Because Queen were comprised of all the best and most versatile singers this world has ever seen, obviously gospel is their true calling. We all know Somebody To Love is fantastic and all, but have you heard this?!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EwMwtAFw2LE
Freddie Mercury, Roger Taylor, and Brian May take turns singing a chorus each and it’s gorgeous. It was half finished in 1984 but they decided to wait 11 YEARS to release the full track because it’s just too fucking powerful for us to handle. Also Freddie Mercury saying “go for it, babe.” to Brian when he does the guitar solo is just too adorable.
more handy Queen anecdotes if you ever think they’re a serious band in any way:
1) roger locking himself in a cupboard to get his song as the b-side of bohemian rhapsody
2) freddie throwing a brick through their managers window because he walked off and left him at a restaurant alone #not glam
3) them all getting stuck in a lift because they started jumping up and down having just heard they got their first number 1 single
4) freddie calling his manager to get him out of michael jackson’s house immediately because michael kept bringing his llama into the recording stupid and it freaked him the fuck out and this is genuinely why freddie wasn’t on thriller
5) john coming up with the under pressure bassline then going out for pizza and forgetting it
6) freddie calling sid vicious simon ferocious
7) the new orleans jazz party which no one can actually remember
John throwing peanuts at brian while brian was onstage doing his Brighton Rock solo.
Freddie getting his drink spiked and jumping up and down in the recycling bin yelling “I’M WHITE TRASH! I’M WHITE TRASH!” and laughing
When Freddie forgot his hair gel for a photo shoot and having to use lube which he just happened to have with him. And then commenting “what a waste” it was.
roger selling freddies fancy ass new jacket to a guy and freddie sprinting after said guy to get it back
freddie getting completely wasted before a show in 1985, stumbling onstage, laughing his ass off, and screaming “HELLO NEW ZEALAND, WE’RE GONNA HAVE A MOTHERFUCKER OF A TIME”
Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.
chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.
grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet
he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.
even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).
(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y’all.)
famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”
for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.
and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.
“We have lost the greatest and most beloved member of our family. We feel overwhelming grief that he has gone, sadness that he should be cut down at the height of his creativity, but above all great pride in the courageous way that he lived and died. It has been a privilege for us to have shared such magical times.
As soon as we are able we would like to celebrate his life in the style to which he was accustomed.”
My favorite part is that these are going to be someone’s neighborhood landmarks. “Turn left at the saxaphone player,” “yeah I work in the shop right next to the Princess Leia fire hydrant,” “if you pass the shady guy selling watches, you’ve gone too far.” The urban and suburban worlds are so funny of random infrastructure points that you’re just supposed to ignore, like those big metal wiring cabinets on the side of the road and all those backflow preventers all over the place. With just a little paint, now they have friendly, comprehensible meaning.
this is whats called a ‘coffer dam’, you basically build some walls, drop them in the water, tie them together, and then pump out the water from your new hole in the water so you can build while staying dry
its oddly not that hard- the flippin ROMANS were able to do it with logs and mud
occasionally particularly devious people would use this to hide treasure or tombs underneath the river so its not only impossible to find but impossible to get to without an engineer division
The days when Native American tribes were forced to give up their land are far from over. Here are 4 examples of destruction in the name of corporate greed.
The days where Native American tribes were forced to give up their land are far from over.
Here are four sacred Native American sites in danger of being destroyed in the name of corporate greed.
Badger-Two Medicine
The Blackfeet Tribe calls the land of Badger-Two Medicine “the Backbone of the World,” the place where the story of their people began. But now the mineral-rich land, located in modern day Michigan, is in danger of being drilled for oil.
Solenext, LCC, the last of the 47 leaseholders of the land, filed a lawsuit so that drilling could begin. Earl Old Person, a member of the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council since 1954, is fighting to preserve what he calls “an altar to the Blackfeet Confederacy.” He wrote a letter to Obama urging the president to intervene.
Oak Flat
After lawmakers slipped in a clause in the National Defense Authorization Act that swapped 2,400 acres of copper-containing land for 5,300 acres of substandard land, the San Carlos Apache tribe has been fighting to preserve Oak Flat.
The land is located in Arizona and contains Apache Leap, a place where 75 Apache men, women, and children were massacred.
In response to the controversy, the international mining corporation, Resolution Mining Inc., said that the mine could be a good thing because it could employ Native Americans.
The Black Hills
The Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota peoples, who suffer from systemic poverty, turned down $1.5 billion offered to them for the Black Hills, land the Keystone XL Pipeline would intersect. That’s how much this land matters to them.
Rosebud Sioux Tribe President Cyril Scott has called the Keystone XL Pipeline “an act of war.”
The Osage Mounds
The Chahokian Mounds are the artifacts of an ancient, complex civilization. The modern Osage consider themselves to be descendants of these mound builders, the architects of the most important city to the Mississippians.
But the NFL’S St. Louis Rams are planning on paving over what’s left of it to build a new stadium. Indian Country Today Media Network reports that the project has a $1 billion price tag and that its construction is still in its early development.
Hopefully the mound can still be salvaged.
H/T: St. Louis Public Radio, Indian Country Today Media Network
My doggo, Ezri, who rarely barks and mostly borks.
When I got her, she’d been abused and would cower and pee at almost everything, and had been mistreated when she’d barked, so she never would. One day months after I had her she got excited on a walk and borked at a bird, and then immediately cower-peed. I had to re-teach her to bark by gathering her whole human pack and having everyone bark and howl and feed her treats and pet her till she got excited enough to join in, and then got more treats. Took a while but I was able to teach her to bork on command (and she’s gotta be excited or she just stares at me like “Sorry, the bork system needs charging”) and she’ll do it happily when she’s excited to go for a walk or upon seeing a friend, and at birds. I love her croaky borking, especially when she started off terrified of making a joyful noise.
I… did not expect this post to blow up this much but I am delighted at all the tags and replies and Ezri has been told the internet thinks she’s a Very Good Dog. :D
She’s a German spitz - in the same family as keeshonds and pomeranians. She might be crossed with something else as her freckled coat, non-pointy nose, and personality are not standard for her breed (they’re usually a lot more high energy and excitable - she’s super laid back and chill). She’s a bit less fluffy than breed-standard too, mostly because she’s grown out from her spring/summer trim (not usually necessary/good for her type of coat but she gets terribly itchy otherwise). It also makes her look like a puppy of a large breed:
Ezri’s best friend is Murder Cat, who is a gentle friend to humans and Ezri, but does things to mice that would make Hannibal Lecter go “Isn’t that a bit much?”
I got Murder Cat as a kitten, and she used to try to nurse on everything when she was small. Eventually, she settled on her favourite thing to nurse on, Ezri, who has never had puppies and a little confused at first but eventually went with it. She grew out of it, but they have stayed snuggly buddies ever since.
New Years here is full of fireworks outside and Ezri gets Vry Scared. I usually set her up somewhere with a snuggly spot right by me, and Murder Cat comes and does this all night:
She goes everywhere with me in my bakfiets (cargo bike) and lets me warm my hands in her fur on cold days.
And her ears disappear if I say her name to get her attention.
ok so great thanks for coming to my TED talk about my dog, good night, drive safe
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