Five Bullets 1.27.23
This week: Cleopatra's Needle, Last of Us, Whodunits & more
Hello and welcome back to Circles In Space for Five Bullet Friday, where each Friday I share some interesting stuff I collected during the week.
Good morning everyone! I hope you had a good week. It’s finally stopped raining here in New York City. The weather is cool and sunny today.
I picked up a new iPhone 13 mini this week. My last phone was a 6s and lasted about 5 years. I’m amazed at the 13’s lightening fast speed and some features that I didn’t have on my old phone including the camera’s ability to take low light photos and the photo-to-text option in Apple Notes (already my favorite). Also - in a recent update, Apple launched Freeform ,a mind-mapping and brainstorming app which I’m excited to try out.
Happy birthdays to: Django Reinhardt, Benny Golson, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. RIP photojournalist Marilyn Stafford.
This week’s bullets:
Cleopatra’s Needle, located in New York’s Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is an Egyptian obelisk dating back to 1450 BC. It was erected at the ancient city of Heliopolis and stood alongside it’s twin at a temple to honor the Pharaoah Thutmose II. 200 years later, heiroglyphs were added to honor Rameses II. Around 12 BCE it was moved by the Romans to Alexandria where it was placed at a temple originally built by Cleopatra to honor Julius Caeser. In the 1870s, Egypt gifted the obelisk to the United States to commemorate the opening of the Suez Canal. The obelisk was transported by the US Navy, paid for by William Henry Vanderbilt, and installed in Central Park in 1881.
Some interesting articles to share this week:
The New Yorker details the journey of Last of Us from video game to TV series.
Harper’s Magazine on the house museums of New Orleans, owned and operated by community members seeking to preserve their local history.
Continuing with my ‘whodunit’ trend, this week I’ve been watching Magpie Murders about the death of mystery writer Alan Conway. His editor Susan Ryeland, with the help of Conway’s fictional detective Atticus Pund, tries to solve the author’s murder. The series is based on the novel by Anthony Horowitz.
On this date in history - January 27, 1945 Soviet troops liberate Auschwitz, Poland.
I’ve been listening to Music of Syria - a collection of field recordings by the prolific Deben Bhattacharya, a Bengali radio producer, music producer, ethnomusicologist, writer and filmmaker. Another Bhattacharya production to check out: Music on the Desert Road, recorded during a trip from England to India and includes music from Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, India & more.
Got something to share? Leave me a comment! I’m always on the lookout for something new to dive into.
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That's all for this week!
As always, thanks for reading and have a great weekend.
I'm reading "The Message of the Sphinx" by Graham Hancock and he mentioned that the other Cleopatra's Needle in London along the Thames River has a large cigar box buried beneath it with its contents unknown. It was buried by brothers John and Waynman Dixon. Waynman discovered some relics in a shaft of the Great Pyramid which the British Museum supposedly still has.