The Bluestocking Boxing Day sale: 1 gerbil for the price of 2

[Boiledbeetle]

Previous thread:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5457910-the-bluestocking-next-stop-christmas

As the patrons, and gerbils, of The Bluestocking Pub sleep off their Christmas Day food and alcohol intake the capybaras will be getting paid double time to move the pub and contents to the new thread overnight.

All welcome, as long as you are a woman. The men have their own pub The Staunch Ally. It's just down the road, then turn left at the bridge.

You don't have to be mad to drink here but it most definitely helps.

Leave the real world behind and join us in the mayhem and surreal life of a pub staffed by gerbils. Where the food is always exactly what you ordered and the drinks don't give you a hangover the next day!

I did work out eventually that the proposal was some time ago, but that didn't stop me from staying awake fretting after my 5.00 trip to the loo by wondering how exactly a walrus would go down on one knee.

Which at least varied my other worry, which was how the Noah family managed to feed and water all those creatures, and more urgently, how they cleaned up after them. And how they kept the rain out of the ark. And what their intentions were for the doves (food? animal sacrifice?). Quite a relief to get to cup-of-tea time.

My sister had the game Othello, I think a version often came in the game packs with early computers. There were tiles; black on one side, white on the other. You tried to dominate the board with your colour by flipping your opponents. I've never thought about the black/white battle in the context of the name before.

lets just hope tomorrow you don’t worry about whether aquatic mammals and amphibians were accommodated or if they had to swim around for the whole duration (40 days plus I’ve forgotten how long drying time).

I think Irving Finkel, who built a replica of Gilgamesh's ark, said the 'all the animals' would have been all the domestic animals - not sure whether that included prey species managed by hunters. And Noah's ark seems to be a straight cog from Gilgamesh (with your regular reminder that being a myth is not the same as not being true).

I must go and buy black treacle so I can make porridge bread if there's an emergency.

I'm not too bad, thank you.

I just accept that I'm a bit wonky. (There are other wonky things as well.)

I just looked up the OT account - it specifies wild animals as well as livestock. 7 pairs apiece of ‘clean’, one pair of everything else. Mind you, it also says Noah was 600 at the time.

It sadly omits his other boat, especially constructed to keep safe his extensive fancy fish collection. Too many for one layer of tanks, so he had to build a multi-story carp ark

@ErrolTheDragon Ha ha ha

That’s very good, Errol!

Very clever Errol -such wit, so early in the day!

I on the other hand clearly need a bit more caffeine, as it took a double-take to understand that when AsWithGladys said:
❤️ for the seven kidneys inside Edith’s contact’s SIL.
I used to think it was interesting when I had 4 on my normal push bike.
it was children on the bike, not kidneys!

I'll put the kettle on and return when I can think more clearly

why did they take our

😆😆😆

https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/2006361007451672999

weight, huh?

He totally meant to do that😆

Turns out there are downsides to a daily shower. I woke up this morning to very itchy excema. Although it's just as likely it's because it's so cold and I'm shit at moisturising I'm going to blame the shower.

Time to hunt out the tub of nivea cream that's hiding in the cupboard, along with the more moisturising shower gels.

Then I shall put on some scratch mittens.

Waaa.

On the plus side I'm currently up 70 items being evicted from the house this week.

Poor itchy Boily!

Re having showers when it's cold - although my house, being little and insulated, isn't actually that cold, I HATE stepping out of the shower because inevitably the air outside the shower is colder.
I'm a real baby about it, I have to give myself stern talkings-to
'FFS it's only a bit of cold air, it won't kill you, and you'll have a bathrobe on within nanoseconds, just get out there and stop being a big baby😠'

So I sympathise!

Yonks and yonks ago when I shared a flat with no central heating, no shower, and ice in the bathroom at this time of year, we used to wash in two halves: a very quick bath to clean the lower half, but leaving some clothes on the top half, and then a flannel-wash of the upper half having clad the lower half. Being totally naked in that below-zero bathroom was out of the question😧

Sympathies, Boily.

Very British Problems just posted "Just received a news notification about the first storm of the year being named Goretti. Feels a bit exotic and exciting to me. Should’ve gone with Gary or Gladys or something."

Do we have a gerbil called Goretti? The storm was named by the South-Western meteorological Group (France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Luxembourg). It looks to me like a surname so I suppose could be considered unisex.

All the other South Western Group names on its current list seem to be traditionally male or female:
Alice
Benjamin
Claudia
Davide
Emilia
Francis
Goretti
Harry
Ingrid
Joseph
Kristin
Leonardo
Marta
Nils
Oriana
Pedro
Regina
Samuel
Therese
Vitor
Wilma

Yes, we have a Goretti. Maybe more than one.

I'm so glad that valid reasons for not following Boily's shower a day resolution are emerging. I haven't got rid of anything yet, but will hunt down some books that I won't read again, seeing that the postman brought me two or three new books yesterday (one, or possibly two, of them were a two-volume publication).

The more northerly met people - Met Éireann, the National Meteorological Services of the UK (Met Office) and the Netherlands (KNMI) - are using these names for north Atlantic storms, chosen by the public:
Amy,
Bram,
Chandra,
Dave,
Eddie,
Fionnuala,
Gerard,
Hannah,
Isla,
Janna,
Kasia,
Lilith,
Marty,
Nico,
Oscar,
Patrick,
Ruby,
Stevie,
Tadhg,
Violet,
Wubbo.

I had to google Wubbo, Wubbo Ockels is a Dutch astronaut who flew in the Space Shuttle, I think we can safely assume he was a Dutch pick, and that Tadgh [Thai-g] was an Irish one, as was Bram - a nod to Dubliner Bram Stoker probably.

I like the present of a Lilith

I hadn’t heard the name Goretti, so I searched for it and it seems originally to have been a surname.

Goretti can refer to Maria Goretti, an Italian virgin martyr and one of the youngest saints in the Catholic Church, known for her tragic story of refusing sexual advances and being murdered at the age of 11.

Wikipedia link. She died in 1902 and her attacker in 1970, so relatively recently for many saints.

Given the frequent practice of naming children after saints and the even more frequent practice of naming girls Mary, perhaps Goretti is now used as a forename?

Not the sort of history I’d like my DD or our gerbils to have to think about when young if at all, but there we are.

I’m not RC but used to work in a school run by nuns. They were all formally called Mary Something, but the Mary wasn’t used, and when they signed something it was just M Something. For example, the person everyone called Sister Scholastica was really Mary Scholastica and would sign her name as M Scholastica, IBVM. (Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary.)

Apologies for the kidney/children confusion. I think in a sentence like,”They were riding two on a bike” the ‘people’ on a bike is implied, but in a discussion about kidneys it’s not clear at all.

I like the inclusion of a Wubbo, as well as Lilith.

What do you immediately think of when you hear “Lilith”?
Unrefined as I am, I immediately think of Frasier’s wife in the TV series, although I also know it’s the name of a ‘she-devil’.

But.

I’ve looked her up.

According to some traditions, she was the first wife of Adam, created from the same clay, but she left the Garden of Eden after refusing to be subservient to him.

Grand, and also appropriate for the character in ‘Frasier’.

If you're interested, Glad, I can recommend this. Very well written.

https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/products/woman-s-lore-book-sarah-clegg-9781803280288

There's a wonderful book by Marilyn Robinson called 'Reading Genesis', and in it she discusses the similarities and differences between the Noah story and the Gilgamesh epic - in particular, the very different relationships between God(s) and people.

Wubbo features in For All Mankind. It’s a counterfactual drama about the ‘space race’ and subsequent space missions, with the historical divergence point being ‘what if the Soviets had got to the moon first’ , followed by their next mission including a woman - and the response of the USA. I would think quite a few of you would enjoy it, if you’ve not yet come across it.

Thanks Edith, I was thinking I'd like to read a compare and contrast.

Mary O’Malley’s play Once a Catholic has a class in school where all the girls except one are called Mary. IIRC, the one girl who isn’t a Mary is called … Maria.

I suspect the writers of Derry Girls had seen the play.

I had a great-aunt Maria (who I never met) but in the family she was always called Ria pronounced Rya. On Boxing Day I met an eighteen month old baby called Rya (at least pronounced that way) - rather nice to see these old names recycling.