Shawn Emily

39. I'm sorry that I got fat. I will slim down. ILLINOIS WILL CONQUER.

[Shawn Emily @STEmily86]

@BostonNooga

[Shawn Emily @STEmily86]

@hochman Can't hear Root Beer Rag without picturing a Dominique Wilkins dunk

[Shawn Emily @STEmily86]

@BostonNooga Let he who is without free time blow the first load

[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.

[Shawn Emily @STEmily86]

@am_monarchist "Because less than 3 percent of you people read books."

[Shawn Emily @STEmily86]

"YOU ARE THE MOTHER-FUCKING-ANTI-CHRIST!"

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Happy 59th Birthday to Paul Giamatti!

[Shawn Emily @STEmily86]

I've saved the St. Louis Browns more times than I can count

[Mandy Kong 🦍 @mirann_darrow]

No, you don't need to make a baseball version of 82-0.

OOTP has existed since 1999 and actually allows you to realistically simulate each game with your historically constructed rosters. You can even field a team consisted of 25 clones of Jose Canseco. You can do anything.

[Kachii @badasskachii]

The World Cup is the only tournament where you’ll randomly remember a player you haven’t thought about since 2006 because why am I thinking of David Trezeguet this morning

[Lloyd Legalist @LloydLegalist]

I'm sure you're all wondering why I've gathered you here today.

[Shawn Emily @STEmily86]

@AugieNash 1 in the hand is worth 3 in the bush

[Shawn Emily @STEmily86]

@biohazard_2236 @Justin_SofOK @TalleyFOW "At least let me draw a fucking house out of it"

[Shawn Emily @STEmily86]

When the jackpot is 1.5 billion dollars, the daydream is worth 2 bucks

[Dave Jones @eevblog]

Unpopular opinion:
Smug people who like to say "The lottery is a tax on people who can't do math" are wrong, they don't get it, at all.

People don't buy a lottery ticket because they think it's a good investment, or because they are too stupid to do the math. They buy it for psychological, social, and entertainment reasons.

The lottery ticket is the cost of buying into the social conversation at the lunch time table at your daily work grind as you discuss with your colleagues what you are going to say to your boss when you win it this week.

The lottery ticket is the weekly mental and social sugar hit just like your daily coffee is, or your daily wine, or your daily beer, or your daily durry. Which incidentally aren't great investments either, and could likewise be (unfairly) considered a tax on the weak willed.

The lottery ticket is the price to be able to have some fun and dream a little.
Sure, it's not the only way you can do that, but it is certainly a legit way.

So, food for thought as you go with your work collogue to the coffee shop, or to the courtyard to smoke your durry tomorrow.

BTW, no, I don't play the lottery, but I understand people. And thinking people can't do the math, that ain't it, Chief.

[Shawn Emily @STEmily86]

@nocontextfm1

[Richard Roeper @RichardERoeper]

Crucial Taunt is out.

[Corey Miller @corey_miller5]

Cardinals Hall of Famer Al Hrabosky goes "tarps off" on the #STLCards pregame broadcast while chugging a Budwesier.

Ok, I'm calling it. Summer in St. Louis can begin.

[Shawn Emily @STEmily86]

@MurrayHillGuy1

[Lasagna Del Rey🍉🏳️‍🌈 @jennmint]

BREAKING: Zack Attack have pulled out of the Great American State Fair.

[Shawn Emily @STEmily86]

@LocalSoundwave

[Shawn Emily @STEmily86]

The owners are going to win this time around because they came out of the gate with what the public is going to see as a pretty reasonable deal. The superstars will have to take less but lower level pay is going substantially up? Turning that down is going to be a tough PR sell.

[Dan Viens 🎙(Seahawks Forever Podcast) @SeahawksForever]

This is fascinating….

If you add up the payroll spend that would be LOST due to the proposed hard cap in MLB, it comes to just over $587 million.

Add up the money that would have to be SPENT by the lower-payroll teams to reach the proposed floor and it’s $570 million.

When we’re talking about this much money that’s essentially a wash. (That’s a difference of what Ronald Acuna Jr. makes in a year)

Seems like a pretty tough sell for the players union in their attempt to spin the idea that this proposal would take money out of the players pockets.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Happy "Dazed & Confused" day!