The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom-podcast listeners of the new, holy Prusso-German empire.



– Karl Marx, London, January 24, 1873.

* Kids today are doing it wrong, or not enough, or something
* When you say that we should bump uglies, could you be more specific?
* Home Affairs set to crack down on MyColes Marriages
* If you gaze for long into The Abyss, honorary blackbelt James Cameron gazes also into you
* Serotonin-Nonrefundable Reuptake Inhibitors
* Ross’s eyesight hasn’t been the same since he was found in that Spencer Street Station locker in 1986
* The correct way to receive a compliment is to blush and sweat excessively while exiting at pace
* And I Nietzsche more than wantzsche
* The National Construction Workers’ Catcall Code (NCWCC) 2025
* Bitsy announces latest venture: ‘Imagine silent films but they’re podcasts’
* Recording pubes with Tchad Blake: ‘The Neumann KU 100 is my go-to for crotch work’
* New frontiers in heterodox economics: the television theory of value
* I do wonder where those bodyworkers keep your intestines while they’re manipulating your psoas muscle
* It was nine worse than 1984
* They fart in his general direction
* Nope, the advice offered here absolutely cannot be ‘Just Do It’

This week, join Beautiful Fairy Princess and Captain Handsome as they effortlessly relate to the non-Facebook demographic by establishing

* a terrible nickname for the show
* that a mirtazapine prescription pairs best with an ice cream subscription
* that anhedonia isn’t that Welsh band from the ’90s
* a perverse rubric with which to deem chia seeds better than cocaine
* that men don’t read novels because at least one of those two things is no damn good
* that women are leading unions because at least one of those two things is no damn good
* that reading is (still) for suckers
* that being contactable is the worst
* that Napoleon would have been 5’10” on Tinder
* that you should probably consider drawing a beauty mark just above the corner of your mouth while you’re at it

An episode description in which I once again take some of my discarded episode titles and list them as bullet points in lieu of writing a proper thingy:

* Dream snorkel, come rescue me
* Nopin’ talkin’ ’bout rootin’
* Experimentieren mit Fleischstäben
* Don’t do you!
* Just acknowledging feelings all day
* The quirkiest of bugbears
* Massive Ordnance Penetrator-Intermodulator
* Please welcome to the stage Buster Bunking!
* 28 years of phallophotic retinopathy
* Ralph Plaines
* The Epstein [no relation] files
* Team The Netherlands: World Police

Self-explanatory, as always:

* I’m bad with names but I could identify that service set anywhere
* Hitch: the elite private schooldog born with a silver bone in his mouth
* The nose Mohs
* Calling the Cancer Council helpful would be the real charity
* Do you even stairlift, bro?
* Helen loses a dress size by not exercising and Ross loses 103cm of height on the Peterson Diet
* Swedish nutballs
* The X axis represents time, the Y axis represents pleasure, and the Z axis represents evil
* What we’ve got here is an epic fail to communicate
* Ross Zombie
* Heavy is the sex that wears the studded leather glove
* Which came first: the chicken or the industrial rock artist?

In honour of Dr Gary Foley’s recent 75th birthday, Beautiful Fairy Princess continues with her dastardly plan to publish his complete biography in podcast form before Tony Birch has the chance to write any of it down. Besides, reading is for suckers, which is why I’m just going to trail off …… Ugh, fine. Stories included feature the likes of John Webster, Marcia Langton, Germaine Greer, Bob Bellear, Paul Coe, Gary Williams, Pat O’Shane, Chicka Dixon, Bob Maza, Ken and Sacha Horler, Ray Peckham, Joe Strummer, and more! Plus, Bird Ferguson briefly steals the show.

See, kids? I know video games. Oh, and it’s a true crime podcast now, so that's all the listener demographics covered. Also:

* Ross Thee Stallion
* Achtung! Unverhohlener Volkswagen-Diebe!
* But first, Clive James
* A potato disc by any other name
* Hustle & Flowchart
* Rösse Car
* Abuse Me Elmo
* Spam Harris
* Who’s bad?
* I thought Dr Peter McGraw was married to Oprah or something
* Neuroblobology (it’s how the Predator sees your feelings)
* It was all Glenfiddich and elbow patches in my day
* Adorno: The 50-year-old Virgo
* Temple of the Cow
* The way to a rat’s heart is through its tickle-hole
* Kill the spiders in John Butler’s hair with the knife he forged
* In terms of running it to ground
* His lovely crimey lumps
* Neuroblobology II (it’s how the Predator sees your racism)
* Sociobiology: hard-wired for untestable hypotheses

Lured by the undeniable architectural triumph that is the newly unveiled Feminist Wing at Floate Library—it didn’t take very long, either—our prodigal heroes return to say things directly at each other’s faces. Some of those things:




* Inclu-Size Me
* Learning to fly (choice of socks is the hardest thing)
* Talk of circadian rhythm
* Buckminster: Full of it?
* The Great Biographer Theory of History
* Stone Temple Co-passengers
* Poor person’s business class
* Irredeemable: One framed portrait of the monarch’s consort, please
* Consciously uncoupling from news
* It’s the pantyhose women that give her, give her, give her the pantyhose blues
* MobLandia
* On not growing up to be Helen Mirren and/or Christina Hendricks
* Is it possible that Guy Ritchie isn’t actually shit?
* You gotta partition your magisteria
* The Naivety Spectrum
* Brown Eye for the Brown Owl

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They call him Captain Handsome but his name was Elisa Day. Nicknames, huh. Where do they come from? Beautiful Fairy Princess seems to think that the answer is ChatDSV, which I understand to be both a telepathic dolphin who loves subroutines—which are evil, unlike normal routines, which are natural and good—and her only companion since the breakdown of the quarantediation process. I probably should have split that last sentence up a bit but I did not want to risk remembering it by stopping partway through, plus I am working to a kitchen timer of indeterminate duration.Also:• Chairman Mao’s Red Braised Porkies• Taken for a Wildean ride• In Seattle, Washington, mushroom eats you!• ‘… the best way out is always Theroux’ – Robert Frost, 1915• What if Regus Patoff but tall?

With the reciprocal intervention orders from The Tiff still in effect, they’ve gone remote again this week. The sound is always shitty over Riverside—as I believe Captain Handsome’s favourite band Travis sang—but whaddaya gonna do? Run it through some magic AI thingy that makes both hosts sound like the Theranos lady? Ugh, these two weirdos would probably love that. No, you put it in the episode description like a puddle of wee to rub their noses in and teach them a lesson, that’s what. Anyway, in case you can’t make it out, they talked about these things:

* Substacking well
* You most likely know it as Myanmar, but it’ll always be Burma to Ross
* The burgeoning Voluntary Quarantine Movement
* Essential workers never did get that raise we all said they should, huh
* Windexing one’s apples, so to speak
* Burgess, the patron saint of shut-ins
* Blooze lawyers bought all the guitars
* Thatcher? I hardly know her!
* Hitch-33⅓: The Final Insult
* Fuggen A. Hayek: because prices, not podcasts, communicate information
* Sigmund and his day-bed made of snow
* Polanyi: because maybe prices don’t so much communicate information as obscure it
* The burgeoning Planned Geriatric Intemperance Movement
* Hamm!

This week, Beautiful Fairy Princess and Captain Handsome—back together after what Page Six has labelled The Tiff—are joined by a mystery guest! Who could it be? Is there perhaps an unnecessarily cryptic set of clues, including the name of this episode combined with the fact that said guest’s stories are accompanied by post-production sound effects, that could potentially lead one to deduce the name? Yes! Might it be less annoying to simply listen to the episode instead? Possibly, but be warned, they’ll be talking about these things:

• Legally blind: not as simple and finite as the rules of haircare

• How to Ruin a Seeing Eye Dog in 10 Days

• Paging Dr Buñuel!

• There’s a fraction too much fiction/How about NGO

• Keffiyeh or keffinah?

• Disabled seating: from my cold, dead arse

• A lunatic, mountain-climbin’, pipe-smokin’, communist doctor from New Zealand

• Like a diamond in the sky, how I wonder/Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind

• Just imagine how fast the colonies would have federated if Henry Parkes had whipped out some maracas

• Don’t mention the pope

• Napoleon: Bigger, Longer & Uncut

• Eggs

• No, that’s the wrong list, Siri

• Open shopping list

• Hey Siri, open shopping list

• Goddammit, Siri

Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your vegan sandals ’cause it’s hot out there today! It’s hot out there every day; what is this, the Jagajaga Federal Electorate? Not hardly, but it is the perfect time for both frozen gazpacho and blue-ballsing some ASMR weirdos with an empty promise of eating noises. Also, Dr Tom Heenan takes time out from his busy private posthumous psychiatric practice to excise a stupid expression or two, espouse the virtues of bullshit, and rubbish Tidy Towns!

No man is an island, even Captain Handsome, who recently returned from an island and would now very much like to be one but has instead settled for erecting a set of boundaries around himself as though he were a patch of arable land in fifteenth-century England. (Those guys said that it was ‘necessary’ for ‘improvement’ too, you know.) Also wrongly, Beautiful Fairy Princess criticises the term ‘lived experience’ for implying its opposite, and postgraduate education for being pointless, before questioning the universal appeal of equine-human–human relationships, which makes it all the more painful to know that she will never read my forthcoming postdoctoral thesis, ’Stable for Two: A Speculative Autoethnographic Study of My Alternate Life Spent Brushing Glorious Horselady Andrea Savage’.Plus:• Reading with one’s eyes makes an unexpected comeback• The nascent anti-generativity movement• Hitchslappers: gloves for patting Ross’ dog• The CPAP machine-based economy• Sleep vs. sex, and if you quote the Old El Paso ad I’m calling the police• The ongoing crisis of sext response times• Substacking it in• Decrease your word power today!• Yah, yah, Pendah Mawt• My brother knows a guy who knows Belle Gibson

Finally back in Captain Handsome’s home office/studio/Idi Amin shrine after two weeks spent hitting, smashing, beckoning, summoning, upsizing, vaccinating, and otherwising, our intrepid hosts are fresh out of Gs and have never felt more amazin’ (that could just be the argon leak, though). Plus, all of these self-explanatory things:

• White Lotus Country for an Old Man

• The Further Adventures of Lumpy Floatum

• Are you down with BFP’s BCC?

• You like palanquin and I like sedan chair (let’s call the whole thing off)

• Parker Posey? Can’t lose!

• Dux of CliffNotes College

• The taintal twinge of terrible tunes (ft. Tim Rogers and Ollie Olsen)

• Misappropriating cultural appropriation

• ‘Futurebob’

• Spooky Holes, Part 1 of 37

• The frogurt is still cursed (that’s bad)

• Quirky hotel criticism: the last refuge of the antidentite

All work and no play makes Bitsy a dull boy

All work and no play makes Bitsy a dull boy

All work and no play mmakes Bitsy a dull boy

All work and no PLay ma es Bitsy a dull boy

All work and no play makes Bitsy a dull boy

All work and no ply mAkes Bitsy a dull boy

All work and no pllay makes Bitsy a dull boy

All work and no play makes Bitsy a dullboy

All work and NO play makes BItsya dull boy

All work and no play makes Bitsy a dull boy

All work and no play mAkes Bitsy a dull boy

All work and no play makes Bitsy a dull boy

All work and no play maked Bitsy a dull boy

This week, our heroes are fearlessly testing the limits of remote recording technology. As will be apparent, Beautiful Fairy Princess has opted to record in an abandoned grain silo, whereas Captain Handsome joins us from twenty thousand leagues under the sea. Thence, they dare jointly pose the bold and entirely original question, ‘war: what is it good for?’ Those who tune in will not only learn that the answer is roughly eight minutes of solid content but can also expect to hear a snippet from the second-best song ever to be called Good Vibrations!

1.    EXT/INT.   LENIN SHIPYARD.   BLOOD RED SKY

 

WE OPEN on a woman, HELEN (36), beautiful, fairylike yet somehow regal, speaking into a microphone.

 
HELEN
This episode is all about film!
 
FRANCIS
I shall speak only of dogs.
 
ROSS
I, too, shall speak of dogs but also of role models
and curated obituary delivery as a service. I might
briefly mention David Michôd if you are lucky.
 
CINNAMON
I shall sing of dogs.
 
HELEN
This episode was all about film!
 
FADE OUT

Meatloaf assures us that 2 out of 3 ain’t bad, but can he be trusted? Neither Uber nor those responsible for the Net Promoter Score seem to think so, with the former suggesting that anything under 4.7 out of 5 is not good, and the latter refusing to even count anything under an 8 out of 10. Let’s see, that gives us a common denominator of 30 but, ugh, there’s also a decimal point in the mix, so ... 361 out of 450 ain’t, according to the average, bad. That’s 2.40667 out of 3, or 8.0222 out of 10.* Therefore, we can reliably infer that the Net Promoter Score people's decision was in no way arbitrary; rather, it stems from the utmost statistical rigour, derived as it so clearly was from the mean of the two figures originally proffered by Meatloaf and Uber. Oh, but then there’s also Beautiful Fairy Princess, who reckons that anything over 16 is good to go, so who knows.

*My sincere thanks to the toddler at Fairfield Station for his assistance with these conversions

Hopped up on Quartiers d'Orange and sundry other entremets from the local footy, Beautiful Fairy Princess seeks routine from a smartwatch in the lead-up to the Masters Games. Will she, like Captain Handsome before her, someday achieve a general equilibrium in her dynamically stochastic lifestyle? Is that how one constructs a question in order to shoehorn in an extremely convoluted and disputably humorous reference to New Keynesian macroeconomic theory in the hopes of eliciting a self-satisfied half-smirk of recognition from a handful of wonks? As our hosts have bilaterally imposed a mandatory opinion lockdown, I am not at liberty to comment, so let us just assume that our information is symmetric. (Another one! Ahh, classic Bitsy.)