Paddy the Goody.

To the untrained eye, MMA may just look like a couple maniacs locked in a cage in their pants to beat the snot out of each other until one of them is literally dragged away by someone who we’re led to believe is the referee but could very well be a bouncer. And all those things are true – but it’s also so much more than that. With the fighters needing to master a number of different disciplines such as kickboxing, jiu-jitsu, and wrestling, there’s a good argument to be made that MMA is the most technical sport in the world and those who participate in it are serious athletes who ought to be treated as such. At least that’s what the fighters say, and I’m not going to argue with them – they’re nutters. In a sport that is arguably associated with toxic masculinity more than most, whatever exactly that means, Paddy “The Baddy” Pimblett decided to use his time on the mic after a 2^nd round submission victory to talk about men’s mental health, having lost a friend to suicide the day before the fight. Bogus mental health-washing is undeniably a real thing, but this very clearly wasn’t that. He may look like Jay from The Inbetweeners, but he certainly doesn’t talk like him.

Kentucky Fried Confusion.

Enthusiasm is annoying. Strong opinions are irritating. In fact, I’d say there’s nothing worse than dogmatism – and there’s absolutely nothing you could say that would change my mind. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this may be one of the greatest pieces of content ever made. And I also have absolutely no idea why they bothered making it, which only adds to its brilliance. It shouldn’t exist, but I’m awfully glad it does – like the duck-billed platypus, one of nature’s most glorious mistakes. To launch a pizza with fried chicken as its base, KFC have released a 14-minute horror short film in which murderous pizza bases massacre a group of young people trying to enjoy a weekend in the countryside. Given our TikTok-sized attention spans, you may be reluctant to sit through something 14 minutes long, but I would genuinely implore you to do so in this instance.

No Whey.

It’s hard to tell whether the protein industry might be a bit of a racket. More broadly, it’s easy to be suspicious of all the various wellness products that are currently being quite literally shoved down our throats. And this is coming from somebody who is an absolute sucker for anything with even the faintest whiff of a purportedly optimising vitamin or mineral. When someone tells me about a new supplement that may or may not have some sort of positive affect that hadn’t ever seemed even remotely important until that very moment, my typical response is “Ahhh”. That was the sound of a mouth opening, by the way, not a stubbed toe. Now, the protein business has been shaken to its core by ‘Crawl Bars’, a new brand offering granola protein bars made out of crickets. Yum! This sounds rather gimmicky, but there is apparently some strong pseudo-science supporting it. Compared to vegan protein sources, crickets are much more nutritionally complete, containing all nine essential amino acids, as well as more iron than spinach and more calcium than milk. And from an environmental perspective, farming crickets uses far less resources than dairy-based protein sources such as whey or casein. So, if you can get past a bit of juvenile squeamishness, then you too can be yolked.

Brushed Up.

The speed of progress over the last few decades can tempt us into the fallacious belief that all technology is accelerating at that same rate. Some things, however, have stayed pretty much the same for bloody ages. For example, we haven’t got that much better at flying in quite a long time – planes now aren’t that different from planes in the 80s, save the absence of a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. Another, arguably more important, example: brushing your teeth. Since the invention of the electric toothbrush, very little appears to have changed – in spite of what the 9 out of 10 dentists mentioned in certain adverts may lead you to believe. A Hegelian might conclude that this means we’ve reached the “End of History” in some spheres – but Hegel is extremely boring and difficult to understand, so we ought to disregard the thoughts and feelings of anyone who supports him. After a lengthy dark ages, progress has returned to the world of oral hygiene. The Blizzbrush 5.0 Toothbrush-Sponge is a radical new toothbrush design conceived by Chris Martin (not that one) that can clean all over the mouth in just a few seconds as its wearer simply bites and grinds on the small, silicone sponge brush. I’m sold. Saying that, the fact that this is the ‘5.0’ is slightly alarming. This is where we find out that the previous 4 iterations worked great until they started yanking people’s teeth out their faces.

Unrighteous Gemstones.

Collectibles are very serious business. Logan Paul’s $5million Pokemon card is a testament to that. But this latest collectible from the MCU makes that look like a bargain by comparison. East Continental Gems and Marvel have just unveiled the most expensive MCU collectible series at this year’s Comic-Con – a version of Thanos’ gauntlet complete with 6 stones with a combined weight of 150 carats. Named the Infinity Collection of Gemstones, the six stones — Time, Space, Reality, Mind, Power, and Soul — will set you back a whopping $25million. Apparently the cost of living crisis isn’t quite so bad if you’re extraordinarily wealthy. This is the type of thing that I would typically feel inclined to sneer at, but it’s so ludicrously expensive to the point of utter absurdity that I can’t help but be somewhat impressed by the sheer gall to create such a monstrosity. This whole thing screams Crypto Bro with more money than sense.

End of the Line.

If you were going to build a city from scratch in the present day, you probably wouldn’t come up with something that looked much like, say, London, New York or Paris. Why build a somnopolis of the past when you could create a 170km long smart city made up by two parallel skyscrapers up to 1,600 feet tall stretching through mountains and featuring high speed rail, a sports stadium, a yacht marina, and housing over 9 million people? If you think that got a bit specific, that’s because those are just a few of the specifications of the city, NEOM, that is currently being planned in Saudi Arabia. Oh, and it’ll also have no cars and will take just 20 minutes to travel from one end to the other. Said to be the most efficient cities the world has ever seen, the city will run on 100% renewable energy and prioritize people’s health while preserving 95% of NEOM’s land. See, doesn’t that sound great? We can just ignore the fact that it looks an awful lot like a futuristic supermax prison. No, you can never leave – but why would you want to?

The Coolsh*t Podcast - Ep. 19.

Shit chicken puns and a discussion about a well-known dweller of the deep.