The Bluestocking: the one where AI finally learns what a blackbird is (we hope)

[Magpiecomplex]

Welcome all, New Year (nearly), new thread!

Now I feel sad. And old. Everybody on that clip is dead. Well, not the audience or the crew, I hope, but Willy, Jeremy & Humph.😥

I've fallen off the wagon...

I've just eaten VEGETABLES!!

Even had a sprout!

If I set this to music, it might become an earworm:
A coleopteroid
cannot avoid
the monotony
of botany

['Poetic' licence: I did botany for my Leaving Cert and it was fascinating and has given me lots of fun words like xylem and phloem. and I know that the flower of the cow parsley is an umbel of umbels, so Botany is far from Monotony]

Are you feeling quite all right Boily? No faintness, dizziness, headache? Still, I suppose if you eat vegetables this early in the year, you can then enjoy the rest of the year in a comfortable vegetable-free state!

I am concerned about Boily's diet, and I think she should eat four more vegetables in 2025, which would meet the recommended five-a-year target

@MarieDeGournay botany also turns out to be extremely useful for crosswords! Although the Christmas general knowledge one from the Telegraph (the in laws get it) was a travesty.

Is it useful for Scrabble too?
I've only ever played Scrabble twice, and surprisingly for somebody who loves words as much as I do, I was so egregiously crap at it both times that I never played again😠

Give a beetle a break, there are already six delicious nourishing vegetables on that plateful of wonderfulness, possibly more depending on what the black thing in the front is.

😄
There's also something that looks like the lower half of the body of a very small orange human being..
A Loyalist leprechaun, perhaps...

It's very annoying when all the nice people die isn't it. Talented funny silly people.
Here's to us! There's none like us and they're all dead.

I've been having such fun with you lovely Stockingers that I forgot to have lunch!
I'm so hungry I could eat the hind legs off a Loyalist leprechaun😂

I love this photo so much. When I was reading the thread last night I kept going back over and re-reading it so I could have another bout of chuckling ...

I'm feeling like a lie down may be appropriate!

I found this morning that an unexpected and unwelcome side affect of the world being cold and monochrome was a compulsion to eat all the stray sweeties would the house. Which included various wrapped things picked up and pocketed in shops that have revived the tradition of big boxes of Roses/Quality Street etc on the counters in December. I was afraid that had stopped for ever after Covid.

But am feeling a little queasy.

Hey! There was a sprout, parsnip, carrot, swede, and cabbage on the plate! I've already hit my five a year!!

Does potato counti in the veg count? If so then yes six!!!!

And it's mint sauce!

Seven so, and if you're doing plants not just veg then the flour in the puddings counts too. You're practically vegetarian after that lot.

RIP tango man!

Do I get extra virtue points for the fruit in my dessert?

Of course!
You're practically into next year's allowance.

Oh, i used to have aTango man. I wonder what happened to.him!

(scuttles into Pedantry Corner)

It's "Here's tae us, wha's like us, damn few an' they're a' deid".

The few being dead, leaving just us to adorn and entertain the world.

It was a favourite toast of my late Dad's, who had spent some years in the company of Scotsmen.

I also still have the instructions that came with him!

Oh excellent! I'm having a repeat of dinner for my tea, so I should be good through to 2027!!

Brilliant! Mine was given to me by a dear (now late) friend. I remember the box he was delivered in extended my name to include "Earwig". Very random!!