Bedtime Stories with Iggy Pop.

Struggling to sleep? Now you can enjoy the soothing sounds of Iggy Pop’s raspy, weathered voice to help you nod off. As part of their series of digital initiatives, the New Museum are collaborating with Maurizio Cattelan to bring you ‘Bedtime Stories’. Basically, they’re getting a load of different artists/musicians/authors to regale their sleepy listeners with a series of slightly strange bedtime stories. And first up was Iggy Pop, who’s already quite strange himself, so it was a match made in heaven. Mr. Pop tells the tale of his beloved Mexican canine companion, who was the apple of his eye right up until the moment he was tragically crushed to death by a car while eating out of a bin. Ahhhh, soooo relaxing.

Congratulations, it’s a Beautiful Baby Planet.

Anything being born is usually not a pretty sight. But it turns out there’s one exception to that rule – planets. AB Auriage is a star about 520 Light Years from Earth that scientists identified years ago as having the perfect conditions for birthing new planets. Well now it looks like it is well and truly up the duff – and apparently this is what that looks like. Who knew a swirling mass of gas and dust could be quite so pretty. But the first thing that occurred to me was not how incredible it is to see a world literally being created, but rather that it looks an awful lot like the David Tennant-era Doctor Who intro. In fact, if you start playing the theme music at about 00:36 into the video it matches up pretty perfectly. All you need is a Tardis and the words “Billie Piper” to pop up on screen and the two would honestly be indistinguishable. So shout out to the BBC, you nailed it.

Weird Ukrainian Sh*t 2.

If you read last week’s coolsh*t, you’ll know that I’ve recently developed quite the penchant for 90s Ukrainian lo-fi music videos. Well now I’ve moved on to Ukrainian photography. Train conductor/photographer July Poly released her latest collection, Ukrzaliznytsia, to capture some of the “colourful characters” she sees every day riding the trains. And by “colourful characters”, it appears that what she mainly means is “prostitutes”. Plus some soldiers sprinkled in there too for good measure. Although it now feels like an eternity ago that I last made the arduous schlep that I used to call my commute, I definitely don’t remember it looking anything like this. Probably smells pretty similar though.

A Very Wavy Don.

They say great art speaks to people. But this doesn’t, it just waves. Digital tech company ‘d’strct’ have just installed this baffling billboard right in the heart of Seoul, and it has now been accredited as the world’s largest ever anamorphic illusion. What’s an anamorphic illusion, you ask? Well, this is. But usually they’re smaller. I guess. To be fair, at 80×20 metres, this is bloody massive. And I’m a fan. I don’t entirely understand it and it does scare me a bit, but I’m impressed nonetheless. Bear in mind also that this was installed in the same week that FC Seoul are being globally harangued for filling their stands with sex dolls in lieu of real fans – so if this is the city’s way of distracting people from that, then fair play for going all out.

Cat-like Reflexes.

Football returned in Germany this week, but as I sat through a dreary 0-0 between Fortuna Dusseldorf and SC Paderborn 07, I couldn’t help but feel like something was missing. I’m starting to wonder now if I ever even really liked football that much, or if I just like the pub and shouting. Or maybe it’s just a morbid obsession with being made miserable almost every weekend – but there’s definitely something missing when it feels like nothing is really riding on it. So until the Premier League returns, I have vowed to only watch football videos involving cats. Like this one – which would have been absolutely massive on 2009 YouTube when cats being silly was still the internet’s most sought after commodity. This cat is such a good goalkeeper that I had to watch the video about 10 times to figure out if I had been duped by some camera trickery. And to be honest, I’m still not sure. But either way, ‘Meownuel Neuer’ could certainly give Jordan Pickford a run for his money. They’re about the same height as well.

Realsh*t: Life In Lockdown – Ep 8.

It’s a global pandemic, so we have a global response right? Wrong. In this week’s realsh*t, we asked our SELFHOOD network, including members from New Zealand and Canada, how far in, or out of lockdown they are right now. Their answers were unsurprisingly very different. If you missed it, check it out here.