On the menu today, Sinisterlanders, we have: things that squeeze into then get dragged out of your subconscious, Calvin and Hobbes, and some football. Mark Casarotto crammed a message with quotable things, the first of which was this:

...when I was younger (until my early teens, probably) my idea of an idyll was to live in a leafy American suburb with wide roads, driveways, big detached houses with little verandahs at the front,

And the first image that came into my mind was Tom Hanks' neighbourhood in Big, so then he freaked me out by telling us to imagine none other than-

wee Tom Hanks' neighbourhood in Big.

I think the little green pixies that run the show in everyone's brains (and I mean *everyone's* - there has not yet been a credible report of anyone having escaped them), are cutting corners. It's like the stock exchange in there you know - they're all screaming things like "Buy the Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters! He has to be dragged out every time someone mentions marshmallows." Evidently they got Tom Hanks' Big neighbourhood at a knockdown price and then unloaded it into lots of our unsuspecting subconciouses. Mark then protested that:

(there is nowhere near enough Calvin & Hobbes discussion on this list

Which I'm going to second. (Actually I think someone else may have picked that up before me, so I'm going to third it...) The Calvin and Hobbes subject fits in in with something Youn Jong Noh said about ageing dulling your sensitivity, because Calvin and Hobbes always manage to bring back my own Calvin Age years that get tucked away under duller things like - to be topical - exam thoughts, as time passes. Reading Calvin's winter exploits makes me want *my* garden to be covered in snow so I can build snowmen that promt the neighbours to think I should be institutionalised. (Hobbes: Why does he [the snowman] have a hot water bottle on his head? Calvin: He's committing suicide.) Calvin also does a lot to solve the world's overpopulation problem. I wonder what the exact number is of people who have vowed never to have kids because of the risk of them turning out like Calvin. Oh look. Here's a poem about England's performance at Wembley earlier today -- Can We Have Our Ball Back, Please? ------------------ England gave football to the world Who, now they've got the knack, Play it better than we do And won't let us have it back. That was by Gareth Owen, and this email was from Natasha xx _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the reborn Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail "sinister@majordomo.net". To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to "majordomo@majordomo.net". WWW: http://www.majordomo.net/sinister +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "jelly-filled danishes" +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+