Honestly, I wasn't surprised when my friend Pamela told me she was raising a hamster family. I remember when I became friends with her five or so years ago she catalogued all of the hamsters of the past to me--there was Maddie, Oliver, Patsy, and numerous others whose names have escaped me. But then she informed that she was named her hamsters, not joking: Stuart, Isobel, Sarah, Richard, Mick and Stevie. The little shivering, hairless lot of them are a mini incarnation of B&S! At home, I am not sure I could stand a little cage full of those noisy little beasts. When I was a kid I had a hamster named Snickers who lived for about four years and who would keep me up at night running around on his little treadmill. Later on, my sister got two hamsters who never received names (and who were also brothers), but they were sort of fat and unfriendly. Later I found that one of them had eaten about half of the other, and I just couldn't look at the nasty beast any longer and gave him to my 6th grade science teacher. Maybe a week or so ago, Kirsten Kenyon told me that she found a mouse in her apartment! She then told me a story about how she and Jack Gillanders had trapped a different mouse and then discovered it was a little baby, and when she took it to the park to release it, she felt guilty about breaking up the little mouse family. Shame about that one, innit? Little mice are so cute, but there is something just kind of creepy about them. Hamsters are nice because they have no tails and like to stuff their cheeks until it looks like they have the mumps. The other night, Pamela sent me a photograph of her little hamster family that she is raising. I wonder what the band would think if they knew there were hamsters running around with their names (thankfully not their likenesses). I admit, they were heartbreakingly cute. But what kind of person decides they want to raise a hamster family? It sounds like a mentalist activity to me. One of my best mates has recently started to raise squirrels that he's found orphaned in the wild (wild?). He found his first squirrel, Towelette, hanging off his balcony by her toe, and decided to rescue her. She now lives in his bedroom and poos in the most inconvenient of places (Namely, inbetween the keys on his piano). He was hoping Towelette and his other squirrel, Gregory, would mate so he could have an entire squirrel family. Egads! Right now I'd better run along, I just thought you all might enjoy my little funny story about the mini B&S running around out there, stuffing their faces with seeds and pissing into cedar chips. B&S--may you never be half-eaten by your brother! Yours, Mandee May "Inconsolably Okay" +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ 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! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+