'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Yes, I should be out enjoying the sun, and everyone else will be so this will go unread, but I'm waiting for the washing machine and I have a week to get down before it slips my mind. A week spent mostly in Devon, where some newly-revealed clay from about 150 million years ago had its first encounter with the mammalian age when I plunged in up to the knees while looking for ammonites, and I went to Jasper Hazelnut's cafe, and saw someone with a hare lip outside ads for Third World children for the first time I can remember, and couldn't really blog on account of a deranged cursor. The train to Devon is lovely, following a stream much of the way and passing fields with cows, and llamas, and in one case horses and chickens grazing contentedly together.

And when the nights drew in, what did I watch?
Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle: good, but perhaps not as good as we all expected after his long absence from our screens. An out comics fan has no place attacking adults for reading Harry Potter, but beyond that, simply filming stand-up feels weird, like watching a straight filming of a stage play.
Given Mad Men's scrupulous sixties style, what the blazes were they doing soundtracking the opening of last week's episode with the Decemberists? Yes, they sound timeless, and it wasn't as if Don Draper was getting into MIA, but it still threw me.
I only watched the first episode of Party Animals, but my mum's a fan and had missed the final episode, so I watched along - an unusual experience for me, who is never normally a casual viewer. The main interest, of course, being to see what the Eleventh Doctor's performance was like. I'm still mainly repeating 'Trust Moffat. Trust Moffat' to myself. Andrea Riseborough and Excelsor from No Heroics were good, though, if basically playing the same characters (the devious slapper and the smug git).
The Tomb of Ligeia is the last and not the best of the Roger Corman/Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe films, in part because one of the major roles is the possibly-possessed cat, and as anyone who's seen Breakfast at Tiffany's will know, cats can't act - they can at best be thrown onto the set by the AD. Typically, the film owes as much to Poe's 'M.Valdemar' as 'Ligeia', but more than anything else Vincent Price seems to be playing James Robinson's Shade, right down to the hat and the glasses. No bad thing, obviously.

"The Pope also warned of a threat to the Catholic Church...from the "growing influence of superstitious forms of religion". Next week; why racism threatens Nazism. Sidious' deranged ramblings about condoms in Africa are, of course, a despicable attempt to take advantage of the vulnerable, but closer to home, last night on Stroud Green Road there was a team, dressed like bouncers, of 'Street Pastors', strolling around at closing time looking for the lost and lonely like so many spiritual date-rapists.
(And with perfect timing, as I finished writing this some more of the scoundrels came to my door. Given I'd discharged my bile here, I didn't even have enough fire left for more than a curt 'No Thank You' and a slammed door)

Just returned from Sidmouth, a thoroughly charming little coastal town from which one can see the wreck of the Napoli. It's actually strangely charming, listing out there; I think they should set up some kind of floating, sloping restaurant. Also, the Devonian cliffs - not only are they a most evocative shade of red, but if you pick up one of the chunks that's fallen off you can crush it with your bare hand. Which, for bonus fun, leaves you with a Red Right Hand!

Now that Girls Aloud have done 'I Predict A Riot', and Lily Allen 'Oh My God', all we need is a decent version of 'Every Day I Love You Less And Less' and the Kaiser Chiefs themselves can be safely edited out of history. 'Cover version? Nah mate, don't know what you're talking about.'

After many interruptions (somewhere around five novels and one biography, plus a few short stories), I finally finished Hugh Kennedy's The Court Of The Caliphs. In many ways the decline of the Abbasids is Gibbon all over again, with Turks taking the role of the Pretorian guard. The caliph who first brought them in, though - what a piece of work!
"When Mutawwakil succeeded to the caliphate, he ordered the abandonment of investigation and discussion and debate and everything which people had enjoyed in the days of Ma'mun, Mu'taism abd Wathiq. He ordered submission and the acceptance of tradition. He ordered the senior scholars to expound traditions of the Prophet and teach the sunna and generally accepted opinions."
He also had some quite gleefully horrific proto-Stalinist purges of his supposed opponents, and instituted the first systematic discrimination against Jews and christians - making them wear yellow.
In more recent islam news: former Jihadi "has no truck with the idea of Islamophobia, which he dismisses as the squeal of an Islamist leadership pleading special favours". If only the left could grasp that simple concept too, eh?