Just A Few Blocks Of Stone

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Just a Few Blocks of Stone

I've had a very busy month with some personal setbacks. So this month I'm not in the mood for writing something funny. Someone in last months wrote about some interesting facts regarding Stonehenge. For those of you who think I'm just a crazy funny guy, well I am, but those that know me more, know that I have a far deeper spiritual side and I've done a lot of research into native beliefs and other cultures. I've written a lot of science fiction and love learning about ancient places. One of the most interesting for myself has always been the Pyramids of Giza. Some old blocks of stone, a friend once said to me. Yup, on that he was correct. But once I begun to look closer at these blocks I begun to realize there is so much more here than some Egyptian scribes working with copper tools could have put together.

So some facts on what is known. The main pyramid contains two and a half million blocks of rock cut from an Aswan quarry six hundred miles away. It weighs an estimated six to seven million tons, which probably doesn’t mean a lot until you consider it’s heavier than all the cathedrals, churches and chapels built in England since the beginning of Christianity, and the tallest structure erected until the Eiffel Tower was built it 1889. The main pyramid was supposedly built by the pharaoh Khufu in twenty years. We now know his name is a forgery put there by an English archeologist which wrongly spelled it as Rhufu, and to this day here's been no true evidence of any pharaoh has ever been found inside the main pyramid, or any inscriptions of any kind. Pretty humble scribes in those days, I'd say.

This is quite a remarkable feat, considering the Egyptians lacked astronomical, geological and mathematical expertise. Although no records recorded anywhere by the Egyptians have shown any details on building, moving or assembling the blocks. Which you'd think some egotistical hotshot would have put into permanent inscriptions. I Know I would.

To build this grand edifice in twenty years would require placing one block every five minutes, day and night, nonstop for twenty years (read this as no unions, no holidays). This doesn’t even include cutting the stone, moving it and building the ramps needed to place them. Setting a mere twenty blocks a day would need 340 years just for the main pyramid to be finished. The easiest way would be floating them up the Nile, man what a traffic jam with all those barges.

Historians claimed that they were erected using an earthen ramp circling the pyramid. Engineering experts have said it is not possible to construct them to such precise dimensions in this manner. Also, that ramp would not be shallow enough to allow the huge blocks to be dragged up it. A ramp of a shallow enough gradient to allow this would have to have been 4,800 feet long - that’s more than three times the length of the pyramid itself - and would have to be built out of stone in order to handle the 5-20 ton blocks. And if it were made of stone, where are the remains? Nothing has ever been found to even suggest how all this was done.

If I've got your attention, here’s where the fun and real mind-blowing stuff starts. The precise nature of the main pyramid is amazing. The difference in length of any of its sides is eight inches. The twenty-two inch thick plain it sits on is within one inch of level on an area of 756 X 756 feet. Which doesn't sound big, but is about ten NFL fields side by side. Gaps between the casing stones measure just a fiftieth of an inch and the apex of the pyramid is located directly over the center, not bad considering this building is forty stories high. Some really good string there and a great plomb bob I'd say.

The lower passageway is 350 feet long. It’s straight to one fiftieth of an inch through the blocks they’ve laid, and straight within a quarter of an inch through 200 feet of solid bedrock. Darn sharp copper chisels and a mighty good eye. Oh, did I forget to mention no evidence of any torches used?

The Meridian Building of the Greenwich Observatory in London was built to align with true north and even it is out by nine-sixtieths of a degree. The main pyramid is aligned to true north within one-twelfth of a degree. It sits exactly on thirty north parallel, that’s an imaginary line one third the distance between the equator and the North Pole. Also, if a line is drawn along the longest land parallel on Earth and the longest land meridian the exact center is the apex of the main pyramid.

Calculations of the length of the King’s Chamber and of the length of the pyramid divided by its height both equal pi. If a line is drawn through the apex of all three pyramids and another through the left shoulder and headdress of the sphinx then the entire Giza complex becomes a Golden Mean Spiral based on the Fibonacci spiral of numbers, which is a sacred set of numbers that govern all patterns and growth in nature. Seashells and watermarks have been found about halfway up the pyramids, carbon dated to around 10,000 BC. These shells, along with a fourteen foot layer of silt around the base of the pyramid, seem to indicate that there was flooding here at one time, a fact which could be further confirmed by the inch-thick sea salt crystals discovered inside the pyramids when they were first opened around 1200 AD. You’re probably thinking ‘how did that happen in the middle of the bleeding desert.

According to the Bible, and fossil records, the Giza area had a lush environment around 10,000 BC. This was also the time of the great flood. Erosion marks on the Sphinx, which, by the way, is the largest limestone structure in the world, shows that it was subjected to rain storms for thousands of years and is perhaps far older than the pyramids. Seashell growth on the Sphinx also indicates that it too was underwater at some time. Lastly, the alignment of the pyramids is the same as the three stars of Orion’s belt as they appeared from Earth in 10,500 BC. The two larger pyramids were originally encased in white limestone and the smaller in red to resemble the color of the three stars as seen in the night sky. The Egyptians weren’t the only ones to build pyramids dedicated to Orion. In Xian, China.

You'll find what look like the same configuration of seven pyramids. Also built in Teotihuacan in Mexico is again the same configuration of pyramids. If you draw a straight line across the globe, oddly enough they all link up.  Which makes my scratch my head and say, "Very Interesting. Weird, but very interesting." I like to think facts are stronger than fiction. So if I've got your curiosity piqued, go grab a tape measure and give your local travel agent a call and check out those old blocks of stone.

Note: Photos courtesy of the New York Public Library

Goodbye Julian Bond, hero and powerful voice for justice, By Sandy Semerad

“Those were the days,” Julian Bond said, as I handed him a copy of my novel, A MESSAGE IN THE ROSES.

“It’s based on the murder trial I covered as a reporter in Atlanta back in the 1980s,” I explained.  He remembered the trial and the Klan march I wrote about in the novel.

            I felt fortunate to have reconnected with him. I wanted granddaughter Cody to meet a fearless and cool civil rights activist and listen to him speak at the Destin Library in Destin, Florida.

Although that was a year ago, it seems like yesterday. I can’t believe he’s no longer with us.

We have lost a hero and a powerful voice for justice.

I first saw Julian on television at the Democratic National Convention. He was nominated for Vice President of the United States, leading up to the 1968 election.  He was only 28 and had to decline, due to a constitutional age requirement of 35.

            Julian was ahead of his time. He began his activism at 17.  He helped lead the sit-in movement to fight segregation in Atlanta, and bravely spoke out with a deep and resonant voice for those with no voice in the Jim Crow South.

He was one of the Freedom Riders with Martin Luther King, Jr. and later helped start the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

            In 1965, he was elected to the Georgia House of Representative. (The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act had given blacks the opportunity to vote).

Although he was lawfully elected to serve, the Georgia House refused to seat him, because he had endorsed SNCC’s policy opposing the Vietnam War.

            Julian refused to back down. He fought for his rightful seat in the House. He took his case all the way to the United States Supreme Count. The high court ruled (Bond v. Floyd) in his favor, stating the Georgia House of Representatives couldn’t deny his freedom of speech. He went on to serve four terms in the Georgia House and six terms in the Georgia Senate.

            I remember meeting him face to face for the first time at a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Atlanta. We kept running into each other while talking to the same people. We laughed at this coincidence and he said, “Must be in the stars.”

            And speaking of stars, he was a bright and shining beacon of hope, who spoke out for what he thought was right. For decades he's been saying black lives matter, women’s rights matter, gay rights matter, human rights matter, and he never gave up the fight.

“If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married,” he has said. He was born African American, just as some people were born gay, he said.

            Thanks to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Julian co-founded with Morris Dees, the Klan lost its vicious bite.  SPLC sought justice on behalf of victims. These lawsuits helped to break the Klan financially.

            I could go on and on about Julian Bond’s accomplishments. Not only was he a civil rights activist, commentator, eloquent speaker, professor, author, poet, Saturday Night Live host and occasional actor, he was also a husband, father and grandfather.

“He advocated not just for African-Americans but for every group, every person subject to oppression and discrimination, because he recognized the common humanity in us all,” Morris Dees has articulately said.

I say amen to that, as I bid farewell to a great man.

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