I'm sorry I left your umbrella in Mail Boxes Etc.

General public service announcement: I appear to be experiencing a significant problem with my e-mail—as in, for reasons I do not yet understand, about a third of all messages sent to my account are not reaching me. Livejournal and Facebook notifications included. Nothing is showing up in my spam filter and no one is reporting any bounces, but if you've written to me recently and haven't received a reply, please re-send your message; it's not you, it's computers. In the meantime, I shall continue to worry about the work-related correspondences I have almost certainly been missing and hope I haven't permanently alienated anyone.

[edit]

Score one for old-fashioned methods of communication: I just received a box in the mail from shweta_narayan, containing multiple books including Angélica Gorodischer's Kalpa Imperial (2003) trans. Ursula K. Le Guin, Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage (1968), and a trade paperback of Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Sherwood Ring (1958), to replace the copy I lent out to friends once and never saw again.

Combined with the fact that nineweaving gave me Susan Cooper's The Magic Maker: A Portrait of John Langstaff (2011) this afternoon at Porter Square Books and I had a store coupon that covered Le Guin's The Wild Girls (2011), I consider today a total win for print and ink. Just not so much for electronics.

Hands up the girl who burnt down the east wing last night

Ronald Searle. I was in college before I'd heard of St. Trinian's and graduate school before I was introduced to Molesworth. What we had in the house when I was growing up was Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer with Not Enough Drawings by Ronald Searle (1981), which traumatized me slightly at an impressionable age with its enthusiastic renderings of "The Irish Ballad" and "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park." I don't have even the marginal artistic skills I'd need to send him off in the appropriate fashion, so all I can say is: ave atque vale, as any fule kno; I'm off to knock somebody's head in with a hockey stick and set something on fire.

Donald Swann with Charlotte Mitchell & Shirley Hall, "Surly Girls"

Hail St. Trinian's Senior High!
Here's to our motto 'Do or Die!'
Kick the girls and make them cry!
Up! St. Trinian's girls!