From out of the Wild Woods

(my own photos)

Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.

Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would've penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you've observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.

You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:

the moon asks a question by dirgewithoutmusic

Good Omens + Oscar Wilde 2/?

You’ll never say you love me, though; you can’t admit you care You won’t admit you love me like the drowning love the air You claim that I am nothing but the pride before the fall And maybe I have fallen, but I love you, after all

For I’m a devil; I can raise, then raze, than radiate I am a devil; I bleed black as ichor soaked in hate I am a devil; I deal in the secret side of pain Renunciation of salvation, dreamers down the drain.

And you’re an angel; you protect and guard all wondrous things You are an angel; you can rest the wide world on your wings You are an angel; you give the ineffable a voice You’re absolutes and absolution; I’m the thrill of choice.

Oh, lover, you are swords and crowns, crucifictitious tears, You’re covenants and convents and ecclesiastic years, Evangelist, avenger, Jonah in the wailing wall Pour plagues into the populace and kill the first sons, all

You want to say you love me like all demons love despair I want to say I love you like all angels love their prayer Oh lover, I’ll prostrate myself and never cut my hair, Oh lover, I have loved you since before the stars were there

Finds Crowley stowed away in the hull along with several hundred Mesopotamian children ranging in age from infants to late teens.

Crowley, in the middle of passing around a bread basket that endlessly refills itself, looks up like a deer in headlights. “Okay, I can explain this…”

—Later that day—

Crowley, while bottle feeding one of the infants: I mean clearly the Almighty wants these children dead, what with their capacity for evil and stuff, so by saving them all, I’m actually going against the Ineffable Plan.

Aziraphale, hiding a smile: Right. Makes perfect sense.

Crowley: I’m being very evil here.

Aziraphale: Of course you are.

Crowley: …you’re not about to throw them all overboard, are you? Because I will fight you.

Aziraphale: Oh, no. You’ve clearly outwitted me this time. I must accept my defeat with grace. And Noah has enough on his plate with the animals, I shouldn’t burden him with this. You’ve won this round, wily serpent.

Like the first time he says “LOL” out loud. “Ell-oh-ell, as the kids say” he says cheerfully and Crowley nearly slams the Bentley into a duck pond cause his brain just tried to escape what his ears just heard and subsequently goes off on a ten minute rant about how no one says it out loud, you’re not supposed to say it out loud, Angel. All the while Aziraphale is feigning politely confused ignorance, and thoroughly enjoying the tangent Crowley has now sneeringly diverted onto, snipping and snarling his way through his syllables, eventually admitting that while he claimed responsibility for the addition of YouTube comments on videos, that was just another thing humans came up with all on their own.

“Fascinating,” is all the angel has to say for himself, and the incident is quite forgotten until he does it again, this time responding to something Crowley says simply with “meirl” and for a split second Crowley thinks it’s some sort of German word he’s actually forgot exists until he realizes Aziraphale just said “me in real life” and whatever last few dregs of his soul that exist shrivel and die.

And it just keeps happening until one day Crowley catches the flutter of amusement behind Aziraphale’s benign and guileless expression and realizes the smug git has been trolling him this whole time, and he’s simultaneously torn between being hopping mad about it (because that’s his job dammit) but also weirdly proud.

“You bastard,” he says, unable to keep the serpentine smile from spreading over his face, “how long were you going to keep that up?”

“Him? What? No, I’m the cool one!” Crowley all but howls, waving a hand toward his angelic counterpart who is sitting at the kitchen table in the cottage sipping a cup of tea. “He hasn’t even changed his waistcoat since the 1890s!”

“So what you’re saying is he doesn’t ascribe to the model of unethical consumerism encouraged by late stage capitalism that keeps people shackled to their corporate overlords?” Pepper asks, giving him a bored look.

“What?!”

“Or that his sense of self isn’t tied to an arbitrary set of standards set by an industry hell bent on destroying values of self worth and happiness in pursuit of profit extolled at the cost of human dignity and life in sweat shops around the globe?”

“…What?!”

And there’s a bit of an awkward pause cause well, everyone’s wondering but you’re not just supposed to blurt it out and assume so all the adults are doing that high nervous laugh adults do when Kids Say Things and Aziraphale who likes to think he’s good with children looks down at this little inquisitive cherub face, bending at the waist to lean on his knees and says cheerfully, “And what’s your name little one?”

“Éowyn.”

“Éowyn, what a pretty name.”

“No it’s not.”

“Oh, er…”

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Are you married?” which is the moment when the girls mother can be heard hissing Wynnie in a soft fierce whisper and Aziraphale finds himself compelled to answer honeslty under the scrutiny of her six year old stare.

“Er, no.”

“Why not?”

Which is when Crowley, who is actually good with kids crouches down and says “Just haven’t had the time for it yet,” which would be so laughable if it wasn’t also so soul rendingly true. And then because he knows how children work adds, “There were some people who didn’t like us being friends very much, but that’s over with now.”

“Hear hear,” Mr. Young interjects, cause he feels like someone ought to, and well Adam’s sitting right there and you never know. He’d hate for his boy to every worry…

“Quite right,” Mrs. Young echoes, passing round another plate of jammy dodgers, two of which Crowley manages to snaffle without anyone seeing, one for him and one for Wynnie, who rips the biscuit apart with practiced efficiency and eats the jam filling first. The same way Crowley likes to.

“Dunno,” Crowley admits honestly, giving the angel a sideways glance as he stands up, forced to drag Wynnie with him, the six year old having decided to adopt the tall leggy man, and wrap her sticky arms around his neck. It’s disgusting but he’s dealt with worse. “Haven’t really thought about it, perhaps we should.”

“Well…” Aziraphale flushes, not sure why they’re having this discussion in public but suspecting somehow that Crowley orchestrated it. “I don’t think we need to be hasty…”

And Crowley can’t help but laugh at that.

It’s only later, after the events of the day have settled and he’s had time to think about it, that Aziraphale brings it up again while they’re sitting at the bus stop. In hindsight, they should have brought the Bentley, but really they’re just enjoying sitting beside each other out in the open. They’ve spent so long hiding, it’s nice to simply be.

“Did you really mean that…”

“Mean what?”

“Back there, with all the humans…about…getting married.” He says it in a whisper, as though he’s afraid who will hear.

“Dunno really,” Crowley says after a while, carefully nonchalant. “Seems like the human thing to do.”

“But we’re not human.”

“No, but we like human things. Perhaps we’d like that too.”

They’re silent again for a time, long enough for the first few stars to come out from behind the clouds, and then Aziraphale brightens, “We could have a cake.”

You’ll never say you love me, though; you can’t admit you care You won’t admit you love me like the drowning love the air You claim that I am nothing but the pride before the fall And maybe I have fallen, but I love you, after all

For I’m a devil; I can raise, then raze, than radiate I am a devil; I bleed black as ichor soaked in hate I am a devil; I deal in the secret side of pain Renunciation of salvation, dreamers down the drain.

And you’re an angel; you protect and guard all wondrous things You are an angel; you can rest the wide world on your wings You are an angel; you give the ineffable a voice You’re absolutes and absolution; I’m the thrill of choice.

Oh, lover, you are swords and crowns, crucifictitious tears, You’re covenants and convents and ecclesiastic years, Evangelist, avenger, Jonah in the wailing wall Pour plagues into the populace and kill the first sons, all

You want to say you love me like all demons love despair I want to say I love you like all angels love their prayer Oh lover, I’ll prostrate myself and never cut my hair, Oh lover, I have loved you since before the stars were there

What if Gandalf started out a maia of Melkor?

What if, in the time before the universe was created, Olorin was one of Melkor’s followers, who refused to join him in his rebellion? That would explain his time under so many different masters in Aman, his association with fire, and his affinity for the Children of Iluvatar - the Third Theme, the element of freedom introduced into the Music of the Ainur in response to Melkor’s attempted domination. Consider the way the Gandalf introduces hobbits into the course of history, confounding its courses, transforming its direction.

In my interpretation, Melkor’s particular dominion is transformation. (And for this reason, Middle-Earth has never known change without loss.) I can’t remember if I’ve had Gandalf ever spell out that Men, in a sense, are Melkor now, in the same sense that he is Saruman - Saruman as he ought to have been. Melkor has abdicated his place in the order of creation, his role in the maintenance of the universe, and that role, for good and ill, is in the hands of mortals.

Also consider what this means for him meeting the Balrog in Moria. They might have been brothers, in the morning of the world, servants together of the mightiest of the Ainur, and now they meet in the deep places of the world, both dreadfully transformed by their choices.

I love the facial expression! 

Grandpa about to tell me a story about mammoth hunting……

And they were so much smarter than we’ve given them credit for in pop culture. They were capable of creating art, which has been confirmed with cave paintings. Neanderthals had imagination. And a Neanderthal skeleton was found with an intact hyoid bone that showed they were probably capable of speaking, so they may have had language too! 

experts have been speculating that neanderthals were capable of speech since at least the 1970s-80s. a fully preserved neanderthal hyoid bone was discovered in 1989, but it wasn’t until recently that we have the non-destructive analysis tools to determine that the specimen is virtually identical in shape and function to the hyoid bone of modern humans, meaning neanderthals likely spoke, and may have been capable of complex language. because of the dimensions of their vocal tract, though, they probably couldn’t produce the same quantal vowel sounds as anatomically modern humans, making their speech sound different than ours. (fun fact: this study also found that because of their relatively short vocal tract in comparison with that of homo sapiens, neanderthals may have had higher pitched voices, in the soprano range)

neanderthals could most definitely experience emotions, including compassion and love. they buried their dead. they cared for their disabled and elderly. they used feathers and bird claws for personal ornamentation. all of these things are very human things. compassion and love are also very human things.

and there’s a reason for this–neanderthals were extremely closely related to us. while recent research has upheld their status as a separate species (homo neanderthalensis) instead of a subspecies of homo sapiens, they could and did interbreed with our anatomically modern human ancestors. almost all modern humans carry a small percentage of neanderthal DNA (about 2% for people of non-african descent).