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In a proper Shandean system, one wouldn't expect anyone saddled (and, yes, I use the word 'saddled' to impart some sort of sense, before actaully coming out and saying it, as I'd done the imparting already, with that particular word, so why not be forward about it, after the fact of having been forward already, of burden, which prepares you for the horror of a name to follow, surely, and possibly a brief moment or two of panic (no briefer, really, than any other moment, it just may seem that way, unless you happen to be on another planet, whose revolutions are considerably longer than the Earth's, in which case your moments may actually have been longer, as opposed to simply seeming longer (if the moments seemed about the same, you've probably just forgotten to set your clock back) in which you worried whether or not your name was going to appear as the name saddling someone, and whether or not, though you say, vehemently, that you don't believe in that sort of thing and never have been influenced by anything or anyone except tried and true science and your brother (who, just to remind you, once told you, possibly not consulting tried and true science at all, that the noise you were hearing in the evenings was not, indeed, a wild, person-eating Jam Tart (which was in fact a relatively harmless and grief-stricken Chocolate Tart that never once at a person), your name having the characteristics of a rather poor Shandean name, you'll now begin to have a rather rough time of it, out there in the real world) with the name Lumppudgy to do well.
And Lumppudgy did have a rather horrible existence, it must be said.
It didn't help tremendously that he died twenty-four hours into his Life, either, being a bug of the kind that only generally lived for a day (days being calculated, for those of you who encountered problems with the earlier reference to moments, by Earth time, and not any other sort of Time). So on top of being dead after twenty-four hours, he was also very very average.
disclaimer:
We are left with an extremely acute sense of purpose and pleasure this week.
Try out our (finally) sorted contacts page, and tell us about your purpose or pleasure. Or whatever.
Because that thing hadn't been sorted for so long, I expect quite a few of you may have tried to subscribe or whinge, and have had no response for these two and a half years or so we've been promising a proper contact system ("...probably be a few weeks (or years, whichever the case may be)...") because we've just been getting empty emails, especially from those of you using Internet Explorer (and we know because we were watching). Anyway, that's fixed now. So now you can mail and whinge about how long it took us to get ourselves in a proper state.
For the record, no, the offices and eleven out of fourteen q.i. productions employees' bedrooms have not been cleaned in any way, shape, or form in the two and a half years or so since we were last reliably accepting your letters.
Last week's issue, by the way, was about happiness.
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Yer Weekly Horoscopes. settle down, now, kids.