The Bluestocking - where women are women, and small furry animals are gerbils, quokkas, capybaras, or a red panda called Rosy

[MarieDeGournay]

Welcome all to the Bluestocking Pub, a haven safe from harsh reality [mostly] full of good company, and excellent food and drink served by the most efficient team of gerbils in the hospitality industry.

Hope this is not a duplicate - tunnocks tea cakes are now fit to fly https://www.msn.com/en-gb/travel/news/tunnock-s-tea-cakes-pass-raf-fit-to-fly-test-after-being-banned-for-60-years/ar-AA1CfrTW?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=80f25bb4daf64ba6c812c78828a0f9e0&ei=21

We all know about Feathers McGraw, clearly a rival evil genius villain to Elon Musk.

I think I'd put money on Feathers McGraw in that contest!

If I may be forgiven for quoting myself - I posted this on another thread:

'When the captain pulled an emergency depressurising switch the iconic Scottish treat erupted - leaving a sticky mess over the airmen, the instruments and cockpit canopy.'

I don't see what the problem was - all the RAF had to do was get in touch with MN, put up a post asking for volunteers, and I can guarantee that they'd have got a crack team of Tunnocks-lovers who would have happily licked all the molten Tunnocks off the instruments, the cockpit canopy... and even the airmen, though only out of patriotic duty of course😏

PS yes I know the exploding Tunnocks incident was in 1965 before MN was invented, but if there's a laugh to be had, the facts go to the back of the queue!

We love anything Tunnocks related.

Although, if truth be told, I prefer a Dime Bar.
No, not a Daim bar, that's like calling a Marathon a Snickers.

Ooh, it’s ages since I had a Dime bar. I don’t suppose they’re susceptible to explosion or implosion.

Hmmm.. why not? do you think it's the shape of the Tunnocks? might it not be that it is a sealed unit of materials that decompress at different rates, and obviously at greater speed than the chocolate coating.
Ergo splat QED😄

I think there's only one way of finding out: repeating the experiment with a Dime bar.

Dear Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard John Knighton, KCB, ADC, FREng..
We have a small experiment which requires the use of one of your planes ...

@Magpiecomplex I have known two situations where a teacher in the same school has been paid to do marking. Do you have any impoverished colleagues?

At my last school we had a retired teacher brought in to do some tutoring. I found out quite late on in the arrangement that one senior teacher in last year or so before her retirement had quietly been paying him to do some of her marking.

When I was considering applying to a boys public school a colleague who had come from there told me that in my department I wouldn’t have to do much marking as one teacher was paid to do most of it.

Some years later I found out that was a temporary situation, which I don’t think my colleague had known. Apparently the school had taken on someone who turned out to be hopeless in the classroom. So, others in the department took on his teaching for the rest of the year between them, and he did their marking in return.

@MarieDeGournay if I may suggest a teensy alteration to your experimental protocol...
We actually need to do a side by side comparison of the whole Tunnocks product suite, Dime bars, Penguin biscuits (greater structural integrity) and Jaffa Cakes (poor structural integrity). And we need to do it many times, for repeatability, in many different types of plane just in case that's an unexpected variable.

I've just eaten one and I haven't exploded yet. I'll let you know....

Show me a teacher who isn't impoverished, @MarchWindsAnd 🤣
Unfortunately my department is so small there's no one I can offload marking to, who I would also trust to do a decent job.

Just to drag the conversation back to birds for a mo: on my walk yesterday, as soon as I sat down in one spot, a chaffinch appeared & begged for food quite shamelessly, as though it was used to being fed.

I was thrilled as I've never seen one close up. Sadly I didn't have anything edible on me, but next week I shall take some bird food from home & go to the same place & see if it appears.

This is the closest AI came to it, & I've lost the will to try again...

I hope that finch isn't planning on holding the knife like a pen, or you might get the ick

PS I love the idea of the cheese cellar & the cheese seller.

I'm a bit worried about Marie, though, & her fascination with used balls.😳C'mon, who replaced Marie with fake-Marie? And what have you done with the real one?

Plenty of things give me the ick, but I'm not bothered about that. OTOH DH has spent his married life eating cereals out of earshot of me, because it's disGUSTING.

My wildlife puzzle of the day is whether I have let seven wasps out the window today or whether one wasp enjoys being followed round the room while I coax 'come on woppy, over to the window, you'll like it better outside'.

I need to start telling the story of what happened to last year's persistent wasp.

Meanwhile in the garden I saw a pair of Speckled Wood butterflies dancing in the sunshine AND a Brimstone. And several bumblebees the size of buses.

@Magpiecomplex Proof that AI doesn't understand 'marking'.

Don't think I'll be outsourcing my marking to AI any time soon in that case! Although the gerbils have an excellent understanding of 'snacks'.

@DeanElderberry .

Noooooooo! I wouldn't assault woppie.

I just don't want her to suffer the fate of poor waspie last year. It was tragic.

Cats & waspies: not a good mix.

I warned her repeatedly that she'd get stung and it would be terrible but she wouldn't listen, and it turned out she's like one of those blokes who eat extra-hot chillis to show how hard they are. There'll be no reasoning with her this time around.

Poor little wasps.

That's either a very small cat or an unusually large wasp!

exaggerated perspective.

or something.

A big wasp woken up after the winter and all ready to build a nest and start raising a family, but a big wasp is still much much smaller than a greedy and ruthless cat.

Gorgeous looking cat, but a definite "Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry" look in those eyes!