FOXSYLVANIA

– – I love the notion of accursed artifacts, articles from antiquity bearing some kind of spell, curse, or enchantment.  Because of this, I think it’s totally cool that an ancient Egyptian statuette in the Manchester Museum in Great Britain is rotating seemingly on its own, and sensibly away from visiting tourists!  This ten-inch high statue, an offering to Osiris the ancient Egyptian God of Death,  dates back to about 1800 BC, and has been in the museum’s collection for about 80 years.

Some, of course, are claiming that supernatural forces are behind the statue’s rotation, while physicist Brian Cox offers the explanation that the movement is a function of differential friction, where the subtle vibrations of passing foot traffic make the statue move; the statuette only moves in the daytime during museum hours.  But before we call out the Hardy boys or arm mummy nemesis Brendan Fraser with a gun, perhaps we should harken to the inscription on the back of the figure, and provision it with the beer, bread, and beef that it’s calling for from one of the many excellent English pubs about…