Hi I'm new to this mailing list, this is my first post, and I hope I don't make a fool of myself. I'm Agnes, I work on a sheep farm and my favourite hobbies are joinery, eating yoghurt and humming. Oh I can't do this, hello everyone, I hope you don't mind me sticking my head in. I'm still around, honestly, but very much part of the wallpaper just now (think of me as a nice "flock"), and pretty unresponsive unless you poke me very hard with a stick, due to continuing illness, which really has gone on too long now, don't you think? But I'm doing list mummy things in the background, albeit slowly, so don't think you're all orphans, and I'll bring home some iced buns for tea, I promise. Please only mail me administration type requests if you've been through all the suggestions on the WWW site and are desperate and crying your eyes out. All of you who have mailed me other nicer things, gosh, please don't think I'm an ungrateful tart if I haven't replied yet, and please don't give up on me, as I never chuck out an email that needs a reply, even if we might all be living in space by the time you get one. You all seemed to have rallied round, post-Christmas, and made this place a much warmer, cosy and stimulating place to be. Why is this, were you all playing a trick on me? I could of course be wrong as I've only read a small number of the emails so far, but some seem to be jolly fine to me. Your mummy's very pleased, please keep it up to stop this list going under. And here's something dull to set off the year in customary fashion. -- Posting -- I've been playing with restricting the list to only accepting posts from subscribed users, and the results show it's well worthwhile doing, so I'm going to implement it. Although it might be annoying to a few, I hope it'll really help increase the quality of stuff we all have to plough through, as only people committed to reading 30 posts a day will be able to send something back, so they'll understand the pain of reading something inconsequential or knee-jerky. I know there might be some who just read the list from the WWW archive, but the consequences of allowing people who occasionally read a couple of messages a week to post is too much. It's you loyal ones who are prepared to feel the weight of all the mails or digests in your mailboxes, that I want fragrant, expressive posts from. There will of course be exceptions to this, people who read their mail from one account and post from another (say a home account), and I won't leave you high and dry - if you're WELL known to me, and have posted lots of [worthwhile, funny, meaningful :) ] posts to the list in the past, or you're Mrs Murdoch, then I'll make an exception if you mail me privately, and I'll allow posting from a non-subscribed account, but I'm afraid I can't do this if you're someone I don't know who's reading this on the WWW or whatever. Anyone who isn't on the list and tries to send something will get a message back explaining what to do. I've added some people to the allowed list already so don't be surprised if your mails get through OK - if you don't hear anything, it's fine. Just to emphasise, if you're subscribed to the main list or digest, you won't notice any of this, and life will continue as normal, bar a slight decrease in piffle, hopefully. -- Underwear -- I quite like the word "panties", partly because it rhymes with "Aunties" and "sea-shanties". In fact, New Year Sinister competition no. 1 is to send me a limerick with B&S content, which features these three words rhyming on lines 1, 2 and 5. Competition no. 2 is the one I forgot to send in over Christmas, because I had my head under a quilt: write a short Christmas carol, with B&S content, featuring the rhymes "Mary" and "hairy" and "Jesus" and "cheeses". If for some bizarre reason I get any entries, I will post the results back to the list. Linda will provide the prizes. If I don't get any entries I will remain embarrassed and silent, and try and pretend I never suggested it. (By the way, Charlotte/John, what happened to the remaining entries to your poem competition, they were going to go on the WWW weren't they? If that plan's off, I'm happy to put them on the Sinister site if you send me them.) -- Swearing -- I've been most amused in recent months by a swear word detector which seems to be in operation at Yale College, somewhere in Wales. Someone from there is subscribed to the list (hi) and probably doesn't know that she/he isn't receiving a small percentage of mails to the list because they're deemed to have rude words in them, and so get bounced back to me. What's fun is trying to see what it counts as a rude word in the returned mail, and wondering what it's like to be the Yale College Rude Word Collector (hereafter known as the YCRWC), who must have to actually type in all these obscene words in the first place, just so that they can keep them out the doors. Some of these words were very respectable 100 years ago, and other words like "pomegranate" which we unsuspectingly use happily today in conversation with our grandmothers, will be obscene in 2055, as I know from my time travel experiments. You must really have to be ahead of the game in terms of obscenity to be the YCRWC. What I was wondering is: does anyone know any rude Welsh words? Could they try them out please and see if the YCRWC is up on them? I'd quite like that, but I've always had a small imagination. miss honey xxx +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list please mail "sinister@majordomo.net". To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to "majordomo@majordomo.net". 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