My lovelies: I'm spending all my recent days and nights in a grey and beige office. The scurrying of sinister little feet through my inbox manages, every once in a while, to break the trancelike state of exhausted delirium in which I find myself working. For which I thank you. I've recently ordered a whole bunch of belle and sebastian related rubbish to clutter the place up with, so maybe that'll help make things a little more human around here. I've saved this post up for a while, after failing the Dalai Lama/Cliff Richard test a couple of times in recent weeks, so it may be a little on the hefty side. I'll provide a packed lunch with the next one, I promise. SHOULD B&S BE A POP GROUP? Well, frankly, it doesn't bother me too much. I think that pandering to wider tastes is often the beginning of the end, but it usually seems to happen when songwriters in bands run out of things to write songs about, other than being songwriters in bands. I don't see too much danger of that happening in this case. You might disagree: please do so, I don't know very much. I can't imagine that any sort of artist wouldn't want to find their audience. If they're able to go on doing what they're doing, and reach increasingly more people, it'd be churlish to grizzle. Also, I can't help but warm to the people in this particular band, and want them to do well for themselves out of it. I'd actually quite like to see some 'good old fashioned rock 'n' roll excess' from them, in the later years: massive weight gain, trashed hotel rooms, legions of illegitimate children all over the world, brandy balloons full of brown m&m's, that sort of thing. Stuart may love his car, but I'll bet he's at least once wondered what it would look like at the bottom of a hotel pool. Or maybe not. B&S DAY Well, in the absence of either any free time, or any likeminded souls in my little neck of the woods, I spent it here in the office, intermittently working, but also skiving off in #sinister quite a bit. I'll do better next year, I promise. Oh, and seeing a couple more picnic photos recently, I'm reminded once again that we may be a "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans", but we are, at the very least, a damned handsome "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans". Which makes all the difference. ISOBEL'S ARSE PT TWO I said something about Isobel's arse in my last post, and thanks very much to the kind listee who sent me a picture of it. I think Isobel's quite lovely, and I like her voice, even at its most hamsterish. About her arse, though, I've no further comment to make. X-RAY SPECS I was just thinking about these the other day. They advertised them on the back of children's comic books (do they still? I haven't seen one for a while), as something you could send money in and buy. I'm fairly certain that they didn't work. How on earth is that an acceptable thing to do? I think that it's more disillusioning than father christmas, the easter bunny and the tooth fairy all rolled into the one great big, jolly, hopping, frilly-skirted disappointment. And you send money! Children's money, that should rightly be used to pay for bullies' lunches, or to get older siblings to buy cigarettes for them! Someone, somewhere, will be living off the money sent in by innocent children, in the rather sweet and naive belief that they'll get a chance to see other people's private bits. Moral outrage isn't my strong suit, but I think that this happens to be the worst thing that anyone's done in the world, ever. JUST QUICKLY 'That Sunday feeling' = the sort of slowly escalating panic associated with a long-overlooked task that you just can't put your finger on. Ghastly. Winter = great. Scarves, soup and stout. And snuggling, for the lucky ones. Not me. But that means that I get an extra stout. Girls in glasses = phwoar. Toast = vegemite, obviously. Anything else is a waste of good bread. *ducks* Ken Chu = the new black, it seems. He goes with anything. Actually, that sounds far ruder than I intended, but I'll leave it as is. That should just about cover it. Stay deliciously crunch-tastic. Bulk love, -Stankin' (call me Werther). _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ 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 +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+