Today’s image could have been shot thousands of years ago if they’d had cameras back then. I took this photo with my smartphone from the top of our Nile River cruise ship one morning. All along the banks of the Nile you could see similar fertile farmland, captured in an ever so narrow strip of green crops and palms. In some places, you’d see cattle on the beach as their owners worked their fields. The biggest clue that this wasn’t a 3000-year-old scene was the occasional pumphouse that brought the life-giving water from the Nile into the fields to help feed the hungry people on the far side of the band of green.
As I took in this type of sight several days, I was always struck by the sense that this ancient land and the way that many people still live has been unchanged for millennia. There’s not that many places where that is true, but Egypt is certainly one of them.
The simple fact of the matter, though, is that as Egypt’s population has been exploding, they cannot grow enough food to feed their people and are forced to import large quantities from other countries. It is not likely that this fact will change, creating a real problem for the future of the people of Egypt.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: in 2013, 34-year-old aerialist Nik Wallenda became the first person to walk a high wire across the Little Colorado River Gorge near Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. Wallenda wasn’t wearing a safety harness as he made the quarter-mile traverse on 2-inch-thick steel cable some 1,500 feet above the gorge. In June of the previous year, Wallenda, a member of the famous Flying Wallendas family of circus performers, became the first person to walk a tightrope over Niagara Falls.
Nik Wallenda learned to walk on a wire as a young boy, and made his professional debut as an aerialist at age 13. He went on to set a number of Guinness World Records, including the longest tightrope crossing on a bicycle and the highest eight-person tightrope pyramid. In 2011, Wallenda hung from a high-flying helicopter above Branson, Missouri, by his teeth. That same year, he and his mother successfully completed the high-wire walk in Puerto Rico that had killed Karl Wallenda.
On June 15, 2012, Nik Wallenda became the first person to walk directly over Niagara Falls on a high wire. He crossed an 1,800-foot-long, 7-ton wire from the U.S. side of the falls to the Canadian side at a height of around 200 feet in about 25 minutes. Because the event was televised around the world, broadcast officials required the famous funambulist to wear a safety tether in case he fell.
The following June, Wallenda made his Grand Canyon traverse. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt and holding a 43-pound balancing pole, he prayed out loud as he walked untethered across a 1,400-foot-long, 8.5-ton cable suspended 1,500 feet above the Little Colorado River. It was the highest walk of his career up to that point, and he completed it in just less than 23 minutes. – The History Channel
TRIVIA FOR TODAY: The barbershop pole represents the medical history of being a barber. The red represents blood, and the white represents bandages. Some barber poles have blue, which could represent veins.
Twolfgcd's Blog (Galen Dalrymple) 