Boop

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

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.

ALSO IMPORTANT:

daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman 

he invaded egypt

the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”

then napoleon showed up

napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus

the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”

this did not make napoleon happy

in fact it made him jealous

…and like this…

…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…

:-D

I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…

And for those of you who would like to try audio versions, this is what is on LibriVox, the free, volunteer run audiobook version of Project Gutenberg:

you are so right so let's go over this shall we -

change in mental state: confusion, agitation, slurred speech, irritability, delirium, seizures

skin may feel deceptively cool or dry. you may also stop sweating entirely.

nausea and vomitting

extremely flushed skin - whole body!

rapid breathing/heart beat

headache

dry, swollen tongue

Trump’s budget bill has many, many things in it, but buried amongst it is the MILLIONS OF ACRES OF PUBLIC LAND FOR SALE.

This is the entirety of the Arizona state forests, the entire Cascades mountain range. Swathes of pristine desert around the national parks in Utah. On the doorstep of Jackson Hole.

THIS BILL IS BIG, BUT IT CAN BE AMENDED AND ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT PASS AS IS please.

If you have ever enjoyed the wilderness, we stand to lose it all forever.

CALLING your senators - NOT JUST IN THE WEST. ALL SENATORS, is CRUCIAL.

Outdoor alliance has a great resource for reaching out.

I made this through tears last night in desperation, and I do want to shoutout to some EXCELLENT tags that I wish I'd had the bandwidth to add in the moment

@pinyonrice and @namira - you're absolutely right. The ENTIRETY of this land won't get sold, it's the fear that any of it could.

BLM manages 245 million acres of land. The forest service manages 193 million acres of land, for a total of 438 acres. The map shown is 300 million of that - 62% of the total area. The bill is only asking for 0.75% to actually be sold off, a FRACTIONAL value of the actual amount.

This is something that kept me awake wanting to understand better, to have some peace that maybe, some aspect of this would be okay.

I agree that this is the precedent, and that *which* lands they choose can have devastating repercussions for drilling, logging, etc. The fight for Bears Ear National Monument has told us this story again and again.

I definitely don't want to come across as fearmongering - there's just. No reason to be selling these lands, and most fundamentally the bill should have restrictions for the use cases, purposes, and actual locations rather than this blanket "free for all".

@fruity-basket-case also really put it well. In reality, individuals probably aren't getting more homes. Oil interests, resorts, mega-leases, the "highest bidder" is who is prioritized here.

20% of the time: “Hold on. I wrote this? This is fire. This is emotionally devastating in the best way. This scene is dripping with tension. I’m a literary perfectionist. Someone give me a book deal.”

The guy was an institution all on his own; look at this.

The “A” profile in his soil is now 47 inches deep compared to less than 6 inches in 1971 and acts like a giant sponge for water infiltration and retention.

From 1971 through 1989 David used an average of 150-250 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre to grow his corn crops. After adding peas and radishes as a cover crop mix, he cut his nitrogen needs in half and was able to get it down to 125 pounds per acre.

When he added multiple species and became more aggressive with his cover crop mixes, he was able to achieve an additional drop in applied fertility. His starter fertilizer is now just 2 lbs of N, 4 lbs of P, and 5 lbs of K. His corn crop now only requires 20-30 lbs of N throughout the entire growing season. He requires no fertility for his soybeans, relying on fertility gained solely through his cover crops. He uses only 40 lbs of 10 N – 10 P – 10 K for his small grains.

Ten years ago (source study published 2019) David stopped using any fungicides and insecticides. This occurred at a time when fungicide and insecticide use has increased significantly with the average commodity farmer.

Four years ago he stopped using any seed treatment, including neonicotinoids.

His cash crop yields have been increasing by an average of 5% annually for the past 5-6 years, with far less fertilizer and no fungicides, insecticides or seed treatment.

So this is a picture of the soil horizons. The O profile/O horizon is stuff like fallen leaves, sticks, and so on, which are biodegrading into the A profile. A fair amount of soils might have no O profile at all.

If you are a gardener, the A profile is what you're concerned with most of the time; it's what we also call "topsoil." Your seeds germinate into it, and shallower plants might root into it alone without ever reaching the B profile. Worms and other small delvers live in it. It's what you're amending, what you're testing, what you're tilling, what you're trying to fill up with good microorganisms to work with your plants and provide you with food or flowers or cover.

I see this quote around sometimes, attributed to radioman Paul Harvey: Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.

Without the topsoil, bluntly, we starve. And there are other problems, in places with a lack of it; without the topsoil, when the rains come, the water strikes hard soil. Hard soil doesn't accept water easily, so instead it pools and runs downhill. That action makes flooding, makes flash floods, makes standing water that carries disease, it contaminates the water table. Cholera is a huge problem in places with a low A profile that receive too much water at once.

We are seeing topsoil depletion across the US. I can't speak for other countries, but the heavy-tilling agricultural habits we've adopted here have obliterated inch after inch of our topsoil; in the 1800s the average depth was fourteen inches! Today it is six. Many suburban lawns have even less. This has knock-on effects we don't even consider on the day-to-day (for instance, there's some suggestion that the lower amounts of various minerals in vegetables and fruits today in comparison with earlier decades might be because of the lower amount of minerals in the soil for the plants to take up into themselves).

And this gentleman took soil that had been that abused and not only returned it to what it had been before the aggressive, destructive European agricultural policy had its way, but trebled that earlier depth.

His land protects the land around it from flooding. His land grows plants less susceptible to disease, because of all the various stressors and pressures those plants aren't confronted with. His land almost certainly has a considerably higher concentration of microorganisms and it would follow that we'd also see greater diversity of macroorganisms thereby.