Thread 17 - TalkLair: "Okay, first of all, what's with the outfit? Live in the now, okay? You look like DeBarge."

[RasaSayangEh]

(Previous thread 16).

Spring is springing, daffodils blooming all over our LairGarden, which have not all been picked by a neighbour's kid...

In the TalkLair, the hearth is glowing, books by non-approved authors line the shelves, cosy rugs are down on the floors looking a bit stained by cat hairball regurgitation. The denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch though, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics. We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

Arf (as the dog would say). One of my neighbours has two gorgeous rescue Phalènes. (The bastard breeder dumped them when they were no longer of use.) The tiny female, aged only about 7 or 8, has been bred until she is pretty much crippled and now travels in style in a waist-high trolley, lording it over her minions and enjoying lots of attention. Her not-brother, some years older, was always incredibly stand-offish, but jealousy has kicked in and he now says hello.

They actually behave more like cats than dogs!

Congratulations @moto748e - gorgeous baby!

Thanks for the kind words, all. Back home now. The concert at the Barbican was wonderful. Although I think my DS was sadly rather less impressed.

Congratulations @moto748e and family - that’s a lovely picture!

I hadn't heard of Phalènes before. What beautiful little dogs they are, though I bet it takes some work to keep them looking smart.

A friend came round with her dog yesterday and she's got a trolley for him as he's very old and gets tired quickly. I called it a wagon and she said 'Darling, that's not a wagon, it's a chariot!'.

The baby is adorable! And the photo, you look full of happiness.

I thought I'd heard of phalenes but wasn't sure. They're a Papillon type dog! I'm inclined to like them because the paps I've met have all been so good natured. I'm more and more keen on chihuahuas because they are darlings with people who treat them like real dogs and they have a long life span. Big up the small dog!

My DS2’s dog is a cross between a Papillon and a chihuahua and she’s lovely.

i am writing this stretched out by my friend’s pool in Gascony after a market and cathedral visit in Auch and a delicious lunch. I have a cup of tea. Don’t hate me.

That sounds blissful @Britinme - I don’t hate you but I do envy you!

This is, apparently the offices of the Guardian ( they are banging the desks for the leaving of the Observer). You will notice that the vast majority of those present are white men, all with similar physiognomy. It’s bizarre how not ‘diverse’ it is considering:
a. The way the G bangs on about the power of diversity and
b. It’s London 2025. My office is far more representative of London’s population and we don’t fetishise about it.
https://x.com/lowerformofwit/status/1929513439136719078?s=10

Ooh! Who won the Owen Jones lookalike contest?

Wow. I was in journalism in London in the 90s (before/without all the diversity recruitment & training schemes the Graun runs) and we were more diverse than that then. And far more so in the London and Manchester offices I worked in once I got out of media.

Also, that clip rather gives the impression the Observer was drummed out (not in a good way).

That's a really white office. I went into the BBC building in Hull once and it was like that there too. Almost everyone except the higher-ups was young and white.

They correct (or over-correct) the numbers of non-white faces in screen-facing roles, though, so that's all right, isn't it?

The state I live in is the second whitest (except for North Dakota I think) in the country and I think we manage a bit more diversity than that.

I saw this thread and wondered if macnurse would be allowed to come back - not sure why she got banned i.e. was it the three strikes thing?

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5347812-mnhq-well-also-no-longer-use-a-rigid-three-strikes-system-who-would-you-want-to-be-able-to-post-on-fwr-again

How frequent do the strikes have to be? I got a week in the sin bin last year and an email last week. It didn't state what I'd written, just to adhere to the mod policies.

I was wondering about that too, Rasa. Has anyone heard from her lately?

I rather got the impression that she'd gone for good, regardless.

Is she still active in the old place?

Given how we were treated I'd be surprised if she went back there, but you never know.

@SinnerBoy Not stating what you'd written is very odd. Mind you, I'm a mod on another forum where we have been known to silently edit nuisance-people's posts so that they say something completely different from whatever they originally wrote.

I'm rather losing my patience with the po-faced nature of MN. I speak of the posters rather than the mods!

I could mail back and ask, of course! I did wonder if it was connected to a certain tax avoidance lawyer.

I'm rather losing my patience with the po-faced nature of MN. I speak of the posters rather than the mods!

That's been a feature of MN since this were all fields!

I recall a famous thread where somebody took offence to the phrase "mad as a box of frogs" because it was racist against the French. More recently, an unfortunate OP had asked for clothing advice for a tropical climate and got repeatedly and prolifically scolded by a poster with a bee in her bonnet that "tropical" was "othering." Not to mention the endless threads of competitive laundry, extreme orthorexia, and of course the opposite extremes too.

It's a bit funny - as long as you are not the unfortunate target!

There's that. But there's also brilliant responses to women in desperate situations. I always think, on that type of thread, the very few idiotic responses stand out in a sea of lucid and helpful ones. And much other wisdom elsewhere.

I was amused today when I suggested that an Archers character should just jump off a well-known jumping-off spot in East Sussex and apparently that was an awful thing to say about a particularly tedious and self-obsessed fictional person and I should be ashamed of myself.

To be fair, only a couple of people agreed and those usernames were unfamiliar - gawd bless the ability to name-change at will, eh? I haven't done that yet (has anyone?) and probably won't ever bother.