Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Dollar for the Dead!

Theme: Wild West - Lissie

Exhibit Z in the increasingly slam-dunk case that just doing the clichés properly is always better than trying to be clever, 1999's forgotten Dollar for the Dead just takes the spaghetti western formula and delivers like Santa on meth. Emilio Estevez (The Breakfast Club) plays "Cowboy", which is scarcely any better than "Stranger" from Any Gun Can Play, but what are you gonna do?

Sometimes I try sitting like this all mysterious not talking to anyone. No one's picked a fight with me yet, I'm sure because they're too afraid.

Cowboy teams up with Dooley (William Forsythe), a Confederate veteran with one piece of a puzzle that will lead them to a stash of gold. Dooley is affable, Cowboy terse. Along the way they fight redlegs led by Mike from Breaking Bad, a hulking menace with a mysteeerious beef with Cowboy, and a Mexican general or colonel or something, IDK. The action is of the coolmaxxed variety: Cowboy does things like drop a shot glass, gun down his enemy, and catch it before it hits the floor - the sort of thing they try to have characters do in Disney Starwars but actually cool instead of ear gages and vape shops """"""""""""""""cool"""""""""""""""".

The entire genre of parody is cope for noone being this cool IRL.

Another gag you may recognise has him spin round in a circle shooting bullets through the floor until a whole circle of floor falls out from under him, delivering him handily from the antagonists rushing after him. Kate Beckinsale later copied this move in her mallcore goth flick Underworld.

"Weee" - Cowboy.

I don't actually know if it originated here or whether Dollar also ripped it off from somewhere, but if I were to come up with something that expressed the intersection of cartoon logic and cool, it would most likely be something like that (maybe dumber). It would be kind of funny if it turned out he shot dozens of random civilians through the floorboards, but you know he didn't because the world warps to accommodate you when you're a cool gunslinger instead of a real-life fuckup.

Note that Dollar shares the old Castellari motif of sticking the camera between, atop or underneath things ADHDly, for extra authenticity.

There's a lot of fun dialogue in the movie, too, which is nice because noone writes good dialogue anymore. I tried to think of a good line from a movie made this decade, and I couldn't, even though I tried as hard as I could possibly be bothered to. This wasn't very hard, and that's my point: they're just not good enough to try.  Watch Dollar for the Dead, practice quick-drawing finger-guns in front of your mirror, wear a cowboy hat, have autism, and, as ever, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

RANKED: History's Greatest Heroes!!! OF ALL TIEM!!!

Theme: Deeds of Glory - Saxon

I know real life can be depressing: your job sucks, you can't get a date, and they keep trying to reboot the DC Comics movie #universe. But life has always sucked, and there have still been heroes who have risen from the crowd of NPCs to give Satan a swirly in based defiance of despair. These are history's greatest whitepills: indelible proof that, while good is always on the backfoot, it has triumphed over evil in the past, and will again before the end.

Pope Leo the Great

Uhhh based?

5th Century Pope Leo I became the only memorable Pope by telling Attila the Hun to fuck off to his face, which the steppe warlord actually did. You might think Leo had reason to feel safe as his esteemed office conferred diplomatic immunity, but you'd be characteristically wrong because the average lifespan of premodern Popes was about 15 seconds, everyone murdered them left and right for any reason or no reason at all, and Attila was such a beast that his name is still synonymous with rampant slaughter to this day, despite the fact that you have no idea who the Huns were, or what else was going on in the 5th Century, or where the little man in the canoe is hiding. The equivalent today would be if the current Pope Leo barged into Blumpf's bedroom, kicked Netanyahu fatally in the cloaca, forced a complete and unconditional IDF surrender, and let's say Ian Miles Cheong died too, somehow.

Gabriele Tadino

Seasoned military engineer Tadino da Martinengo defied his Venetian masters and ditched his governership of the isle of Candia to join the Knights Hospitaller on Rhodes in their defence of the island against the vast forces of Suleiman the Lawgiver. Using a percussive device fitted with bells to alert him to tremors caused by Ottoman mining operations, Tadino was able to sabotage many of their efforts with his own brilliant countermining operation, like if you played Worms Armageddon with the drill- and blowtorch-heavy weapons set, but instead of a fat manchild you were the biggest Chad of renaissance Italy.

Chadino reps his Hospitaller drip (1538, colourised).

When a Turkish mining effort did succeed, its impact was still largely mitigated by Tadino's venting system, which allowed the walls of the Knights' fortress to release much of the shock of the explosion and remain standing with the based impudence of an internet anon who still says gay and retarded. Tadino even lost an eye to enemy arquebus fire and simply replied with the full lyrics of "So What" by the Anti Nowhere League, because his whole life long he never even learned how to give a fuck. A siege that should have been a cakewalk for the Ottomans ended with them beaten down to letting the whole Order leave with all their stuff, whereupon they simply set up their entire operation again on Malta, which held against Suleiman's increasingly buttmad efforts well into the sultan's overly beturbaned seventies.

John Rabe

Sometimes piano teacher physiognomy belies a heart of gold and steel.

German businessman John Rabe took it upon himself to establish the Nanking Safe Zone in the midst of the Sino-Japanese war's most notorious episode, for which he has been credited with saving over 200,000 people, just because it was the right thing to do. Rabe was a humble Christian man who enjoyed gardening and classical music, and received nothing but trouble for his efforts: after w*rld w*r 2 ended, he lived in obscurity and often relied upon donations from grateful Chinese. The allies also made him undergo Denatzification brainwashing because, of course, he was a card-carrying NSDAP member, and an immeasurably better man than you or anyone you know will ever be, because, of course, your entire Manichaean Marvel movie worldview is complete bullshit.

Leonhard Seppala & Friends

If straight men ran fashion, scarfs made from live sled dogs would be mandatory winter apparel.

In 1925 there was an epidemic of diphtheria in Nome, and only 20 men could get the serum necessary to counteract it there on time. 20 men and 150 dogs, that is to say, since this implausibly cinematic race against time was achieved via sled dog relay. Most famous among the Chads who pulled this off was Leonhard Seppala, a Norwegian Kven famed for his expertise in sled racing. Per Mushing.com, to "save valuable time Leonhard risked the 20 mile sea ice crossing between Cap Denbigh and Point Dexter in a blinding blizzard". The same article cites temperatures as low as -64° for other participants, to say nothing of sleds flipped over by high winds and dogs suffering from "frozen groin". I think I had that once around the time they fired me from the morgue.

Francisco Franco

ywn rock drip this hard. You've been MOGGED, son.

I'm going to take the TWISTED and DEMENTED position that the people in the Spanish civil war who raped nuns, crucified priests and buried people alive were the bad guys. Historians can debate ad nauseum on whether the election that would have delivered Spain into the dominion of these drooling psychopaths was rigged in the conventional sense, but the leftists' habit of dragging conservative members of the Spanish parliament out into the street and murdering them also counts as de facto election rigging, because (stay with me here) you can't actually vote to elect someone once they've been murdered by a communist. Generalissimo Franco was the only rightist to win anything in the 20th Century and, wildly not coincidentally, Spain was the only European country to be better off after WW2 than before it, perhaps because he had the good sense not to participate in it. Few men are objectively chosen by God to save their people from the most rancid and cartoonish evil imaginable, but our Frank was.

Timur

"Wait, surely not?" you say, in a posh Bri'ish accent, monocle falling from your face in surprise.

Pictured: you.

Sure, the warlord best known for building pyramids out of his enemies'/victims'/anyone's decapitated heads might seem an odd fit for inclusion in a heroes' list, but, as J.R.R.R.R.R.R.R. Tolkien once said, sometimes evil can do good that it does not intend. Around the turn of the 15th Century, Sultan Bayezid I laid siege to the crumbling defences of Constantinople. Bayezid was a repulsive, brutal tyrant and colossal pedophile, so about average for an Ottoman ruler, but he was winning hands-down, until he made the historic error of taxing one of Timur's vassals. Timur was probably the only more powerful ruler in the world at the time and one of history's most brilliant generals, and had a much bigger army, so this was about as wise as Bayezid's habit of sending him insulting letters had been. Timur crushed Bayezid's army and captured him, saving Christendom for another decade, much to his own annoyance upon later reflection, which just makes it funnier.

Some accounts say Bayezid was treated well, but this is somewhat unconvincing because he died less than a year into his captivity. More persuasive and hilarious accounts suggest Timur literally kept him in a cage and cucked him to death by fucking his way through Bayezid's entire harem in front of him until Bayezid got an aneurysm and croaked, whereupon he went straight to hell where the same thing has been happening to him on endless repeat to this very day.

Taylor Root

Random hiker Root was fortunate enough to catch on his GoPro camera his timely rescue of a lady hanging off a cliff, being held only by her daughter, who had one arm. While this sounds like the most made-up shit since Jussie Smollett's 3am MAGA Country ordeal, the footage proves it, unless enough people in the comments post "FAKE AND GAY"*. Root's story prompts us to adopt the Rodin's Thinker pose and contemplate the large degree to which heroism is just being in the right place at the right time. After all, wouldn't you feel kind of awkward if you just kept walking despite the amputee's increasingly desperate pleas for help? I mean I wouldn't, but I'm Pat Bastard. NONETHELESS, Root did the right thing, unless the lady he saved was secretly a big murderer or some shit, which is what I would assume, but I'm Pat Bastard.

Vlad III

The hero we need.

My regulars will know that on this δ╝◙♀ we stan a spooky king, but did you know the historical Dracula was taken as a boy to serve the arch-nonce Mehmet II in his janissary corps, while his brother Radu became the loathsome sultan's personal rape-slave? Frankly, this origin story would have more than justified young Vlad becoming the comic book villain as which he's been immortalised, but instead he returned to the throne of Wallachia with only the most practical, Machiavellian, yet righteous plans in mind to cast off the Ottoman yoke, running an underdog campaign so effective that he could only be undone by the incessant treachery of his fat pig boyars and Matthias Corvinus.

But Vlad's domestic policies were as autismally righteous as his warfare: it is said that his impalement of criminal scumbags was so effective that he could leave a golden cup at a well and no one would dare take it. Another time, a merchant petitioned him to recover goods stolen from him. Vlad tracked down the thieves, mounted them on stakes, then had the merchant count out all the coin he had returned to him. Vlad had slipped an extra coin into the hoard to test the man, who luckily or wisely passed by reporting the extra coin as handed to him in error, at which point Vlad commended him and told him that he would have shared the fate of the initial thieves had he omitted to report the discrepancy. He then spent the rest of his evening drawing Sonic and playing with his train set. Based and wholesome!

Roman von Ungern-Sternberg

It is a little known fact Charles Manson ripped off his stare from my boi right here. 

History has known two great Mongolboos: myself and the good Baron von Ungern-Sternberg. In the 1910s, a lot of people listened to a 5'6" manlet named Lenin who looked like Satan and promised utopia could be achieved by murdering the Tsar and his family and anyone who supported them, springing all the rapists and murderers from prisons and arming them, and then starving to death. Anyone who could read knew this had already been tried in something called the French Revolution, but, fortunately for Satan, noone bothered to read actual history back then either, so the Red faction won, mostly by using terror tactics like picking 100 randos from a village and hanging them to scare the rest into submission, boiling people's hands and peeling the skin off and nailing it to the wall, and having rats eat their way through people's stomachs. Today, very sophisticated people will tell you that these guys were just idealists whose ideas need a little more fine-tuning.

It might well be imagined that anyone who survived this apocalyptic horror would have given in to despair and so ended, but, after much guerrilla-style service doing Jesse James tier train raids, the good Baron found a whole new lease of life fighting the Chinese in Mongolia, where he restored the Bogd Khan and was praised by the local people as a reincarnation of Chinggis Khan himself, from whom he had always very dubiously claimed descent by way of Temujin's grandson, Batu Khan. His supporters eventually got tired of his madladdery and abandoned him to be picked up by Reds, who executed him, but Outer Mongolia remains an independent nation to this day. Like Vlad, horror stories of the Baron's antics told by his seething h8rs proliferate unto the present, but we will always love him for the inspiration he provides: if at first you don't succeed, you can just go to Mongolia and become Khan.

Alfonso VIII of Castile

The face of one who's seen some shit.

The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 is perhaps the most celebrated and pivotal in the long saga of the Reconquista, marking the beginning of an ignominious end for the Almohad invaders. For the king of Castile, it also marked the most glorious redemption arc in all of history. This is on account of Alfonso VIII having fucked up catastrophically and suffered a crushing defeat at Alarcos in 1195. Whereas the Almohad force was formidable, it's Alfonso's rash tactics that tend to carry the blame for the disaster. This is important because human error is inevitable in all walks of life, including where the stakes are highest, and the true test of a man is whether he folds into it's-so-overism or picks himself up off the ground and skullfucks evil with a thousandfold replenished zeal. The Reconquista would take some 280 more years to complete, but the king's redemptive victory was a tipping point from which the occupation forces would never recover. Even with a coalition of the Spanish kingdoms at his back, Alfonso doubted to the last that he could win, but he did what he had to anyway. No matter how badly you've fucked up, walk it off, because the best is yet to come.

*If 10% of the comments on any video read thus, it's legally classified as fake and gay per statute 5318008 of the Bastard Code.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: We're Outta Here!

Theme: R.A.M.O.N.E.S - Ramones ft. Lemmy (the narrator from Tromeo & Juliet)

Actual punks pass righteous judgement on the posersphere.

The first Ramones album I ever heard was the live album of their final show. When I went back and heard their OG studio recordings, they seemed way too slow. This is because the Ramones kept playing faster as they went along, with the result that by the end they less resembled that orangutan trying to hammer nails in that one video you've all seen and more resembled Travis the chimp on the fateful day of his gamer uprising.

This is because Johnny, the reactionary chud who invented the punk guitar style*, also forced the band to wear their signature uniform leather jackets and bent his efforts toward endlessly refining and perfecting the sound now most ripped off in all pop music history. I know it's fashionable to pretend prog was actually gr8 and punk ruined everything, but you're wrong on that, and the posers who immediately co-opted punk are right: two-minute songs that sound like Dennis Hopper wilding on that log with a chainsaw are the Platonic form of rock, and everything good about prog found its correct expression in the metal of Crimson Glory, Queensrÿche and Megadeth.

But as much as the sound saved rock from disappearing up its ass completely, it would never have transcended gimmickry without the songwriting, which is funnier than any imitator to this day. The greatest lyric ever written isn't "Scaramouche, can you do the fandango" (???) or "I'll see you on the dark side of the moon"; it's "now I guess I'll have to tell 'em/that I got no cerebellum" from DDT abuse cautionary tale "Teenage Lobotomy". A thousand monkeys on typewriters would replicate the works of Shakeƒpeare twenty times before they'd write something that good. Likewise, "Cretin Hop" consigns your attempts and mine at political incorrectness to the tryhard penalty box of shame. But it's not just the household-name hits that are on parade here: hardcore dabble "Wart Hog" makes the cut along with "The Crusher" from Dee Dee's epochally bizarre rap album. The most inexplicable choice is to end the set (and their career as a band) with a cover of "Any Way You Want It", but it wouldn't be the Ramones if they didn't throw a questionable curveball at the moment least expected.

It is a testament to their singularity that the most ripped-off band in history's like will somehow simultaneously never be beheld again on Earth. Everyone gets one time-machine gig to attend, and this one would be mine, after I was done giving thalidomide to famous boxers' mothers and planting a rotary telephone in Ötzi the ice man's cave.

*We will entertain no hipster ackshyouwallys of any kind.

Cool Thing: Mācuahuitls!

Theme: Axolotl - The Veils

I borrowed the background from my own WIP comic page. The actual māc is from tochtliwear.com.

Fatsoes with beard strips artfully covering their double chins have argued since the internet began about which sword is teh epicest. Typically their conclusion is the Japanese katana (because they're weebs) or some manner of rapier, but they're all wrong because swords, like fedoras and trenchcoats, are only good for looking cool, thus owned exclusively by those in deficit of cool, thus making them lame (I have a trenchcoat, but I'm the exception. Shut up).

But if having weapons from the Middle Ages were still actually cool, the most aesthetic of them all would be one that's not very good at all, actually. For the Aztecs, that most /fa/ of civilisations, never quite figured out things like steel or iron or bronze, but had a lot of shiny black volcanic rock lying around, which they creatively jammed into the edges of flat wooden clubs, which made for the best-looking weapon of the day. Sure, the mācuahuitl was no match for Spanish steel, on account of it had all the deft manoeuvrability of a cricket bat, but its obsidian blades were ridiculously sharp, to the point that Spanish eyewitness accounts plausibly claimed it could behead an horse with one stroke, raising the whimsical thought that Tom used one offscreen in The Godfather.

Since the purpose of Mesoamerican warfare was moreso to capture victims for sacrifice than to kill them upon the field of battle (in fact Mexica-Tenochtitlán would frequently declare a xōchiyāōyōtl, or flower war, with some hapless neighbour for this express purpose. They did this so often with Tlaxcala that it largely motivated the Tlaxcalteca to team up with the Spanish when they could simply have killed them following La Noche Triste), you only gained points toward ennoblement as a cuāuhocēlōtl if you brought your opponents back alive. This was much more challenging than actually merking them with your equine-decapitatory big club of glass blades, meaning, paradoxically, that the culture who fought without metallurgic weapons practiced the most metal form of combat.

Cool Thing: Tsaatan Reindeer Riders!

Theme: Run Run Rudolph - Chuck Berry

POV: you just said hApPy HoLiDaYs in a Merry Christmas neighbourhood.

The Tsaatan are a nomadic Tuvan people found in best country, Mongolia. While most people ride horses or the bus, the Tsaatan ride reindeers, which is more cool. So central are their lil Christmassy bros to their lifestyle that Tsaatan means "the people with reindeer", and they move their ortzes (tents) around the oft-frozen taiga with their herds, milking them, trading their antlers (doan't worry; they grow back), and sometimes ritually merking one to drink its blood to give them warrior strength, which seems somewhat pointless because there are only 200 of them in the entire world, they live in the harshest wilderness imaginable, and absolutely noone cares to trek out there in -40ºC temperatures to pick a fight with them, unless perhaps cable hasbara tells boomers they're building a reindeer-powered nuke.

The Tsaatan speak Dukhan and practice an ancient shamanic religion requiring them to pick a sacred reindeer from among the herd whose antlers are never amputated. To ensure this reindeer brings good fortune, they place a bowl of milk on its back and walk it around an ortz three times. If the bowl falls off to land facing upright toward the sky, it's an auspicious choice of reindeer. If this just keeps never happening, IDK what they do; you don't have a lot of options in this tough environment, and milk doesn't grow on trees. Incidentally, milk is extremely important throughout Mongolia, with airag, the fermented milk of mares, being the country's signature beverage. All Mongolians are lactose intolerant, but they just drink it constantly anyway, because they're also Chads. Don't let your whiny kid tell you xir lactose intolerance means xe can't possibly deign to stomach a normal diet; if it's good enough for men of the Altan Urag, it's good enough for xim.

In summary: the Tsaatan are cool, Mongolia is cool, I'm a Mongolboo, there hasn't been a good movie released this decade, listen to Hanggai and the Hu, practice khoomei and sygyt, and I'll see you next time with another Cool Thing or B-movie writeup or something; IDK.

RANKED: Top Ten Moar Animals that are Cool!

Theme: Zoo - Swallow

Another Tuesday finds me characteristically unprepared with a b└ögg post, so, whilst I compose my thoughts like Beethoven at his Moog synthesizer, here's another turbo-low-effort listicle about animals.

Tentacled Snake

Noone knows why Vietnam's tentacled snake has tentacles, nor why what look more like the rhinophores on a good sea slug are considered tentacles at all. By that logic I might well call myself a tentacled bloğğer, but let's not go there. What is of more direct import is that it exists, and coolly trips up and down its watery abode looking for things to eat. Perhaps the real reason it has those things is that it's an metalhead throwing the \m/.

Bat-Eared Fox

Both adorable and deadly, if you're something very small, like a termite, because, honestly, these things are about the size of a comical terrier. One thing I've been told about the bat-eared fox is that they're apparently chill with porcupines, unlike the fabled honey badger, which will maul and eat the spiny bros despite the cost in perforation this inevitably incurs. Bat-eared foxes are found in southern and eastern parts of Africa, where they are every bit as cool as rhinos and other megafauna that are better-known.

Wilson's Bird of Paradise

There are many bird of paradises to be found in the mysterious lands of Indonesia, but no one's ever been there or knows anything about it, despite its having a population of 427 thousand billion people. Wilson's one has this cool tail that curls inwards, perhaps to mimic the impression of a young lady doing her mandatory-under-Pat-Bastard's-dictatorship regime of squats.

Mandarin Duck

Imagine, if you will, a species so alien to the human experience that the men were cool to look at and the women visually dull. The mandarin duck is just such a species, with the male mogging the shit out of his lady friend, which must drive her insane. Fortunately, the male deigns to date down instead of being an homosexual, for which, let's be honest, we couldn't blame him (no homo, no furfag, no bird-botherer). Plumage of his caliber is so patrician that it scarcely seems of this world, but God put him there just to make us happy, and that is an encouraging thought.

Painted Bat

As orange is the colour of Halloween, and bats its patron animal, you might think the bright orange painted bat would be well-known, except to think that you'd have to know about it, but now you do, so now you do.

Golden Poison Dart Frog

In the crowded field of cool frogs, one stands out both by virtue of being bright yellow and also adorably small. The fact these things will kill you deader than a schoolgirl in a country Laura Loomer doesn't like puts them quite strictly in the look-don't-touch category beside roadkill and women who like Beyonce.

Bright Blue Stick Insect

Named achrioptera manga after Japanese cartoons, the bright blue stick insect misses the point of looking like a stick by being bright blue, but by the same token lands a slot on my prestigious list, because bright blue things are cool. When I was but a mere changeling, I had pet stick insects purchased from a classmate at the Yookay workhouse I attended, but they all managed to drown themselves in the water dish provided. Given that the noble stick insect lives in the fucking rainforest, and is therefore conversant with the concept of H2O, I can only conclude this uniform demise was the result of suicide.

Oblong Winged Katydid

What did Katy do? Science may never know, but all katydids resemble leaves, so one theory is that she made like a tree. The oblong winged katydid, however, katydid it wrong by being bright pink (sometimes yellow). Like the above mentioned stick insect, their survival chances' loss is our gain, although I'm sure their predators probably don't see the same colour spectrum we do, so it might not make any difference.

Nilgai

Most people think of antelopes as dainty, springy, sprightly little things. Not so the nilgai, which is ripped af as fuck and will murder you with its roid rage should you get too close. This Indian antelope has never once skipped neck day and is hunted in routine culls because it's been known to total vehicles that presume to trespass on its rightful territory, like the roads. I saw one out the window on an Indian road trip once, but I didn't get a picture, so I'm free to wax one-that-got-away about its brutish physique, even though it was actually fairly medium.

Gibbons

Normally I'd be more specific, but all gibbons are cool. Their exclusion from the title "great ape" strikes me as a travesty of justice, with their funny long hands and arms and ghostly, mournful whooping. Yet none can deny them the epithet "great troll", as evidenced by this four-minute clip of one fucking with tigers for the lulz. Even the humans with the densest scrotum-stretchers in the human kingdom will typically do so only with a steel cage for protection, but the gibbon just does it au naturel for the love of the game, making it the GOAT troll out of all the fauna on the Earth.

"LOL YOLO" - A. Gibbon.

Join me next week for more haphazard filler straight off the top of my head!!!

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Medusa!

Theme: Challenge - A.R. Kane

M O O D

Having been on my goth bullshit lately, you'll permit me to wax fanboy on my favourite 4AD art-goth record outside the hallowed discography of This Mortal Coil: Clan of Xymox's atmospheric odyssey Medusa. While Bauhaus took malevolent glee in the the act of post-punk rampage and the Sisters of Mercy brought majestic grandiosity to would-be stadium anthems (they weren't above having Jim Steinman pen their monster hits), it's the bummed-out voice of Ronny Moorings that's largely defined the tonal footprint of the dark scene in the wider culture, as evidenced by the fact his brand of languid, self-searching intonations better matches the loving pastiche of Peter Steele in Type O Negative.

But Clan of Xymox were scarcely a rock band at all; their goth was always of the trippy, dancey darkwave variety, and never more dramatic or more dreamlike than when it dripped with 4AD's trademark production shimmer. Medusa was so definitive a document of this ineffably cool style that it's no wonder they switched up genres altogether afterward, taking a multi-album detour into synthpop as just Xymox. Sure, the purist might well call it sElLiNg OuT, but at the very least Twist of Shadows is really good synthpop, and tracks like "In a City" still maintain much of the fatalistic melancholy that's as core to the project as snarling aggression is to Megadeth or wide-eyed exultation is to Catherine Wheel. I hope ol' Ronny isn't as perpetually bummed as he invariably sounds, and if he isn't I can but salute his four-plus-decades-long commitment to the bit.

Much as I love a good playlist, I remain a firm proponent of the album format and the integrality of proper sequencing, and Medusa is as flawlessly sequenced as the Mortal Coil records, ebbing and flowing from one morose shade of black to another with such effortless mastery of macro-dynamics that each track, verse or sonic interjection seems a narrative twist and/or turn, where lesser acts with less sophisticated production would blur into a sludge. Like TMC, they make liberal use of instrumental tracks to segue between arias. The heightened angst of "Agonised by Love" recedes like a tide into the sullen, sombre, yet serene "Masquerade", and there's a strident, cathartic climax in "After the Call"* before the anguished closer "Backdoor" drags us back down the sonic labyrinth, with its plaintive lament, "Tomorrow I will be here again/Tomorrow I will be here again/Be here again". By the number of spins I've given this immortal disc, this panicked prophecy was every bit as much a promise. Listen to Medusa (in the dark, alone).

*Pieter Nooten did another version on his solo album which is also worth a listen; less bombastic march, more calm reflective prayer. They're both so good I can't pick one over the other.

Cool Thing: Jenny Hanivers!

Theme: Sunk Costs - Jenny Haniver

"Ayy lmao" - J. Haniver

In the 16th Century strange creatures from the deep began to circulate, doubtless portending the rise of Cthulhu from his house in sunken Rl'yeh. Some were dubbed mermaids, others monk-fishes or sea-devils. WAS this a newfound cryptid, like El Chupacabra, the fabled goat-sucker of Old Méjico, or Consuelo Delores Marìa Xōchītl Velasquez, the contemporary donkey-sucker of contemporary Méjico?

At frist i was liek

But then

I lol'd.

NO!!! For instead they were elaborately carved from the desiccated carcasses of skates and rays, granting them the skeletal appearance of a Wicked star. Eat a sandwich, Ariana!

Your friend and mine, Salvador Dalí, poses with Ms Haniver.

Although Jenny Hanivers are technically fake and gay, at least they were creative, and becalmed sailors can't have had much else to do besides say arr and go insane. Bring back Jenny Hanivers!

"I can be yuor angle or yuor devil" - J. Haniver

Cool Thing: the Deer Stones of Mongolia!

Theme: Saihan Mongol Mori - Hanggai

*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.

RANKED: The Top Ten Moar Animals! (Nudibranch Edition!)!

Theme: The Mollusk - Ween

It's that time of year again: Tuesday.

Spanish Shawl Nudibranch

Nudibranchs are psychedelic-looking sea-slugs that eat small cnidarians, absorb their stinging nematocysts, and repurpose them for their own defence against larger predators, sort of like you with donuts, minus the last part. The Spanish shawl one is purple and orange, and kind of looks like Sanic the Hedge Hog OC.

Blue Sea Dragon Nudibranch

The blue sea dragon is also a nudibranch, despite looking nothing like the Spanish shawl. This is a recurring theme with nudibranchs, which come in many shapes and sizes, from four millimeters to 23 inches long, according to the summary of the first result on Bing. They are also found all around the world where there are oceans. Nudibranchs can't swim for shit and simply drift where the tide takes them.

Anna's Chromodoris (Nudibranch)

This one is blue and yellow. The orange things on the front are rhinophores, while those on the back are gills, or vice versa; idk.

This one

Found off Dahab in the Red Sea, this one looks really cool. IDK what it's called though.

Opalescent Nudibranch

This one has perhaps the coolest name of any animal. I want to use "opalescent" more in conversation, but I'm not sure how. Enter the opalescent nudibranch; problem solved.

Green one

Some nudibranchs can photosynthesise. Note that this is in stark contrast to you, who can't do anything right.

Blue Velvet Nudibranch

No doubt named for David Lunch's kino of the same name, the Blue Velvet (1986) nudibranch also appears to be impossible to photograph in focus. I went through like three pictures of this thing on Bing Dot Com Image Search and it's a point of principle I never click a fourth.

Hopkin's Rose Nudibranch

This one makes the cut in part because it doesn't even look like a sea slug at all, looking more like an anemone unless you catch it at the right angle to spot the rhinophores. Hopkin must have been so stoked to coin this rose, holy shit bro.

Variable Neon

This lil bro kind of reminds me of the dragon on the Welsh flag, which is by far the best flag and prompts the question: why don't more flags have cool dragons on them instead of lame blank slabs of colour like some bullshit you'd go see in the Tate Modern?

Vexillology is a solved game, you can all go home.

Cole's Nudibranch

All nudibranchs are hermaphroditic. Some have been known to eat one another. Most live in shallower waters but deep sea ones have been known. I hope you've learned something today, because you sure haven't reading my takes on B movies and shooting whipped cream directly down your gullet.