dgui

N'ayez pas peur d'être heureux, c'est juste un bon moment à passer. Romain Gary

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.

He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.

In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.

For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.

He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.

He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

German singer Anna-Maria Hefele stunned the world with a viral video showcasing polyphonic overtone singing.

[Sensuality is art... @hirodelaluna_]

Bath 🫶🏻

[Sensuality is art... @hirodelaluna_]

Fin de journée…

[Armée de Terre @armeedeTerre]

Nuit du 5 juin 1944. Les parachutistes de la France Libre sautent sur la Bretagne, juste avant le Débarquement.

Aujourd'hui à 101 ans, Achille Muller, le dernier SAS (Special Air Service) encore en vie, reprend les airs avec le 1er RPIMa 🪂
"Qui ose gagne."

[raymond @raymond28677463]

Sketch de groland qui date de 2019, ils étaient au courant ! 👍🤪🤪

[Marie Bernard @MarieBnard]

Un beau geste au cinéma, c’est lorsque, dans Le Château de ma mère du grand Yves Robert, le film se conclut sur l’une des plus belles phrases de Pagnol et de la littérature française.
C’est dimanche.
C’est Beau Geste.
Et c’est chouette.

[hiddenliburua @hiddenliburua]

La différence entre une métaphore et une périphrase, dans Faut pas prendre les enfants du bon Dieu pour des canards sauvages (Michel Audiard, 1968).

[𝟑 𝐞̀𝐦𝐞 𝐎𝐞𝐢𝐥 @_3emeOeil]

🐹 Elle a fabriqué une petite chemise sur mesure pour ce capybara… et le résultat est incroyablement classe 😭

Avec son calme légendaire et sa tenue parfaitement ajustée, il a l'air ultra chill 😎

[Le Contemplateur @LeContempIateur]

Vous avez tous besoin de voir cette vidéo aujourd’hui 🥰

[dgui @Dgui73]

@WowWowGirls @OlgaKobzarBest Magnifique ce puzzle

[🅶🅾🆁🅺 @Raclure03]

Je pose ça là ... On sait jamais !

[Dr MuVenda @Ndi_Muvenda_]

In Kruger National Park, South Africa, veteran ranger Sipho Nkosi suffered a heart attack while on solo patrol. His vehicle was found empty, and search teams began looking for him.

What the park’s remote trail cameras revealed broke the hearts of everyone who saw the footage.

An old bull elephant — known to rangers as “Mnumzane” (Zulu for “Sir”) — had found Sipho’s body. For three full days and nights, the elephant refused to leave. He stood guard, gently touching the ranger with his trunk, chasing away hyenas and jackals that came too close, and even covering parts of the body with branches and leaves.

On the third night, the elephant was still there — visibly grieving, swaying slowly beside his fallen friend. Only when the full recovery team arrived with vehicles did Mnumzane finally step back, watching solemnly as they carried Sipho away.

Park officials later confirmed that Sipho had rescued this same elephant as a calf years earlier after poachers killed his mother. The elephant had never forgotten.

One colleague who viewed the footage whispered:

“He didn’t come to say goodbye. He came to make sure no one disrespected his brother.”

Mnumzane still visits the exact spot regularly. Rangers now leave fresh water and fruit there in honor of both.

[UFO mania @maniaUFO]

For a few minutes each year, sunlight makes this Yosemite waterfall look like a river of fire.😍

[TBnews @TBNewsFr]

Un chien policier a été mis à la retraite en raison de son âge et vit désormais dans une maison normale avec 3 chatons.

[Love Music @khnh80044]

Still listening to this timeless classic… and it never gets old 💓🎶

[AlloCiné @allocine]

Disclosure Day, le nouveau film événement de Steven Spielberg.
Si tu découvrais que nous ne sommes pas seuls… ça te ferait peur ?
C’est le jour de la révélation.
Disclosure Day, au cinéma le 10 juin.

En collaboration commerciale avec @UniversalFR

[dgui @Dgui73]

@madame_humour Tant que c'est pas dans la boîte à chocolat ça va

[Adenot Sophie @Soph_astro]

Jour 085, orbite 1316 — Saviez-vous que vous pouvez observer la Station spatiale internationale à l’oeil nu ? Depuis le sol, la Station apparaît comme une étoile très brillante qui traverse le ciel à peu près à la vitesse d’un avion de ligne. Mais contrairement à un avion, elle n’a ni phares, ni feux de position clignotants. Ce sont ses panneaux solaires, orientés pour recevoir la lumière du Soleil, qui la rendent si lumineuse lorsque vous la voyez depuis la Terre.

Pour savoir quand nous passons au-dessus de vos têtes et où nous chercher dans le ciel, rendez-vous sur le site https://t.co/VleZSlmKS4… Je ne pourrai pas vous voir, même si vous faites de grands signes, mais je pense à vous depuis là-haut !

📸 @NASA / @esa – S. Adenot 🎥 ESA (temps réel écoulé: 30 min)
#εpsilon • @esaspaceflight • @NASA_Johnson • @Space_Station • @ESA_fr • @CNES

[Andrés Guillén 💋🐺💎 @andresguillen6_]

Lo grandiosa que es @Shakira definitivamente, solo ella sabe hacer unos himnos mundialeros 🙌🏼🇨🇴👑