Gone West.

Well, Kanye’s certainly had a busy couple of weeks. He’s been making plenty of headlines, and almost none of them positive. The most notable recent antic that springs to mind is his decision to stand alongside Candace Owens at Paris Fashion Week wearing matching his and hers ‘White Lives Matter’ t-shirts. You can see why that rubbed a few people up the wrong way. Saying that, one might argue that fashion has always been conspicuously provocative and Kanye wearing a White Lives Matter t-shirt isn’t so different from Johnny Rotten, Vivienne Westwood et al wearing swastikas in the 70s. One might. Not me, obviously. Naughty Kanye. All that nonsense aside, he’s also released a mini doc which takes the audience through a week in his life – and it’s quite something. It’s 30 minutes long, so you’d be forgiven for not watching the whole thing, but I would encourage you to do so if you want a fly-on-the-wall perspective of Kanye showing an Adidas executive a pornographic video in a business meeting.

Blow this Joint.

President Biden has taken a break from telling unsuspecting members of the public that ‘you don’t fuck with a Biden’ to actually do something rather worthwhile. The POTUS announced this week that all people convicted of simple cannabis possession at the federal level will be pardoned, and he has encouraged state governors to now do the same – although that might be a bit of a hard sell in Alabama. While this may highlight the diverging opinions that will lead to the quasi-civil war currently brewing in the US, it will at least see 6,500 people have a felony expunged from their record. And the fact that this has happened just a few weeks before the midterm elections is absolutely definitely only a coincidence. But even if this is a fairly cynical political play, it’s hard to argue with the results that will come from it – but no doubt Fox News will try their darndest to do so.

Doodle Bug.

Sam Cox, better known as Mr. Doodle, is a 26-year-old artist who has just completed his opus, ‘Doodleland’. Cox bought a £1.5million Kentish mansion back in 2019 with a plan to paint the whole gaff white in order to cover every inch of it with his signature cartoonish doodles. 900 litres of white paint, 401 cans of black spray paint, 286 bottles of black drawing paint, 2296 pen nibs later and he’s only gone and done it. Behold the migraine-inducing result. Isn’t it… interesting. Bet his Kentish neighbours are happy. Expect a Dick Cheney-esque air rifle accident in the near future when the Tories, the farmers and the travellers team up to take Mr. Doodle down.

Say "Fromage".

Scare tactics aren’t terribly common in marketing. In general, they’re considered to be a bit, well, scary. However, to promote their new horror film ‘Smile’, Paramount enlisted a team of actors to appear at public events and photobomb live broadcasts with their most petrifyingly ear-to-ear grins. The ‘Smilers’ were spotted at The Today Show as well as several MLB games, generating a lot of buzz on social media from Twitter users wondering what on Earth is going on. It’s a fairly simple stunt, but you have to admire the commitment of the actors involved – some of them stood smiling without breaking for over 5 hours. The stone-faced stoicism of the Queen’s King’s Guard doesn’t look quite so impressive now. The scarier thing, though, is that this actually worked. Smile had already racked up $22 million and $37 million in ticket sales at the North American and worldwide box offices respectively just 2 days after its release. I imagine some executives at Paramount will be striking a similarly menacing countenance around about now.

Fail to Prepare...

“If you build it, they will come”. Turns out that wasn’t actually what Kevin Costner said in Field of Dreams. Apparently it was “If you build it, he will come”. That’s nowhere near as impactful. Screams of the Mandela Effect (give it a Goog). But the sentiment behind the original misquotation is particularly pertinent this week, as Saudi Arabia have just won their bid to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games in an area called Trojena. That doesn’t sound terribly noteworthy, but Trojena doesn’t actually exist yet. We’ve previously looked at THE LINE, and Trojena is another part of the $500 billion Saudi ‘Neom’ megacity that is scheduled to be completed by 2026. At least that’s what they say; looking at the scale of work proposed, I have no idea how they’re managing that. But if anyone can do it, you’d put your money on a country with infinitely deep pockets and rather loose labour laws.

Feel the Energy.

You can heat your house this winter by dancing. Or, to be more accurate, you almost certainly can’t – but a club in Glasgow is transforming itself into a self-sustaining, renewable raving venue by converting the body heat on its dancefloor into energy that can then used to power the club. SWG3 has just switched on a system called BodyHeat, which will pipe dancers’ thermal energy via a carrier fluid to 200m bore holes that can be charged like a thermal battery. If that doesn’t make sense to you, don’t blame me – blame the BBC News article that I just copy and pasted it from. The owners say this will enable them to completely disconnect the venue’s gas boilers, reducing its carbon emissions by about 70 tonnes of CO2 a year. It don’t come cheap though, costing about £600,000 to install. But they expect the amount saved on energy bills to surpass that figure in about 5 years. And if they were to host strictly only jump-up DnB events, I reckon they could be in the black within a few months.

The Coolsh*t Podcast - Ep. 26.

What is Britney Spears’ dad up to these days, anyway?