Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Sorry!

Yeah, the first image that came up when I searched for this was a poster instead of the actual album cover, which has the driver running over a ball in the road. On the poster there is no ball, making a nonsense of the album title. Oh well.

Just as my favourite Pink Floyd album is Adam and Eve by Catherine Wheel, so too my favourite Smashing Pumpkins album is Sorry! by, uh, Catherine. No offence to Billy Corgan (who, despite what soybeards will tell you, was probably the 90s' least douchey rockstar), but Sorry! is more consistent than any given Pumpkins album and makes good on the haze-of-noise component of the sound to which the Pumpkins never quite committed to my liking. We can, however, credit the Pumpkins 100% for the template: "Saint" opens with a drum roll just like "Cherub Rock", while "2am" swipes the cinematic string section from "Spaceboy", and the signature squirrelly lead-work that set the Pumpkins leagues apart from the grunge pack can be found throughout (although, again, I prefer Catherine's guitar tone. Sorry!). Moreover, the blend of dazed boyhood whimsy and sneering aggression is no less authentic for being studiously cribbed from the more famous Illinoisans. It's just all so much more interesting than Burt Cobain's one-note whining, it makes you wish more people had ripped off Corgan over Cobain. Catherine is funnier too: the Bee Gees' "Every Christian Lion-Hearted Man Will Show You" is an inspired cover choice. And Catherine weren't afraid to colour outside of the lines either: "Flawless" anticipates Bri'ish shoegazers Slowdive's diversion into blissed-out country (as Mojave 3) by a cool year. Most importantly, their video for "Saint" was the most 90s video of all time.

Catherine released another album, 1996's Hot Saki and Bedtime Stories, which cut back on the noodling and leaned more into red-cup pop-punk house party vibes, but for my money was somewhat weaker overall. Still, Sorry! stands the test of time as one of the mid-90s' finest gems. Give it a spin, asshole!

Jimbo: The Thinking Barbarian - 20. One Way Ticket to Midnight (Part 5)!

Previously...

Theme: From the Arcane Mists of Prophecy - Visigoth

Thus ended the last extant codex on the life and times of Jimbo, the Thinking Barbarian. For sans corroboration, all the latter tales of this era have long been relegated to apocrypha. Who now recounts the song of nomads from the northern tundra? Of the rise and fall of āltepētls on the sun-baked plain, or in the humid jungles of the world? All that was whispered by the elders fades to myth, and some will doubt that such things ever transpired, as the men of those days came to doubt that giants ever reigned over the earth. What became of those who went before us has seemed destined to remain a mystery.

Until now.

For the four winds blow, the sands shift, and the the topmost pinnacles of step pyramids long buried emerge from out the sea of dust, and answers may be found within the ruins long abandoned to the earth. I am weary, and I yearn for that sleep which the living cannot know, but it will have to wait, because I still have work to do.

RANKED: The Top 10 Animals!!!

"That's all very well, Pat", you muse, fresh off yet another binge of my superlative blôggue because it's the only thing worth reading on the internet, "but what exactly are the top ten animals? For I, a plebeian fuck, know only maybe dogs, cats, hamsters, birds - all of which I just call birds - and perhaps goldfish. Tell me more about the wonders of nature". OK.

Indian Giant Squirrel

I once travelled to the wilds of Maharashtra in search of this squirrel, which most of the twenty billion Indians don't seem to be aware exists. Well your humble blogguiste can confirm they're real, and they come in a wild variety of colours and patterns from reddish brown and white to full purple and orange. If I were Indian I would never shut the fuck up about these S-tier squirrels.

Binturong

The second greatest animal looks like a combination of so many other animals it might have been mashed together by an overly broad AI prompt. Often known as a bear-cat, to me it looks more like a raccoon-spidermonkey, complete with prehensile tail. Based on videos where they wrap themselves around people's shoulders, a binturong would be an excellent accessory for a pirate in some period adventurekino set in Indonesia, if anyone made good movies I want to see anymore.

Giant Oarfish

Every source you will find on the giant oarfish spins with a straight face that they may have "been mistaken for" or "inspired tales of" mythical sea serpents, instead of admitting that sea serpents are real and are simply a massive fish instead of a massive snake. Just look at this fucking thing.

Okapi

Once mistaken for a forest zebra due to its patterned hindquarters, the okapi is in fact a closer cousin of the giraffe. I'll take it over either, though, because it's great. The okapi has an extremely long prehensile tongue which it can wrap around a bunch of vegetation and rip it out for eating. If I had this, I would use it to steal ice cream cones from children, and then laugh in their stupid faces as they cried.

Resplendent Quetzal

The most /fa/ civilisation in history, the Aztecs, accessorised with the unparalelled plumage of this alien-looking bird, one of nature's most strikingly weird beauties, like Anya Tayylmao if she were of the avian persuasion.

Peacock Tarantula

Another kino animal almost unknown to its multitudinous countrymen, the peacock tarantula is endemic to a single forest in Andhra Pradesh. A bright blue spider is the most made-up-sounding thing you can imagine, but it's real. Even the most arachnophobic little baby bitch should celebrate this overlooked jewel in God's creation.

Yeti Crab

I gave my thoughts on the yeti crab one million years ago, and they have not changed. What an excellent animal.

Sun Bear

Like the okapi, the sun bear has an unusually long tongue, but unlike the okapi, it is a bear, and uses it to scoop out honey from beehives or some such nonsense. Sun bears may not be the biggest bear, but they're the coolest one. Perhaps had Timothy Treadwell been Sun Man instead of Grizzly Man, he wouldn't have had his face eaten as he screamed. Food for thought!

Superb Fruit Dove

As you can already tell by its name, the superb fruit dove is a cut above lesser fruit doves, with a bright pink patch on its head like "what are you going to do about it asshole?" - an attitude shared by all flight-proficient birds, but seldom with such self-justifying flair.

Rhinoceros Hornbill

All hornbills are cool but for my money, the rhinoceros one is the best. Named for the rhinoesque curvature of its casque, this bird is better than anything you've ever done or heard of in your pointless life. They can give off a majestic call with the amplificatory effect of the casque, and their eyes are colour-coded, with the males' being red and the females' white. I wish you'd go away.

But those are just my thoughts, what are yours? List your favourite animals in the comments and subscribe to EmptyHero on YouTube dot com.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Forbidden Planet!

The Supermanesque title font is an odd fit for the psych-horrorkino that's about to come.

By far the greatest science fiction movie ever made, Forbidden Planet is pointless to discuss without spoilers, so before we get into it, I'll simply note that you can blame it for the uniformed pontificating of Star Trek and the invincible robot shenanigans of Terminator and Chopping Mall.

At this stage, crewmembers were not yet marked for death by shirt colour.

Robby was so popular he had an otherwise unrelated spinoff movie, The Invisible Boy.

But on the spoiler front, Planet cuts much deeper than you might infer from its frivolous legacy. Ostensibly an extremely loose reworking of Shakespeare's The Tempest, Planet abstracts from the personal to depict an archetypal tragedy at the level of an entire civilisation. Leslie Nielsen's spaceship crew touch down on the Forbidden Planet (1956) to investigate the strange case of Dr Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), survivor of the lost ship Bellerophon who has since made a home there with his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis).

I want to live in Casa Morbius and freak out my guests with my reinforced bunker shutters.

Morbius has been studying the fate of the planet's former inhabitants, the ancient race of ayylmaos known as the Krell, whose sudden disappearance left intact a raft of kino sets augmented by audacious matte paintings whose monumental scale feels realer and vaster than whatever nonsense slopscapes CGI has wrought.

The emptiness left by the absence of the Krell themselves is palpable and haunting.

Of course, if you've seen the film you know the secret: the Krell had managed to repress their most primal unconscious drives until their technology hit a point of singularity at which they were unwittingly released and wiped everything out in a single Event Horizon style blood orgy of annihilation. The Jungian resonance of the monster from within is subtly foreshadowed (lol) throughout the picture.

"Flying saucer" spacecraft invading Earth were already a venerable cliché by this point. Here, the saucer lands on an alien world and discharges a human crew: a clue that the monster is us in the very opening of the picture.

The bright red, curved claw of the id monster looks a lot like the comet logo on the crewmen's hats, which are of course positioned right over the brain. JuSt A cOiNcIdEnCe though!

OK, the position of the claw cast probably wasn't intended as a phallic symbol, but when your material is the unconscious mind, associations kind of form themselves, don't they?

The Krell also recall the civilisation described in Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness, who were wiped out by their mindless shoggoth slaves. And of course Warhammer's warp realm, moulded by the unconscious emotions of the living inhabitants of the material world, owes everything to Forbidden Planet's monsters from the id.

tHe EfFeCtS aRe DaTed! Yeah but imagine this fucking thing coming at you halfway into a night shift.

Bellerophon was a hero in ancient Greek mythology who slew the chimaera but was eventually destroyed for his hubris in attempting to fly to Olympus on Pegasus, the winged horse; to transcend the human condition in defiance of his remit in the celestial hierarchy. At the very juncture in our history when we aspire toward a Krell-mode point of total repression and technocorporate singularity, the savage forces we deny are real threaten to bubble over and drown everything in slaughter. Now, more than ever, I bid you remember the fate of Yugoslavia, and the partition of India, and the horror that has overwhelmed the Middle East; and to recall the archetype of Babel, and why the story was set down in ancient times.