Sinister is five years old now, which can only mean one thing - tomorrow will be the list's first day at school. The uniform has been bought, the packed lunch is being made. Will mummy shed a few tears after dropping us off at the school gates? What will our teacher be like? I hope we don't get bullied... So we have another sinister marriage. Congrats to Colin and Amy. I've never met them, but it's certainly put a smile on my face this morning. That message probably scored a few hundred milisinisters. It's the new way of measuring postings, you see. In this modern scientific age, everything has to be measured and quantified. For example: Beauty is, as we all know, measured in milihelens. Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships, so one milihelen is the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. Computer software used to be measured in milihotmails - a program that breaks down one thousandth as often as hotmail. These days of course, people have realized that that is far too large a unit of measurement, so people prefer the microhotmail. Music quality is measured in repeats. This is the number of times you play a song / album before it leves your CD player (divided by the number of other CDs in a multiplayer machine, where applicable). (More observant readers will have noticed that I am using the old imperial measurement here. The metric equivalent is the milicocker, where a one milicocker song is one thousandth as good as Common People by Pulp. The metric system does have the advantage of being able to give negative scores to Nickelback songs; I leave the choice to the reader.) Happiness is, according to Dave Gorman and others before him, measured in happys; where one happy is equal to the amount of contentness a person gains when you give them a pound coin. Of course, this can be translated into other currencies; an American happy is the amount of contentness given by a dollar bill. This also explains why Australians are so cheerful all the time, because the Aussie dollar is worth bugger all. Now, there are 1331 members on this mailing list, of which a few hundred will be either people with two email addreses subscribed, or people on holiday not reading their mail; so there must be approximately 1000 people looking at each message. So, a one milisinister posting is one that makes one member of the list glad that they read it. The likes of Archel and Trousers can register a couple of hundred milisinisters very easily; I'm happy if I make it into double figures. Of course, that's not all that matters. Saying in a post that you love me and think I'm great might only score on milisinister, but it will give me personally about fifty happys. Big Stu +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+