Sageing With Janet

08/02/2026

She Didn’t Ask Netflix for Apologies. She Asked for the Truth.

At nearly eighty years old, Nona Gaprindashvili had already beaten the world.

She’d beaten champions.
She’d beaten grandmasters.
She’d beaten a chess culture that told women to stay quiet and stay separate.

What she didn’t expect was to be erased by a streaming service.

October 2020. The Queen’s Gambit explodes onto Netflix. Millions watch. Chess boards sell out. A fictional girl becomes a symbol of female brilliance.

Then a single line appears on screen.

“There’s Nona Gaprindashvili,” a character says,
“but she’s the female world champion and has never played against men.”

Nona freezes.

Because by the time that line claims she’d “never faced men,” she’d already beaten many of them.

She wasn’t offended.

She was erased.

Nona was born in 1941 in Zugdidi, Georgia—the only girl among six children. Her brothers taught her chess, expecting her to lose. She didn’t.

By eleven, she beat them all.
By twelve, she replaced her brother at a tournament—and crushed the strongest player there.

At twenty-one, she didn’t just win the Women’s World Championship.

She obliterated it.

For sixteen years, no woman came close. But Nona wasn’t satisfied. A women’s title felt like a fence, not a crown.

So she walked through the gate no woman was supposed to cross.

She entered men’s tournaments.

Not exhibitions. Not charity matches. Real competitions. Real stakes.

She beat grandmasters. She drew legends. She won tournaments where no woman had ever finished near the top.

In 1977, she entered an elite open tournament in California—no women’s section, no protection.

She tied for first place.

History blinked.

The following year, chess had no choice.

They gave her the Grandmaster title—the real one. Same title as Fischer. Same title as Kasparov. No prefixes.

First woman. Ever.

Decades later, Netflix told the world she’d “never faced men.”

So Nona did what she’d always done when people underestimated her.

She made a move.

At eighty years old, she sued Netflix for $5 million—not to get rich, but to set the record straight.

Netflix argued fiction gave them freedom to lie.

A federal judge disagreed.

You can’t use a real person’s name, place them in history, and rewrite their achievements as fact.

Netflix settled.

Quietly.

And Nona went back to the board.

At eighty-one, she won another world championship.

Because she never stopped proving people wrong.

Beth Harmon inspired millions.

But Nona Gaprindashvili made that inspiration possible.

She didn’t imagine equality.
She enforced it.
Across sixty years. Across continents. Across courtrooms.

And when Hollywood tried to rewrite her legacy, she reminded them of something chess teaches better than anything else:

Every move matters.
And the truth always finds its way to checkmate.

07/02/2026

Anthony Hopkins couldn't find a book anywhere in London. Then he sat down on a subway bench.
It was 1973. Hopkins had just landed a role in a film called "The Girl from Petrovka," based on a novel by American journalist George Feifer.
Like any serious actor, he wanted to read the source material. He spent an entire day searching bookshops along London's famous Charing Cross Road.
Nothing. The book wasn't available anywhere in the UK.
Frustrated and defeated, Hopkins walked into the Leicester Square Underground station to catch a train home.
That's when he noticed something on a bench.
Someone had left a book behind.
He picked it up. Turned it over.
"The Girl from Petrovka."
The exact book he'd been searching for all day, abandoned on a subway bench in a city of eight million people.
Hopkins couldn't believe it. He took it home, read it, and noticed something strange. The margins were filled with handwritten notes in red ink. Annotations. Someone had marked up this copy extensively.
He didn't think much of it. He used the notes to help him understand his character, prepared for his role, and filed the coincidence away as one of life's unexplainable moments.
Months later, Hopkins traveled to Vienna where the film was being shot.
One day on set, he was introduced to a visitor.
George Feifer. The author of the book.
They talked about the film, the characters, the story. Then Feifer mentioned something that made Hopkins stop cold.
"I don't have a copy of my own book anymore," Feifer said. "I lent my personal copy to a friend a couple of years ago. It had all my notes in the margins. He lost it somewhere in London. I've never seen it since."
Hopkins felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
"I found a copy," he said slowly. "On a bench in the Underground. It has handwritten notes throughout."
Feifer looked at him skeptically.
Hopkins retrieved the book from his things and handed it to the author.
Feifer went pale.
It was his copy. His handwriting. His annotations. The personal copy he'd lent to a friend years earlier, which had somehow ended up abandoned on a subway bench at the exact moment Anthony Hopkins, the actor who needed it most, happened to sit down beside it.
In a city of millions. Across thousands of streets. Among hundreds of tube stations.
The right book. The right bench. The right moment.
George Feifer got his lost book back. Anthony Hopkins got a story he would tell for the rest of his life.
Carl Jung called it synchronicity, the idea that meaningful coincidences aren't random but reflect some deeper pattern in the fabric of reality.
Hopkins has always been fascinated by the concept. He's spoken in interviews about learning to simply be amazed by life.
"I don't know if there's a master plan," he once said. "But sometimes things happen that are just too perfect to explain."
Maybe it was luck. Maybe it was fate. Maybe it was just the universe having a bit of fun.
Or maybe, just maybe, some books are meant to find their readers.
And some stories are meant to be told.
/

07/02/2026

Ernest Hemingway said she could "write rings around all of us"—then called her "a very unpleasant person" in the same breath.
Beryl Markham was the kind of woman who made people uncomfortable.
Wives feared her. Society considered her scandalous. Hemingway himself admitted she was difficult. But even he couldn't deny her brilliance.
Born in England in 1902, Beryl moved to British East Africa (now Kenya) as a small child. While other colonial girls learned embroidery and piano, Beryl was running wild with Maasai children, learning to hunt, and developing an obsession with horses and freedom.
By eighteen, she'd done something no woman had ever done: She became Africa's first licensed female horse trainer. Maybe the world's first. In 1920s Kenya, this wasn't just unusual—it was outrageous. A teenage woman, training thoroughbred racehorses, competing in a male-dominated field, and winning.
She didn't stop there.
In her twenties and thirties, Beryl became a bush pilot, flying mail and supplies across the African wilderness. She navigated by landmarks—rivers, mountains, elephant herds—in an era when one engine failure meant certain death.
Then, in September 1936, at age thirty-four, Beryl decided to attempt something that terrified even experienced pilots: flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west.
Here's why that matters: Flying west to east, with the prevailing winds, was challenging but achievable. Charles Lindbergh had done it in 1927. Amelia Earhart in 1932.
But east to west? Against those same powerful headwinds? Non-stop? At night? In a single-engine plane?
No one had ever succeeded.
On September 4, 1936, Beryl climbed into her Vega Gull aircraft in England and took off into the darkness. For over twenty hours, she battled headwinds, ice, fuel concerns, and exhaustion. She couldn't see the ocean below. She had only her instruments and her nerve.
Twenty-one hours and twenty-five minutes later, her fuel tanks nearly empty, she crash-landed in a peat bog in Nova Scotia, Canada. She'd aimed for New York but didn't quite make it.
It didn't matter.
Beryl Markham became the first person in history to fly solo, non-stop, east to west across the Atlantic Ocean. The "hard way." The way everyone said was impossible.
The press went wild. Awards poured in. She was an international sensation.
And then... she mostly disappeared from public memory.
In 1942, Beryl published a memoir called "West With the Night"—a lyrical, stunning account of her life in Africa and her adventures in the sky. Critics praised it. It sold reasonably well.
Then it went out of print and was largely forgotten for four decades.
What people didn't know was that Ernest Hemingway had written a private letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, about Beryl's book. In it, he wrote:
"She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer... this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers."
That letter stayed hidden for years.
In 1983, someone discovered Hemingway's praise. "West With the Night" was reprinted. Suddenly, the literary world rediscovered Beryl Markham—not just as an aviator, but as one of the finest prose stylists of her generation.
The woman Hemingway couldn't stand had written a book he couldn't stop thinking about.
Beryl wasn't easy to love. She had multiple marriages and affairs. She was often broke. People called her opportunistic, difficult, cold. She made enemies as easily as she made headlines.
But she also lived by a philosophy she wrote in her memoir:
"Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday."
She refused to be what society expected. She trained horses when women couldn't. She flew planes when it was considered reckless. She crossed the Atlantic when experts said it was su***de. She wrote beautifully when people assumed she was just a pretty face with an adventurous streak.
Beryl Markham died in Kenya in 1986, at age eighty-three.
She was complicated. Controversial. Fearless. Brilliant. Difficult.
And she proved that you don't have to be likable to be unforgettable.
Sometimes the people who make us most uncomfortable are the ones who show us what's actually possible.

06/02/2026

Start each morning focusing on one thing you’re grateful for.

Gratitude isn’t woo woo - it activates neural circuits linked to reward, regulation, and perceived safety. Regular gratitude practice gradually shifting the brain’s default patterns!!! Not much in life takes this little effort for such huge gains.

Also a moment of gratitude for Maya Angelou - her book ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ was one of the books on my A level literature course work. I fell in love with her instantly. Having had a challenging childhood myself her hope, joy, compassion, love, wisdom and inspiration sang to my heart. ❤️

•
The post below is shared from
With love
Fiona
www.earthmonk.guru

17/01/2026

In 1969, Eve Plumb was cast as Jan Brady on The Brady Bunch.
She was eleven years old.
For the next five years, she grew up on camera—awkward phases, changing voice, adolescent insecurities—all broadcast into millions of American living rooms every week.
Jan Brady became famous for being the middle child. The overlooked one. The girl who lived in her sister's shadow. The one who cried "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!" in frustration.
The character was a punchline.
And slowly, so was Eve.
Here's what people don't understand about child fame: it doesn't pause when the cameras stop rolling. The identity you performed at eleven follows you everywhere. Casting directors stop seeing range. They see the character. And for Eve Plumb, that character was a whiny, jealous, second-place sister.
When The Brady Bunch ended in 1974, Eve faced the impossible choice that awaits every child star, especially girls:
Grow up too fast, and get punished.
Grow up too slowly, and get forgotten.
Try to stay the same, and get trapped.
Hollywood wanted her frozen. Audiences wanted nostalgia. The industry had rules, and breaking them meant risking everything.
Eve broke them anyway.
In 1976, two years after The Brady Bunch ended, she auditioned for a role that shocked everyone who knew her as Jan.
She was cast as Dawn, a 15-year-old runaway who becomes a teenage pr******te in the NBC television movie Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway.
Eve celebrated her 18th birthday on set.
She later said: "It was such a departure from Jan, and that was a big shocker. That was really, really quite the shocker for everyone. But it was great. As an actress, I'd been playing roles since I was six, so it was great to get a new challenge."
The film was a massive ratings success. But more importantly, it did something strategic:
It announced that Eve Plumb was not Jan Brady.
Not anymore.
"I think it was very fortunate that that came along for me," she explained, "because it was the instant transition from Jan to adult, which is very difficult for a lot of child actors to make, because once you're not cute anymore, nobody wants you."
The same year, ABC launched The Brady Bunch Variety Hour and asked the original cast to reunite. Everyone said yes.
Everyone except Eve.
She was the only cast member who declined. She didn't want to sign a five-year contract. She didn't want to become Jan again indefinitely. She had already glimpsed freedom, and she wasn't giving it back.
A "fake Jan" appeared in the variety show instead.
Eve moved forward.
But here's the part of her story that rarely gets told:
In 1969—the very year The Brady Bunch premiered—Eve's parents made a decision that would change her life more than any television role ever could.
They used her earnings to buy her a Malibu beach house.
She was eleven years old.
The house cost $55,300.
Eve held onto that property for 47 years. While other child stars blew through their money or had it stolen by managers, Eve's investment sat on Escondido Beach, appreciating quietly.
In 2016, she sold it for $3.9 million.
That single decision—made when she was a child—gave her something Hollywood could never threaten:
Security.
Financial independence.
The freedom to say no.
Eve has been blunt about the economics of child stardom: "The biggest misconception is that we're all rich from it, but we are not. We have not been paid for reruns of the show for many, many years. We are not making money off of it at all."
The Brady Bunch has been in continuous syndication since 1974. It has never been off the air. The cast receives nothing.
Eve's wealth came from real estate, not residuals.
And over the decades, she built something else—a second creative life that had nothing to do with television.
She became a painter.
For more than 25 years, Eve has painted steadily—oil on canvas, still lifes of everyday moments, film noir scenes, domestic Americana. She's exhibited in galleries across the country: New York, Laguna Beach, Scottsdale, Chattanooga, Richmond.
She describes her work as "spontaneous still life":
"Whenever I see a likely subject, everything stops and I take photographs. This holds the moment in time until I can paint it. What I'm trying to do is represent that moment of time and it can be elusive but when you get it right, the sensation it produces can really turn heads and create so much emotion."
When asked why she paints, her answer is simple:
"Painting is a creative outlet for me when I'm not acting. It gives me a feeling of control over my creative life. An actor often has to wait for projects to come along, but I can paint any time of the day."
Control.
That word echoes through everything Eve Plumb has done since 1974.
She did return to Jan Brady—eventually. The Brady Brides. A Very Brady Christmas. Reunion specials and tributes. But she returned on her terms, when she chose, as a wink rather than a surrender.
The past became something she could visit, not somewhere she was trapped.
Her advice to young performers today is practical, not sentimental:
"Don't quit your day job. Save the money and buy a house. Don't squander what you've got because it won't always last."
Eve Plumb is 66 years old now.
She acts when she wants to. She paints every day. She owns her time, her identity, her story.
She didn't escape The Brady Bunch by pretending it never happened.
She survived it by refusing to let a role she played at eleven define the woman she became.
That's the part pop culture always skips.
The tragedy isn't growing up on screen.
The tragedy is never being allowed to grow past it.
Eve Plumb grew past it.
And she made damn sure she owned the house she grew into.


~Anomalous club

05/01/2026