Another Memorial, Another Controversy

I've been covering the WTC reconstruction and memorialization efforts, but have only covered the memorial efforts in Shanksville, PA only tangentially.

Maybe I should be covering the issue more, especially considering that it seems to be run in the same fashion as the memorial efforts in Lower Manhattan.

According to the Qibla finder, which goes according to the shortest route (in this case, over the North Pole), the midpoint of the "Cresent of Embrace" points directly towards Mecca, if you imagine an arrow nocked in the "bow" of the crescent.

Thanks to Aaron of Lifelike Pundits for that graphic.

More Credit: I'm sorry, but I don't know who should properly be credited with the pic. Aaron of Lifelike Pundits sent it to me, but Politicalities credits it to "Etaoin Shrdlu," by way of "Zombie."

Incidentally, Politicalities calculates the angle of the crescent mathematically and finds that the line bisecting its midpoint interesects with Mecca with an error smaller than 1/580th of the arc of a circle. A fair amount less than one degree.

SarahW at Blue Merle first caught that the "Crescent of Embrace" actually points directly to Mecca... Go there for the complete explanation. And for a link to the Qibla finder, so you can prove this to yourself.

Is the Marxist designer of this "memorial" going to tell us that's yet another inadvertant coincidence, based only on the fact that he finds this particular Mecca-pointing tilt of the crescent "aesthetically pleasing"?

Curious indeed!