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

Gmail's spam filter has been getting increasingly overzealous lately. I can forgive it the mailing lists and ads from online shops, but mails from people it knows I have mailed? Individual replies in conversations where I am clearly taking part? And now, in a real masterstroke - the notifications from my Google Alert. Calm down, soldier!

Fun though darkmarcpi's birthday (observed) was last night, mostly the weather this weekend has been encouraging me to catch up on my sleep, and my viewing. Bionic Woman, for instance, which wasn't quite as bad as I'd come to expect, but would still do much better to focus on Katee Sackhoff as the hotter, less whiny bionic woman. The whole "what have you done to me?" bit would work if she'd ended up like Robotman, a human brain trapped in cold, unfeeling metal - but she hasn't, has she? She seems to have no loss of sensation, no downsides to her posthumanity. This being the case, I have much more sympathy for Sarah Corvus' ongoing upgrades, "cutting away everything that's weak".
Final Worlds of Fantasy was pretty good, although as well as the New Weird stuff I would have appreciated a note on how totally genre boundaries are breaking down now, and thank heavens for that - a nod to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, for instance. Oh, and speaking of the New Weird - free Jeff Vandermeer book for download, plus interview. Oh yes, and based on those clips I no longer have any interest in seeing the Hogfather adaptation. How unconvincing was Death?
And Torchwood's 'From Out Of The Rain' was, unsurprisingly, very good. PJ Hammond's previous episode was the one which stopped me abandoning the series, and on this one he'd been given even more leeway to cut loose with his Sapphire & Steel preoccupations. I also like his deft touch here as in 'Small Worlds' with the possibilities of Jack's having been around, and not just in the sexual sense the other writers riff on. Although, something - the lighting, the direction? - left me feeling the episode wasn't quite as eerie as it could have been.

Though I knew Cuba was a vile regime, and that the Manics' support for it was one of their more questionable decisions even during their long, sad decline, I had no idea that until Fidel's brother relaxed the rules just now, DVD players, microwaves and computers were illegal. Of course, that's another breach of faith with communism, given computers were officially denounced as "deviationist bourgeois pseudoscience" by the Soviet Party. Don't start thinking they've joined the civilised world just yet, though - "it is thought air conditioners will not be available until 2009 and toasters until the year after".
A country without toast; the very definition of dystopia.