The Bluestocking Arms Women's Pub, where women make friends with Beetles, Androids, Cakes, Dragons, Hedgehogs and other women, where wit and wisdom flourish

[inkymoose]

Here at the Bluestocking there's a place for all women. A break from Reality, and many laughs and stories to share. Have your fill of Tunnocks bars and tea cakes, sing feminist anthems, drink as much beer or gin or hot chocolate as you desire. It won't make you fatter or drunken but oh, it's fun. Sit in the garden with our Lion resident or the Quokkas and Capybara. Express your opinions loudly in Pedantry Corner. Ask for whatever you fancy to be served by our obliging Gerbil staff. Come in, all women, welcome!

@inkymoose wrote I went to see an amateur production of a musical play recently, with low expectations, and was thrilled by its brilliance from start to finish. We're not in London, so the investment in going was much lower

I’m involved in an amateur musical later this month. Some of the cast and crew are or have been professional actors, dancers, musicians and dance or music teachers. The band is paid, but probably just enough to cover petrol and parking: like the directing team, actors and backstage crew they do it because they enjoy it.

Tickets £18 - £20, less £2 for students, jobseekers and over 60s. It is hard to break even, when the rights holders and the theatre get over 80% of the box office.

The theatre had a musical with a similar set-up earlier this month (with a play in between) and will host another in June, with a fourth amateur musical at another theatre a fortnight ago. Yes, there can be an overlap of cast and crew between the shows. 😀 It’s a small city.

if you were a small rodent how do you think you’d feel?
Apart from the fear, gerbils have no time for adders, they’re good at multiplication though.

Can I come?

I'm not sure what's going on. They all ran away when I mentioned I'd seen an ad...an a-word on my holiday last week. I didn't realise it would provoke a reaction. They're totally cool around the word viper. Anyway, it was the quickest way I could think of to get rid of the baby gerbils that were eating me. I don't blame them. They were hyped up on Easter eggs.

If I was a small rodent [and I'm not saying I'm NOT a small rodent, mind] think I'd look at an adder and say 'OOOOh I'm scared, is it a boa constrictor? a king cobra? or a black mamba? no it's a titchy little adder!'

Are adders bigger than gerbils, then? I don't know much about snakes, thanks to that Patrick chap who drove them all out of Ireland, in a Transit van, on the Holyhead ferry...😄

Oh well, I'll take your word for it that gerbils are scared at the very mention of the a-word.

Thank you for filling me in on that unknown unknown before bedtime.

G'night, all. You'll have to sort out your own dreams, as Cake has scared away the Dream Gerbil by mentioning a---rs

small mammals are at the top of adders’ menus - even including rats and weasels. A bite would make Colin pretty ill, I think.

@inkymoose , you’d be most welcome. I’ll pay for your ticket.

How lovely! Such a kind offer.

What a flattering image of me. Thank you.

Maybe the gerbils are bad at maths and reading, @lcakethereforeIam? 😉😂

Possibly explains why we're rarely presented with a bill. They can't do the maths.

Thanks, Errol I'm glad I didn't read this last night, the thought of our little gerbies being somebody's lunch😱

I obviously know nothing about adders. I thought they were titchy. And I thought they had been replaced by calculators and later personal computers.😃

I will, as scolders keep telling us to do, 'educate myself'.

Actually I DO know something about adders -
their name is an example of where the 'n' at the start of a word has been absorbed into the indefinite article, so 'naranja' in Spanish became a norange and then an orange.
Adder derives from naedre, so a naedre became an adder.

Strangely the gerbils ran away when I tried to explain all that to them - no interest in etymology, disappointingly.

Oh look, there's a Black Mamba! Or more correctly, the Dendroaspis polylepis, the etymology of 'Black Mamba' is disputed, and as you can see, despite their common name they are not actually blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaarrrghhhhhhhhhhhh h h h ...

I was wondering if ad...a-word was a wandering n. Apron is another one. Iirc naidr is still the Welsh word.

Fuck it! Who'd have thought the gerbils knew Welsh.

I think they must as instead of "can I take your order please" when I sat down at a table this morning I got "A gaf i gymryd eich archeb os gwelwch yn dda"

Sending up the pedantry corner signal... Glossing over the just plain wrong "teeth bearing", does one diffuse difficult situations, or defuse them? I always thought it was defuse, but this book is making me second guess myself, because I can see an argument for both versions.
And yes, this is a pedagogy book. Nothing inspires confidence in an expert teacher more than an inability to spell. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Quelle horreur, Magpie! That's shocking, it really puts the 'agog' into pedagogy!

I think defusing the situation would be to say 'We clearly have some differences of opinion, let's sit down and sort them out sensibly'

Diffusing the situation would be to turn around and say to everybody else in the room 'And I don't know why you are all sitting there looking so smug, you are ALL a bunch of two-faced ignorant bastards, you're all as bad as each other, he's just the worst of you!'

Both valid behaviour management strategies, @MarieDeGournay, I'm sure you agree! 🤣

Definitely ‘defuse’.
Defuse nullifies a danger.
Diffusion spreads stuff around. If someone had a vial of poison you wouldn’t want to diffuse it, would you?

Not unless you are into homeopathy, anyway.

Thank you, I was fairly sure I was right that it was defuse, but this book uses diffuse three times in quick succession and did make me reconsider.

If it was prussic acid, and the alternative was The Well of Loneliness, any decent family man would sure prefer to diffuse the former..

What?

I know books get published when they are full of rubbish, and proofreading is left to the most junior (cheapest) member of staff available but

how did this happen?

@inkymoose I can tell you exactly how, because my students do it all the time. They rely entirely on the little red wiggly lines.

You have been gaslighted by a book of poorly written, grammatically incorrect, morally vacuous, pseudo intellectual, hastily scrawled drivel.

It's not your fault, Magpie. You weren't to know when you opened this volume how facile and gormless the contents were going to be. Your poor brain, reading the word "diffuse" three times in a row, picturing one of those jars with smelly sticks in someone's bathroom that you have to hide in a cupboard before washing your hands, then imagining a horde of ravening hyenas rushing across the veldt holding great tusks in their bared teeth as a sandstorm diffuses over their heads!

The only thing is, other people are likely to be influenced and seduced by this dreadful tome, too. Thank goodness you are exposing it here! Perhaps your next step should be to take it to the librarian and have it banned/ exorcised /shot /destroyed sent back to the publisher with a note: "See me."

@inkymoose, I think I love you... xxx

The "see me" will of course be written in red pen.