Sinister, Today is Sinister's 5th birthday, finally, for real, and I thought day 1826 or something of Sinister could be the day I could break all the list rules and send a short somewhat FAQ-breaking mail. I just wanted to say happy birthday, and don't really know what else to say. I'll ramble for a bit then retire in embarrassed silence, coughing and rearranging flowers on the windowsill. I'm not really up to counting properly (maybe there's a Sinister Statistician chewing a Sinister Pencil somewhere), but I'd take a rough guess that the Sinister archive since August 27th 1997 contains 24,000 messages. Multiplied out by the average number of people who've been on this list, I'd guess that my poor tired little mail servers have sent more than 20 million messages in the course of their 5 year childhood. I'm not sure if when the servers hit 15, get spots and start to hang out drinking cans of cheap lager outside the chippy they'll be so happy to do so (I expect some fairly surly error messages), but I'd like to thank the little darlings for their tireless work. Of course really I'd like to thank YOU all because you all joined the list, made the list, and kept the list going, but I'm a bit embarrassed and don't know how to put it. Just.. you know. My best friends for life have been made through Sinister. Some of you have said the loveliest things, but I've gained more from Sinister than anyone and consider it an incredibly lucky and unlikely thing to happen to me, and maybe a life-saver. All it was was an idle thought on a Thursday afternoon, and not a very original one. You made it all what it is, and you should thank the flowers, not the gardener. I've been pretty much a silent mum retired to bed with valium and vodka, and I'm aware how rubbish I've been. I've been poking away in the background fixing stuff and keeping it going, and Linda's been her own sweet self keeping everything going publically. Things have and continue to be pretty impossible in the world outside Sinister, but I couldn't not mail on day 1826. Happy Birthday Sinister. Honey xxx +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ 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! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+