Pat Bastard and the Spurious 5

Tuesday, 20 January 2026

Cool Thing: the Deer Stones of Mongolia!

*Mogs your henge*

Did you know some 1500 deer stones have been found, mostly in storied Mongolia, whence rode Chinggis Khan? Deer stones range from ~3-15 feet tall and are decorated with carvings, of which the Mongolian ones are by far the coolest.

Step it up Sayan-Altai/West-Eurasianbros!

Dated to somewhere from 1400 to 700 BC, the purpose of deer stones remains debated, but sheer decorative splendour must have been at least a tertiary purpose. Most deer stones feature carved reindeers, but others have been found depicting different animals, like elks and tigers, as well as various weapons and accessories. Despite their immense antiquity, many retain vividly sharp images, and analysis suggests an early metal drill-type tool was used in carving some of them. Bring back deer stones!

Mongolboos rise up.

Tuesday, 13 January 2026

Supermarionation Tuesdays: Stingray!

Theme: Ocean Man - Ween

I once had little toys like this from Burger King or someplace. This was exactly how I looked playing with them too.

The overwhelming consensus is that Gerry Anderson's insane puppet fixation peaked with Thunderbirds, but, as I am allergic to consensus, I say Stingray was the best. Stingray transplanted the basic plot of those old Flash Gordon serials from my late adolescence to an underwater realm, with Troy Tempest as Flash, Titan as Emperor Ming, and Marina as Princess Aura, who vied for Chad's affections with his earthling gf Dale Arden/Atlanta (who was not a city). I appreciate you don't know what the fuck I'm talking about because unlike me you weren't around during the Great Depression, but the parallels are uncanny, or, at any rate, not noticeably canny.

The great debate: smoking hot redhead puppet gf or amphibious mute puppet gf? >inb4 the muteness is the clincher.

Both the love triangle and the off-again, on-again war with Titan and his gargling fishbros remained unresolved, as the series began yet another trend in Supermarionation by bitching out and giving us a clip show for its finale, but this is good insofar as it allowed young minds to come up with their own stories of how things might have ended. But the one-off episodes were fun too, and wildly imaginative: one had Troy and Phones discover a second ocean underneath the floor of the familiar one, which sounds like the plot of something Jules Verne might have written, or a 50s scifi kino like Mars The Angry Red Planet.

If you don't look back at her, you can't see her signing that you should have stopped to ask directions one ocean ago.

But as I recall everyone's favourite character was X-2-0, Titan's alternately creepy and long-suffering spy sidekick whose voice actor made him sound like alternately creepy and long-suffering character actor Peter Lorre. X-2-0 lived on a creepy island with a seemingly innocuous house whose furnishings flipped around to reveal a high-tech HQ like something out of a James Bond movie.

I'd be bummed I don't have this setup in my house but, for all you know, I do.

As the show went on, X-2-0 became the foil for Titan's potent combination of incompetence and megalomania, and the brains to his oddly statue-of-liberty-looking heavies' brawn, or, if you prefer, prawn.

Don't forget to tip your waiters!

This made him halfway between the land-dwelling heroes (I think the Innsmouth set referred to them derisively as "terraneans") and Titan's people, mostly referred to as "aquaphibians", which sounds suspiciously like a word made up by Gerry Anderson by splicing "aqua" into "amphibian", which makes no sense because amphibians live in and out of water; the "am-" part is like in "ambidextrous", meaning they can do both. An "aquaphibian" should only be able to survive in water, but this doesn't seem to be the case, or else Marina would have quickly been less hot exotic waifu and more decomposing globster. F for linguistics, but A for entertainment. Watch Stingray you oaf!

Actual frame from Stingray.

Tuesday, 6 January 2026

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: 3:10 to Yuma!

Theme: it has its own!

Not to be confused with its much noisier and less suspenseful remake, the original 3:10 to Yuma is the western Alfred Hitchcock might have made, had he ever made a western instead of eating pork pies. IDK why suspense is a lost art; it's not like the technology has been lost or superceded, but noone does suspense anymore and that sucks. Much more of the OG 3:10 is spent waiting, to far greater effect than all the sound and fury of the remake, which adds pointless detours, setpieces and characters, and every memorable line of which is ripped straight from the classic.

Composition is a lost art too.

Van Heflin, who is not an hard rock band, plays Dan Evans, the everyman tested with the onerous duty of herding legendary outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) to the station in the line of fire of Wade's gang buddies. Heflin plays nervous better than any actor I can name, eye twitching and grim face sweating as the pressure mounts, while Ford's cool-guy baddy counterpoints him with the detached calm of a seasoned psychopath. Evans has reason to be nervous: his land suffers from drought and his wife passive-aggressively implies he should have picked a fight with Wade's gang and been easily and instantly killed like a real man.

You almost never get fatally shot anymore, it's like you don't even love me.

In stark contrast to this troubled marriage, Wade forms a fleeting attachment to Felicia Farr's world-weary saloon thot with effortless charm, only later to muse that the grass might be greener on Evans' side. It would be easy for Wade to lapse into nothin-personnelisms like all the shitty, non-Manhunter versions of Hannibal Lecter, but neckbeardry is nimbly swerved by the deft, calculating performance and palpable charisma of the character. It's a simple but highly credible battle of wits and nerves between two men who cultivate a healthy mutual respect based in wariness, making for a character study as satisfying as the finely honed suspense.

Body Language EXPERTS react to 3:10 to Yuma! The guy on the bed is the calm one. Thanks for the 500k views! Don't forget to hit the bell!

But something else that elevates it over the remake is the heightened, mythic quality conveyed in its dramatic theme song and more subtly in the hints of providence that start to show through in the final break for the station. The train itself comes on like a portent of judgement, venting clouds of steam, and the crane operator gets a workout sending the omniscient camera wheeling and descending over the action like a rich kid on Christmas might abuse his brand new drone. Malign 60s revisionism, spaghetti hipster nihilism and miseryslop from Unforgiven to Deadwood have all coagulated into one big push to demythologise and demystify the Old West, just as Game of Thrones attempted to beshit the magic and lustre of Tolkien and friends, but all such smarmy drivel pales in the face of something far more vital and profound. The great stories continue to ennoble with stolid persistence through the years, so skip the remake and the dEcOnStRuCtIoNs, and take that traaaaiiiin.

Imagine thinking you can demythologize a place that looks like this.

Tuesday, 30 December 2025

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Phantom Carriage!

Theme: Dark are the Veils of Death - Candlemass

Christmas has The Mothman Prophecies and Curse of the Cat People. Halloween has the Night of the Demons remake. New Year's Eve has but one kinograph of note, but it's arguably (and not even very arguably) the best silentkino and best Christian film of all time, and unlike most of my Greatest Movies of All Time of the Week, it might actually be the greatest movie of all time.

Big talk from a big bastard, you say? Well let me tell you a tale...

Victor Sjöström directs and stars as David Holm, an abusive, neglectful husband and mean drunk who delights in spurning offers of help from the local Salvation Army sisters and corrupting his peers with his nihilistic bullshit. In one scene, he tells a fellow consumptive (this was a disease in black-and-white times) that he coughs in people's faces to drag a few of them with him on the way out.

I mean this guy was a real jerk.

Silent cinéma is often ridiculed for its stylised performances, but Sjöström's showcase is uniquely compelling, probably because there's no vanity in it: his Holm is alternately loathsome, dastardly, pitiable, wretched, menacing, perversely charming and consumed with maddening sorrow. Windbag critics have made calling films "powerful" a punchline, but The Phantom Carriage merits the superlative and more. Anyway, Holm's degenerate existence is about to be rudely interrupted, for Death has come to him on New Year's Eve.

The ghostly transparency was cutting-edge at the time. 2bh, for what it is, it holds up better than most CGI from circa ever to now.

But while Sjöström's lesser pupil Bergman's later iteration of the Grim Reaper was more-or-less a hammy villain, Carriage's more unsettling vision has a mortal man enslaved to drive the titular cart to and fro nonstop for an interminable, enervating year collecting the souls of the departed until the next New Year's Eve comes round and his last client must become his successor - and it looks as though our miscreant protagonist is next up on the list.

Me working nights, or mornings, or on my day off.

WILL Holm be damned to drive the ghostly carriage? CAN he right the wrongs he's done in life before they take the lives of his beleaguered family? OR will it be the first one again, because I didn't have a third thing? I'm not telling, but the gut-punch denouement will have you searching your own compromised, endangered soul. Skip the forced party, hangover and chlamydia tests; watch The Phantom Carriage before the year is out.