Hello. I've never heard of the powerpuff girls. When I was wee and, actually, far older than that (if still short), my preference was for stop-animation puppet shows. My favourite was a one-off feature whose name escapes me. It involved a bicycle repair [puppet] man called Sonny Duckworth who lived and worked at the summit of one of those hills whose vertiginousness one only encounters in fantasy (and Meteora and perhaps in China too). Sonny would have a whale of a time riding up and down the road which spiralled around the hill in his motorised tricycle, probably with a pet puppet riding pillion, but his dream was to build a racing car and win the grand prix... It was all the beautifully made model sets that inspired me, and I spent ages with bits of wood, sheets of tin and the wrong type of glue trying to build my own version of the racing car which, after some dastardley and mutley type shenanigans from the opposition, won our puppet and his pet puppet the race. Wars I suppose it is natural at a time of conflict in the world that peoples' passions should be aroused over a wider sphere than that of the immediate territory in dispute. There are, after all, ideas and ideals at stake which affect us all. So, however errenous or poorly informed or lazily reasoned these passions find their expression, I think it might be even more worrying if nobody did care enough to risk having and stating a view. I would think that our mettle is tested not by how successfully we can side-step unpleasantness but in how we attempt resolution because, inevitably and forever, there will be both misunderstandings and conflicts of interest. "At the age of four, [George S. Kaufman's] mother told him that an aunt was coming to visit and asked, 'It wouldn't hurt to be nice to her, would it?' to which he replied, 'That depends on your threshold of pain.'" I am tempted to quote about war from this book I got from the library today called 'the Portable Curmudgeon' but this is no time for flippancy in that regard so I'll quote Oscar Wilde on music instead: "Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf." Then again, Belle and Sebastian weren't around in Oscar's day... have a nice weekend folks #:D Gordon +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the undead 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 +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "peculiarly deranged fanbase" "frighteningly named +-+ +-+ Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+