The Bluestocking: where conversation should supersede cards

[MyrtleLion]

The Blue Stockings Society was founded by women emphasising education and mutual cooperation. Men could attend as invited guests, but in this Women's Pub, they are only welcome to peer enviously through the windows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Stockings_Society

All women welcome!

All tastes catered for.

All food containing calories will not increase waistlines.

All drink containing alcohol will not intoxicate beyond the mildy merry and slightly inhibited stage. Guaranteed no hangovers.

Don't mind the gerbils, hamster, capybaras, quokkas and other assorted rodents. They're all female, all staff and very accommodating...

Dh reckons this (the tunnelling quokkas and gerbils) is HS2 construction!

You know ferrets are used in cable laying, right?

https://www.ferret-school.co.uk/working-ferrets/cable-laying

With 'my' Bank Holiday event racing towards me I wrote a comprehensive but plodding press release and sent it to church and community groups, with a request to a friend that she suggest other recipients. She said - local paper - but before she sent it she stuffed it into Chat GPT. Such a transformed document - we didn't 'make' a thing, we 'lovingly crafted it' - bullet pointed highlights! action words! exclamation marks! all sorts of advertising jargon. I'm beginning to fear a good turnout.

Ferrets - I'm in love!

❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤

Will AI ever be able to draft a tender document where the company really doesn't want to win the contract but has, for Byzantine reasons, to submit a superficially adequate proposal?

I may or may not have had to do such a thing in the past. Full of go-getting enthusiasm and buzz phrases, but with enough low-key, just visible details designed to undermine its claims to be able to actually fulfil the contract.

Oh, and I can never read or hear "lovingly crafted" without mentally adding "in sumptuous Skivertex".

At least it's not a " carefully curated collection". These words make me want to scream.

Nooooooooo! Is this for real?

Decades ago when I used to work cabling up networks, and we were trying to pass a cable along under a floor, I used to say 'What we need is a lovely little trained ferret so we can attach the cable to its collar ...'
and my colleagues exchanged That Look, silently saying to each other
'See, this is what happens when you let girls do this job, they say stupid things about animals..' 😄

Nooooooooo! Is this for real?

Yes, it is. There are videos on YouTube.

Ferrets were domesticated for going down holes and tunnels, after all.

So your colleagues were (insert descriptor of choice re. intelligence/lack thereof here).

Well well well. I knew nothing of domesticated ferrets trained to do things when I suggested the cabling job, it just occurred to me that they'd be good at it and would make the task a lot quicker.

I now have a greater respect and admiration for the ferret, in addition to thinking they are very cute, as are their wild cousins the pine marten - and yes, before anybody brings reality into all this, I know they are vicious little divils, but this is the Bluestocking where even pine martens are cute and cuddly

Track them down, tell them you were right, show them the evidence, stick a few of the emotionally strongest ferrets down their trousers to make them remember the occasion, retrieve the crew, come back to the Bluestocking, administer some TLC to the probably somewhat traumatised beasts and explain to them why it mattered and why they are wonderful.

A ferret once strayed into my house, and although I tracked down a ferret man and handed it over to him, for the few days it was with me it was very sweet and affectionate and happy to eat cat food and be petted and admired.

So probably no more vicious than any of the rest of us.

Great minds think alike.

Women are better problem solvers because we can’t just heave and lift. It helps men as well, since all the heaving and lifting breaks their bodies, but we can't have women having good ideas, so women are sidelined and men are broken.

I am honoured and humbled that you think of me as your Queen! Because I haven't seen a lot of bowing and scraping...

QueenCamilla, like every woman is welcome. Mainly because I hear she and I might get on.

I like your plan, Deano, and I especially admire how well thought out it is.
If you apply a similar level of planning to your bank holiday event, it will deffo be a humdinger!😄

edited to remove asterisks that mysteriously appeared in the text, like shooting stars...

edited to remove asterisks that mysteriously appeared in the text, like shooting stars...

Joseph O'Connor the writer [and brother of Sinéad] once said that Dubliners use the F* word so much that if you transcribed the average conversation, you'd have to put in so many asterisks that it would look like a map of the Milky Way

I have found the instructions for a half-finished pendulum clock model!

I started it during the pandemic and broke the hour hand so left it unfinished. I have discovered that the little collection of "bits" including a winder button were discarded accidentally in a rare frenzy (finding it lying around and asking what's this for?) of tidying up. Moral: don't tidy up.

Anyway I have ordered the missing bits. It's Chinese New Year so nothing will arrive for at least two weeks, which means I can do some AI work.

Though I did do some bits of construction that didn't need the missing bits. If course I did.

Awww - and I know it was much appreciated -

Love the ferret!

This may or may not be apocryphal but if you need something larger than a ferret there's an obvious candidate...

community.spiceworks.com/t/dachshund-on-duty-cool-story-of-one-it-dog/561303

Oddly enough, we passed two long haired dachshunds in the park yesterday, and I said " they'd be great for cleaning drains". Probably because I had just had to unblock the outside drain and was thinking about it.

Ferrets! Hurrah!
Many years ago when I was a fellow traveller with Militant Tendency in the Labour Party, A Mr. Neil Kinnock ordered a purge upon us.

So we used to meet in a room in the Unemployed Workers Centre prior to Party meetings to go through the agenda. The sign we put on the door said: Ferret Breeders Regional Meeting In Progress.

But you'd have to consider whether it's harder to clean a drain than a long haired dachshund.
I've only had smooth haired, the first one was a two person job to bath during which we all got soaked.

Well, that's been a week. Culminating in an hour or so in my happy place - deep in an Excel spreadsheet! Bar gerbil, could I please order an obscenely large hot chocolate and an equally obscenely cheesy pizza?

Will this do?