The Bluestocking - your local women's pub, warm, friendly, and not at all unusual in any way.

[MarieDeGournay]

Welcome to The Bluestocking, the welcome is warm, the conversation is wide-ranging, the food and drink are delicious but magically free from anything they need to be free from, and the bar staff are highly-trained, professional, efficient and very friendly gerbils.

Snow leopards take a good picture, don't they?

@MarieDeGournay wrote:
I don't know of any biog of MdeG, ..er, what is the short form of your name here,
DrAuroraSoupDragonsFriend?🤔
That said, I've just had a bit of a google and I see there is one, in French, which I'll track down and read and report back.
I'll look for an English one, but she's a bit obscure, even in France, so it's unlikely.

I’ve just done an online search in my local copyright library. ‘Marie de Gournay’ brings up 633 results: most of the books/articles are not in English. If I add the word biography there are only 27 results, none of which seems to be a biography of her.

If a biography has been published in England (the UK?) copyright libraries should have received a copy.

Perhaps another of us with access to a copyright library can check if I’m searching correctly? I didn’t need to sign in to search.

If a brief biography is better than nothing, then there’s always

I keep thinking that some of my relatives who clog up the Dictionary of Irish Biography (hello Catherine Drew) could do with a proper study into their lives.

Then I realised I'd be volunteering myself, for nobody else would be up for the job...

I looked up the last source Wikipedia gives - Jenny Diski, Apologies for the Woman Writing - which it describes as a work of historical fiction based on the life of Marie de Gournay, published by Virago in 2014.
It’s ISBN 9780349005331 in electronic format.

I don’t know if that might be interesting?

I thought I had managed to get some T-shirts printed but something went wrong when I tried to put them on.

@inkymoose , you may be trying on the cold shoulder version.

I'm glad to hear everybody is accounted for.
There were some good news in the Igneococcales family. this week. ds received an offer from one of the universities he applied to, one of his preferred two options as well. He only submitted his application on New Years eve so it wasn't too long to wait but I was a bit nervous. One other university has asked for passport and settled status information which we'll upload today. It will feel very weird being on our own come September.

Or try some of the nefarious sites that I never ever recommend to my students or even Internet archive or the Gutenberg project?

I never ever recommend those sites to my students either, Taz.

Well, the Sleep Gerbil did not visit me last night.

Instead, the Snore Gerbil visited DH. I eventually decamped to a freezing cold bed in the freezing cold spare room at 12.45, and proceeded to lie awake alternate fuming and trying to chill out until about 2.30. Awake again 6.30. Unable to sleep again.

FML. Second night like that out of the past three.

In fairness to DH, he has told me to kick him out tonight if he does it again (he will, all it takes is a single whisky...)

Edith is short-tempered zombie this morning, who shouted at the bread when it didn't slice properly and slammed an innocent saucepan around when she found it in the wrong place. Why the FUCK am I only person in the house who knows where everything lives? It has been this way since forever.

I'm not nice to know at the moment and am best avoided.

@EdithStourton I was wondering why the gerbils were passing notes around.

Glad to hear it.

🤣🤣🤣

Oooh sorry, Edith, I think they've been around my place. I slept until 7.38 am, this is pretty much unheard of unless I'm seriously unwell (which I'm not). I'm usually up by 6am the very latest, I send them back your way for tonight.

The attribution of faces in inanimate objects is called pareidolia. [Para-doe-lia].

It's a form of pattern recognition, particularly for faces. Humans are hardwired to seek and respond to faces, so it's very common.

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

If you search for pareidolia in Google Images, you get some amazing examples.

https://www.google.com/search?q=pareidolia+pictures&sca_esv=27fffec528844299&rlz=1C9BKJA_enGB1133FR1133&hl=en-GB&udm=2&biw=744&bih=1001&aic=0&sxsrf=ANbL-n7dQ4xfmSsJ3GbnlTqYf1ct-gt2ww%3A1769336652639&ei=TO91aYvbJvq3hbIP2J7LiAo&oq=pareidolia+pictures&gs_lp=EhJtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1pbWciE3BhcmVpZG9saWEgcGljdHVyZXMyBxAjGCcYyQIyBRAAGIAEMggQABiABBiiBDIIEAAYgAQYogQyCBAAGIAEGKIESMQQUABYAHABeACQAQCYAVigAViqAQExuAEDyAEAmAIBoAIDmAMAiAYBkgcBMaAH-AOyBwC4BwDCBwMyLTHIBwOACAA&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-img

I attach one of my favourites.

I had a lazy day yesterday. I'm knitting booties for my BFF's yet-to-be-born DGS. They are very quick and easy, though I lost concentration watching Armageddon last night and had to start one again.

I haven't sewn up or weaved in the ends yet, so I'll post pictures once that's done (in who knows when amount of time).

BFF and I were friends from around 8 months old (we were born three weeks apart) till nearly 7 years old. Then she moved away. It took me 46 years to find her (on LinkedIn - because I remembered her name and she didn't change it). Once we met again, it was as if the 46 years hadn't happened.

We don't do gifts, so I shall say that the knitting is a way for me to learn and they can be used, given to charity or thrown away, and I won't mind, because I'm enjoying the process.

The baby blanket is finished and attached. I bought blocking mats with an Amazon voucher given to me by The Girl in the Tower (DSD - we call her that because she has the top floor to herself and we rarely see her, and she loves the nickname).

I was able to pin the blanket out using the grid lines, so it's mostly very straight. You can see where I accidentally knitted stocking stitch instead of seed stitch in one row, but I don't care.

That’s gorgeous.

Thank you. 💙

The booties are in white DK yarn and a beige cotton yarn. I have another very cute pattern which I may do in the teal Aran - same as the blanket. And I may do a hat and matinee jacket in teal too, but I might not have enough. So I'll do the booties and hat and then see.

@MyrtleLion what a gorgeous blanket!

NB. It's essential with hand-knitting that you include at least one inconsistency from the pattern instructions so that people know it's been hand-crafted not machine-made. I usually include several differences and it's quite intentional. 😀

I concur.
My latest has one um, er, honestly deliberate mistake in the colour work, but no one is ever going to spot it unless they block it themselves at some point. And there would be no point doing that as I blocked it before I wore it.

Poor Edith. You sound just like me on Friday after an appalling night. I couldn't even blame DH as we've had separate bedrooms for years. I was a total zombie all day. Here's wishing you the wonderful TEN hours I had on Friday night after I crawled exhaustedly into bed. I haven't slept like that for a very long time.

PS I'm also the one who knows where everything lives except for DH's tools. Those are his problem.

They will be most welcome.
Glad you had a good night (says she grudgingly).

I said that the gerbils make sure that every animal in the place has read that note. And then, please, bar gerbil, I would like a massive hot chocolate, fortified with brandy, delivered to me silently for my elevenses, with roast beef and all the trimmings to be served to me at the very nice window table, the one with a view of Peak Woo and the pond, at 1pm sharp.

I love this suggestion! It was of course, now I remember it correctly, intentional for that reason. I definitely did spot the error and nearly unpicked it...

@MarieDeGournay I don't know of any biog of MdeG, ..er, what is the short form of your name here, DrAuroraSoupDragonsFriend?🤔

It has got rather unwieldy hasn't it. It's because it's had an extra word added to it with each iteration. So, I've made an executive decision and decided to call myself AuroraSoup in the next thread and I've already bagged the name. I like Aurora Soup. It makes me think of Arrietty, Homily and Pod Clock and the rest of The Borrowers, or maybe Tolkien's Belladonna Took and friends (seem to have Tolkien on my mind at the moment).

If anyone sees me on any threads here before I have finished writing TheDifficultDocument you have my full permission to banish me. Thank you.

Morning all.
Sorry about service failures by the Sleep Gerbils, Edith - I had a word and they told me that they are committed to ensuring the highest standard of care to their customers and .... but I stopped listening after that.

You are 100% entitled to some satisfying sauce-pan-clattering and scatter-gun swearing, and then I hope you feel more at one with the world. Such as it is😒

I had a word with the Dream Gerbils too, I could have done without the one about having a panic attic in a crush while waiting to get into some unidentified rock concert.

I didn't mind the one about a black and white cat sitting on the rockery in my garden. And then this morning when I opened the blinds, there was a black and white cat sitting near the rockery in my garden.. spooookyyyyy..

Thanks for all the MdeG hints - I'll deffo track down the Jenny Diski book, thank you AsWith.

I've ordered the French biography, a bit expensive but hey...

Amazon UK had it even more expensive, and it said 'USUALLY DELIVERED WITHIN 3-7 MONTHS' !!
so I got it from elsewhere, sooner.

I know of MdeG through Michel de Montaigne, any pal of Montaigne is a pal of mine😄
I hope she sat him down and gave him a piece of her mind about some of the things he said about the inadequacies of women; however, she would probably have agreed with him when he said:
“Women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them..”