The Bluestocking: it's the season of mulled wine, conversations about pineapple and, of course, gerbils. Confused? You will be...

[EdithStourton]

Welcome to the anarchic and marvellous women-only on-line pub, the Bluestocking. The booze won't give you a hangover, the cakes won't make you fat, and the conversations are fascinating, covering knitting, health and safety, the Muppets and anything else that comes to mind.

Climb Peak Woo, have a cuddle with Rosie the Red Panda, and watch out for capybaras busy with any necessary building works.

Welcome in (and name change at the door if you need too).

Andrew Doyle certainly gets where the Divine Amanda was coming from: Opinion | Twain and Tolkien mocked Amanda M. Ros. Maybe she duped them, too. - The Washington Post

I think the likes of Wilde and Yeats, and Stoker - and Maturin if anybody remembered him! - are revered and valued in Modern Ireland.
In fact I baulked at the description of Stoker as an Anglo-Irish writer, I think of him as completely Irish, but in a specific tradition.

Wilde is complicated as he ..flourished, shall we say? in England, but both his parents were were steeped in Irish traditions and folklore, his father spoke Irish and there's a strong possibility Oscar did too.

Wilde's mother's poem on the Famine is incandescent with anger:

We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride,
But God will take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died.
Now is your hour of pleasure – bask ye in the world’s caresses;
But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses,
From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses,
For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.
A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand,
And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.

Poor Internet bloke. He finished up, everything was working and he left. Unfortunately for him he was still stood outside on his phone when I had to get him to come back as everything had stopped working.

One of the bits he replaced he replaced with a broken new version.

Hopefully this time it's all fine as he's now left and driven off straight away.

Can't think why he had to replace the original bits. As you'll see from the photo of one bit it still had plenty of life left in it.

Definitely a strong possibility that Oscar was an Irish speaker. I know his frenemy Edward Carson was - and there's someone who really belongs to the old Anglo-Irish culture, he hated having to head up to Belfast to address crowds of Orangemen.

Does anyone remember Maturin? I remember getting Melmoth out of the library as a teenager - in an actual three volume hardback edition! - and nobody had borrowed it for years. And I can't believe there are more than a handful of people in the world who have read Stoker's non-Dracula stuff. Not that I recommend it, he was a one-hit wonder in literary terms, but his theatrical connections make his biography interesting.

Florence Farr seems to have been the key figure connecting anyone interesting at the time.

What’s the thinking behind replacing the shamrock, @MarieDeGournay ?

Looks like a cat has been using it as a toilet.

What on earth is that bit of kit @Boiledbeetle? It makes it look like the internet has been around since the early sixties!

I never name change and don’t have a different name on other threads. But the other day I saw a poster who had a similar name to me; the first part of it. It felt very odd.

Yes, there's at least two other Magpies around. It does feel slightly weird.

No idea. The guy reckoned it was at least 20-25 years old.

Weirdly the high pitch whining noise (that I sodding knew wasn't my tinnitus) has finally stopped.

I'll ask the next internet person what it is when they come out on Thursday evening.

Yep! It's died again. Five minutes after I last posted. This time the internet and the tv have gone!

I suspect the cables coming into the house need renewing.

I occasionally end up on the same thread as another Boiled and it discombobulates me!

Oh no, Boiley. It is so stressful when the internet dies…

thinking similar usernames is not as bad as identity borrowing, that would be terrible if it happened in this space 🙄

This poster was a Swash. I had the thought that I’d hate for the Blue Stockingers to think it was my non pub name if they started posting crazy stuff 🤣.

I did think of you, Hedgy, when I saw it and thought of mentioning my thought of you. But I didn’t want to dredge up a painful time… ☺️

I know! I can't spy on the cats through the internals cameras when it goes down, I have to physically go and see what they've just knocked off something.

Luckily I still have an old TV with a video player in it and a DVD player. And thankfully a decent amount of data on my mobile. So I won't feel completely stuck in 1977 when we had no phone and no TV!

I have unlimited data too. But I still feel like I’m camping when the real internet goes down.

I don't have unlimited, but I do have more than the 1GB per month I had for years on my mobile.

Ah, good. You’re all tucked in and toasty then, Boiley ☺️

I'm guessing that the shamrock is too generically Irish, they wanted something that would represent Northern Ireland more specifically, and chose flax as a reference to the history of linen in Ulster.

You [one] could read a lot into it politics and identity-wise, but I just think: I get the relevance to the linen industry, and it's a pretty flower

I thought of changing my name to hedgehogisnotatwat but thought better of it.

for newer regulars we had a long spate of playing with AI so adopting an identity that could be used as an image was why i ended up as a hedgehog.

plus i like them

It's an isolator and surge protector, keeps the inside in and the outside out😄

Thanks, Marie ☺️. I do like a bit of linen.

Hedgey, #strange times 🙂

Have been meaning to comment somewhere on the apparent new rule that we cannot advise people to ignore a poster whose opinions are designed to goad.

So we must now just privately ignore, not declare we are ignoring, and ensure there is no obvious manifestation of the protected characteristic of freely ignoring someone’s posting habits.

i have been trying to think of another way of expressing my need to ignore out loud.

but fear that PIP might pick on me.

Boily, have you ever wanted to be a Role Model?

Well you are: inspired by your tidying achievement, I ordered some storage things and have completely rearranged one whole ..cupboard [had to do a quick linguistic shift there from 'press'].
It's a good feeling, isn't it?😇

Impressive surge protector knowledge there, Marie 🙂