'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)