There is a video embedded in the news article below, but I was not able to capture it to post here. I found this same video, minus sound, at You Tube, and you can watch and judge for yourselves, minus the distraction of commentary!
Neb-senu is the tall ebony-colored Shabti on the right-end of the row (farthest away from viewer).
Ancient Egyptian Statue Mysteriously Rotates at Museum
By ABC News | ABC News Blogs – 13 hours ago
An ancient Egyptian statue in a British museum has sparked debate after it was captured on video seemingly rotating on its own.
The 10-inch tall statue of Neb-senu has been on display at the Manchester Museum in Manchester, England, for 80 years but it was only recently that museum staff noticed the statue moving.
"Most Egyptologists are not superstitious people. I wondered who had changed the object's position without telling me," the museum's curator, Campbell Price, told the U.K.'s Sun. "But the next time I looked, it was facing in another direction-and a day later had yet another orientation."
With his curiosity piqued, Price returned the statue of the Egyptian idol to its original position in a locked glass case and set up a camera to film the statue over an 11-hour period. The resulting time-lapse video, Price says, shows the statue moving on its own.
Other experts attribute the rotation to a more scientific reasoning, such as subtle vibrations that cause the statue to move.
"The statue only seems to spin during the day when people are in the museum," Carol Redmount, associate professor of Egyptian archeology at the University of California, Berkeley, told ABC News. "It could have something to do with its individual placement and the individual character of the statue."
The statue, made from serpentine, shows what is likely an official with "priestly duties," according to Price, wearing a shoulder-length wig and knee-length kilt.
The hieroglyphs on the back of the statue spell out, "bread, beer and beef," a "prayer for offerings for the spirit of the man," Price told the Sun.
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One of my favorite old-time movies is "Miracle of the Bells." It starred, of all people - Fred MacMurray (he later went on to television fame in the 1960's as the father of "My Three Sons" and a drop-dead gorgeous actress who sported only one name - Valli (Dorothy Sebastian). In the film, she plays an actress who strikes it big by scoring the lead in a major film production of "Joan of Arc" -- but before the film can be completed she dies of -- I think -- tuberculosis. The producers decide to pull the film from distribution rather than working around an ending with an unknown, now dead, although brilliant, actress. Fred MacMurray, who had befriended the "Kid" as he called her, years before, when she was a struggling actress dancing in a two-bit woo-woo show to make ends meet, hits upon an ingenious plan to not only pay homage to the girl he maybe could have loved and maybe even did love and his coldest, calculating most commercial reporter instincts to promote the film and, he hopes, put enough pressure on the Hollywood producers to release the film, which shows the "Kid" at her finest.
And I have to say that, without watching a single scene fresh of the movie, I don't even know if' it has ever been released as a video, just remembering Valli acting as Joan of Arc was a very emotional and transcendent experience as I watched the old film on cable TV years ago in the 1980's (when it was still reasonably priced - I don't have cable TV now).
Anyway, the grand climax of the movie takes place in the actress's hometown church -- a small, struggling mining town in Pennsylvania, I believe. As the church is packed with people for her final memorial service, the bells of the church begin to ring, and all across the town, all other church bells begin to ring too. This is spread across the region, from town to town, city to city, as many church bells begin to ring at precisely the same time, and -- miraculously, all across the United States, as people had read reporter Fred MacMurray's touching tribute to the deceased actress and the demise of her one and only and greatest film role of all time in a movie that would never be seen, was spread across the land in the week before the memorial service took place.
In the local church where the deceased actress lay in a fine coffin beneath a hovering stone sculpture of the Archangel Michael, as the church bells begin to ring, and other bells from other churches join in, filling the air with deafening sound, suddenly, to the amazed eyes of all beholding, the Archangel begins to move!
The Archangel, in fact, moves about 45 degrees so that He is now hovering with (I seem to recall) a mighty sword arched over the dead actress's coffin, as if protecting it, as if blessing it. And the head of the statue appears to be gazing down at her, as she lays at rest.
Of course the story of the miraculous event that occurred in that little, tired church in Pennsylvania, spreads across the United States in a firestorm -- or what was a firestorm back then, when there were only telephones and telegraphs!
Enough publicity is generated, and enough public opinion arises, that the Hollywood producers who had pulled Valli's finest hour as Joan of Arc announce that they are releasing the film after all!
And thus, the Miracle of the Bells ends on a sad, but triumphant note.
Well, it got to me, heh? I still remember so much of it, even after all these years!
Now, let me tell you darlings, Father Paul, who was the young but worldly wise priest of the old parish church where the actress was laid to rest, he was played by none other than a young and very skinny FRANK SINATRA! And he didn't sing a note, either!
Valli went on to play in another bizarre but smash film that has become a cult classic: The Red Shoes.
I do not remember any other films in which she starred. But those two films were enough to fill the plate of a great actress, back in those days.
Anyway -- back to the Miracle of the Bells. Father Paul deduces that it was the vibrations of the extended bell ringing that caused the stone sculpture of Michael the Archangel to swing around on its base to face protectively over Valli's coffin.
Vibrations. The Music of the Goddess. Oh, if only we would stop and take awhile to listen once again to the Divine Music.
P.S. Guess what, darlings! The colorized version of The Miracle of the Bells is available to view on You Tube:
So, is it just vibrations (shades of the Beach Boys' smash song from the mid 1960's Good Vibrations...) that is causing Neb-Senu to spin in his glass case? And was it just good good good vibrations that caused the admittedly fictional stone stature of Michael the Archangel to pivot around on his pedestal to protectively overlook the coffin of the actress played by Valli?
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