Hello everyone, There exists a small but elite group of Australian businessmen in my hometown. They all work in one store, a pawnshop, called Cash Converters. I find this odd simply by merit of the fact that my hometown is in Pennsylvania, in America- and is a very small town, a former steel industry center, now sort of brownly decrepit and sprawling. And I wonder why it is that these people (all unrelated, I might add) would come all the way from Australia to (presumably) live and work in a small suburb of Philadelphia, in an unglamorous (albeit very successful) store which, besides having a name that to my mind suggests money laundering, is located in perhaps one of the worst parts of the entire county. The only hypothesis that springs to mind is that, somehow, through complex and arcane networks, the mayor of my town has forged a kind of draconian marketing contract with various travel agents and career counselors in the metropoli of Australia, where enthusiastic and (again, this is me speculating) towheaded antipodean youngsters are suckered into selling all their fantastic Dirty Three albums and bootlegs in order to buy a plane ticket to the exciting and impossibly-bustling-and-cultured Pottstown, PA. My God, this confused me. I'm not exaggerating when I say I thought about this deeply for the five or so hours it took me to drive home to Virginia on I-95. Could it be that my confusion was just sublimated anger at having one of the sales clerks ask me, upon the purchase of a cheap electric guitar and practice amp at said store, whether this [the guitar] was for me "as a rock and roll star, or is it a gift, mate?", (and I promise, he actually did say 'mate' I'm not making that up) to which I responded by nodding my head and saying, in a sort of shy and lamentful way, "uh, rock and roll style?", having heard the 'star' as 'style' and now consequently feeling slightly embarrassed in front of the witchily pretty female sales clerk. I know there are some Australian sinisterines + -ettes on the list, and I was wondering if, hey, are there any large and unwieldy roadside billboards over there with pictures of Pennsylvanian landscapes, mottled with fall colors, and featuring some sort of sentimental and catchy slogan in a sensible font? Maybe even vaguely authoritarian in tone? Ok. So there is (at least) another Kevin on this list (hello other Kevin!), and I think I need to confront this fact head-on. In my opinion, it's really a good thing, you know, because, heck, our name means 'gentle and lovable' (uh, in Gaelic, if I remember my grandmother's tiny namecards correctly), and with all the sort of rippling hostility and thinly veiled sexual threats that are always flying about on this list, people of a kevin-nature are here to serve as a buffer (feel free to hurl invective at either of us, and like egg-carton insulation foam, we will absorb and dampen). Plus probably all the Rachels too, 'we can never have enough Rachels' = story of my life. So, that's enough meta-list talk I suppose. I really wish I could write long and consistently-themed missives (a la Kieran and the PF), but really, my attention span is far too short for that. And plus I'm at work. Which place is populated mostly by diminutive secretaries whose faces look as if they would explode into thousands of tiny green mosquitoes if given the proper stimulus. I'm looking forward to: the fourth of July, which for me is one of the saddest holidays; going to see the Giddy Motors next month; applying to grad school, and getting engaged so that I can have a fiancee to give me the OED as a present like the inestimably lucky Michael Vance. Oh, and any sort of post from Laura Llew would be great, as they (the posts) always rock my socks off. Seriously. Hosiery --> obliterated. off to lunch, xo, Kevin +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ 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! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+