motion, so it hasn't caught up to him yet. But he's no longer relevant, so he remains eternally relevant
Starting point is 00:25:49 because he's in a kind of a chill slow motion state. I think one of the really interesting things about this is that they are making the celebrity AIs play characters. So it's not just that you're talking to Snoop Dogg. Snoop Dogg or the AI of Snoop Dogg is playing a dungeon master who will assist you to play adventure games. So the premise is that the AI is somehow inherently Snoop Dogg, but it's performing as a dungeon master. And I feel like this is the cleverest way to overcome the reality that these will be completely incoherent characters.
Starting point is 00:26:23 overcome the reality that these will be completely incoherent characters. It'll just, whatever inconsistencies there are lie in the chasm between Snoop Dogg and Dungeon Master, not in our technology. And I think that's very clever. I mean, it is really, for me, it has really redeemed the meta landscape from their failure to provide legs. They don't provide legs. redeemed the meta landscape from their failure to provide legs. They don't provide legs.
Starting point is 00:26:50 I mean, they launched legs with great fanfare at one point and they weren't very good. Did they? Oh, I missed that. Yeah, which is, I mean, they failed with the failure to provide legs and then the big hullabaloo about providing legs later on in the game, I think they revealed a big problem in the meta development process, which is that all good technology online is either sourced from the military or pornography, and there is no pornographic landscape that would fail to provide people with a bottom half.
Starting point is 00:27:18 There was one other thing with this, which was because I was wondering about Snoop Dogg somehow managing to stay relevant and looked at what he's been doing this whole time i was trying to look at if he'd released any new music recently and it turns out he still released music all the time he released uh six albums last year what yeah and two of them are named after the metaverse and then it's called metaverse part one and metaverse part two or something and then i just found this quite sweet that they're just obviously really good friends him him and Zuckerberg. Snoop Dogg's sort of name checking them on his albums and then Zuckerberg's going,
Starting point is 00:27:49 oh, would you want to play a dungeon master in my shit game? Sweet. Bless them. I think my favourite part of this is that Zuckerberg's gotten ahead of all criticism by saying this isn't about answering queries, it's about entertainment. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:28:06 That's what I say in my shows. Judgmental children news now. And this is the news in Ireland that a kids' court has been established in order to punish people who are exceeding the speed limit outside school zones. So basically, if you exceed the speed limit and you break the law in this way, you have the option of either going through the traditional court system and paying a fine or getting points docked off your license, or you can sign up to a kind of community initiative where you go in and are lectured by smug children who don't know how to drive.
Starting point is 00:28:50 So, Jaws, you understand road rules. Can you unpack this story for us? I just, I found that there was an interesting thing in this story where it said that a certain number of motorists who've been offered this have turned it down. They've been told you can either pay a fine and have points on your licence or you can come and hang out with these kids and they'll talk to you i would rather be eaten by horny crocodiles and have to face four children like how much have you got to hate kids to be
Starting point is 00:29:13 given the option of like you have to spend money and potentially lose your license or you can just hang out with some kids for a bit and it will presumably maybe it'll be a bit embarrassing to be like judged by children but also I would imagine quite interesting and fun and a bit different. And yet there were some people who hate kids so much they were like, no, I will pay you to avoid that experience. I don't want that. I'm completely on the opposite end of this spectrum from you, Joss,
Starting point is 00:29:36 although I love children. Really? What, you'd pay the money? I have been around some really judgmental children and they're appalling. They're impossible to deal with because they don't understand any complex motivations at all uh and they're capable of sort of a great moral rectitude in a way that is like deeply cringy and embarrassing to the part of you that still thinks that you should believe in the way that they do so you'd be sat there
Starting point is 00:29:59 trying to explain to them why speeding is actually really good i think i had i just had a more fun vision of what it could be because i think if i ran it what i would do is before the adult came in i would get the kids i would like cover them in fake blood and stuff and make them pretend to be ghosts so that when they come in they all stand there like the kids in the shining and they talk in unison and they're like why didn't you slow down or whatever i do it like that so that it becomes a kind of haunted house ghost train thing and i think that would be just quite fun for the adult like like a horror movie yeah you adults would start speeding just to get to go in and see it well i mean i'm just
Starting point is 00:30:36 i'm just going to run this quote past you jaws and tell me if you still feel uh that you would prefer to be in front of the children's court than to pay the fine uh slash get the points off your license pupil emily flanagan said it was a good experience which will help prevent speeding you would prefer to be in front of the children's court than to pay the fine slash get the points off your licence. Pupil Emily Flanagan said it was a good experience which will help prevent speeding. I think the people that came before us as a court didn't know they were speeding and now they know the consequences could lead to a child being killed on the road. I think it sounds fun.
Starting point is 00:31:02 I think if I sat there and I had this serious little kid being like, I could have died, you know, I think I'd have a great time. I'd play along and just be like, oh, yeah, I'm really sorry. What was I thinking? I'm an idiot. And then I'd just go home. It's just nice to have a day out, isn't it? I think maybe I give more weight to the moral judgments of children than you do.
Starting point is 00:31:23 You'd let it go off you like water off a duck's back. Anya? It's very different from my road safety education. Like all I remember was like some hedgehogs. There was some sort of hedgehog thing. And it was like maybe hedgehogs crossing the road. Yeah, the same king of the road. Yes.
Starting point is 00:31:42 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think they wore high visiz yeah probably and that's how would you feel how would you feel if you run a red light and then you're put in front of a court of judgmental hedgehogs i would actually be i'd be really more emotionally affected than children because i'd be like not only only can hedgehogs judge, but they're judging me specifically. And also all of a sudden I can drive. So it's like a huge turnaround for my world.
Starting point is 00:32:16 Joss, would you prefer hedgehogs or children? Or horny crocodiles? Oh yeah, I don't want to be brought before a panel of crocodiles. I think I'm still not ready to confront that fully. Hedgehogs, I'd be delighted. I met Mrs. Tiggiewinkle once, and it was one of the best days of my life. She's enormous. Like, if you go to Beatrix Potter's house in the Lake District,
Starting point is 00:32:39 where she lives, there's like a Beatrix Potter museum, and you can meet them all. Mrs. Tiggiewinkle is massive. Just like so much bigger than I thought. It's like as tall as me. It was crazy because it wasn't that they made them all that size. Like Jeremy Fisher was like the size of a frog but then Mrs Tiggerwinkle was as big as me. I was like what's going on here? So I'd be happy to see her kin again. I mean, that brings us to the end of today's episode of The Gargle.
Starting point is 00:33:11 Anya, have you got anything to plug? I am going on tour with my Edinburgh show. It's a stand-up show about the worst haircut I ever got in my life. And the tour starts in January, ends in March. haircut I ever got in my life. And the tour starts in January, ends in March, going to all classic places and then some random ones like pool.
Starting point is 00:33:31 So all the details are available on my website of that. Excellent. Look that up and go see Anya on tour. Jaws, have you got anything to plug? I don't have a huge amount to actually plug at the moment. I'm in that bit where I'm working on lots of things
Starting point is 00:33:47 that aren't currently finished. But there is a short film that's coming out in November, which people can find on my website, on jawsnorris.co.uk, when that goes out. And I guess the most recent big thing I did, I made a radio sitcom last year, which people can still find on BBC Sounds, and I'm working on hopefully more of that sort of thing one of these days.
Starting point is 00:34:09 I highly recommend it. The Dream Factory is excellent audio. Thank you to our roving reporters, Jared Watt, who sent in the crocodile sex story, which I recommend you read in full, ideally out loud. And Matthew Collins, who sent in the kids court story out of Ireland. If you would like to be a roving reporter, tweet us at HelloGogglers on the platform currently known as X. I'm Alice Fraser. You can find me online at patreon.com slash alicefraser.
Starting point is 00:34:33 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 would like to work on whatever you're working on with me, you can sign up at patreon.com slash alicefraser. From a dollar a month. You get the access to all of those things. This is a Bugle podcast and 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,
Starting point is 00:34:59 Catharsis, Tiny Revolutions, Top Stories, and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts. Take your time and play it cool.

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