Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters, episode 1428 for Thursday the 28th of May,

2026. I'm your host, Luca, joined today by Bo. Of Breakfast with Bo, fame and the claim.

The darling of the breakfast scene of Britain. Bo's Breakfast Club, hashtag the real BBC.

Yeah, 8 p.m. 8 at 8am, rather, every morning.

Or it wouldn't be breakfast, would it if it was 8pm, so yeah, caught myself there.

Anyway, today we're going to be talking all about the Punch the Monkey saga

and how one little monkey became embroiled with some hijinks from the crypto bros.

We're then going to be talking about the return of the dark lord himself,

because he's always in the shadows, isn't he?

And every now and then he feels the need to make his presence known.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then we're going to be talking about how the skies are simply not your billboards,

and I intend to go on a somewhat meandering philosophical discussion about the corporations taking over our skies,

and what we should actually be trying to do with our skies.

So, with all of that said, shall we begin? So, Bo, have you ever heard of Punch the Monkey?

Only in absolutely in passing on Twitter, a week or two ago, I saw that there was this poor little

monkey and that it'd been abandoned by its parents or its tribe or something. Yeah. And that people had loads of sympathy for it. Beyond that, I don't know anything. I don't know anything about crypto bros. No. Beyond that. I never thought, oh, wait, I need to find out all the details about this little monkey. I was just like, okay, that's the thing that's going on. I'm not interested. Well, you may not have felt that, but fortunately, Samson is our scholar of Japanese online trends. Oh, it's all Japanese? Yeah, this is. I didn't even know that. All right. Okay. So, it's a Japanese zoo? Yes. Okay. All right. Yeah. So we're in Japan. I'm learning, I'm learning. Okay. And this is a Japanese macaque monkey.

As you can see, absolutely adorable. And just so there is no confusion about punch whatsoever, they've even helpfully put the fact that there's a monkey in brackets at the top. So it can be... Not to be confused with Lucy Punch. No. Or Punch and Judy. Yeah, punch and Judy.

Oh, right.

Yeah, sorry, yes.

Yeah, yeah.

So, but it is exactly as you say.

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