Unguided Blog

According to Global Voices Online, I happened to learn that a Turkish soap opera, Nur (or Noor, your preference, the former spelling is Turkish, the latter for you to correctly pronounce it), has become a hit in the Arab world, with reports of fights and even divorces occurring because of the obsession of many women with the handsome male star, Kivanç Tatlitug, who plays Muhannad (I did not know such a name existed, by the way). The series it seems, not only caused quite a stir in the Arab speaking blogosphere, but also among all-knowing-always-talking religious clerics.

I am pleased, really. No, not for the supposedly increasing divorce rates but for those who cunningly mask their desire to dominate the female of the species behind religion. They must be in shock. Women… like… men? (I will regret this phrase and the title of this post which will force Google and the company push wild and interesting ads -sigh-) What a novel idea!

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Free, my a55! I almost forgot that our beautiful government has been blocking YouTube for more than two months. I was reading a friend’s blog (Hi, SFO), and he linked to a YouTube video of Tito Puento interpreting Dave Brubeck’s famous classic “Take Five”. Naturally I clicked it. And I waited, waited, refreshed, and waited some more. Nope, nothing’s happening. After a few more tries, I almost gave up, thinking the site was down. Then it occurred to me that those beautiful people in the government of ours, the chimpanzees, sorry champions of democracy, who were closer to God (well, they are closer than me, for sure) denied access to YouTube so that no harm would come to 70 million citizens of this country.

I remember the days of military regime. Good old days! Even those, the top brass I mean, were kind enough to let you know what was allowed and what was not. Even censorship must have rules and principles, don’t you think so? They could have smoothly redirected me to a page, telling how censor was good for me and my children, how it was done for the benefit of the many, of the bright days ahead, a secure place in the heavens, etc, etc. No? Is it not my right as a voting and tax paying citizen to know that a site is blocked? Don’t I have a right to know? What happened to the rule of accountability and transparency in government? I am disappointed. I really am.

As a law abiding citizen, of course I did not access YouTube, directly I mean. I watched the video and wanted to share with you. The embedding code was problematic, though. It was not XHTML 1.0 strict but a quick search yielded positive results and after changing the code slightly, the video has taken its place in my non-democratic blog where I am the sole benevolent dictator. Hope you like it.

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Just by co-existing we affect our environment. It will be naive to assume that in order to protect environment every development effort must be stopped or rejected. World population is increasing, recession is on our doorstep, so there will be an increasing pressure to exploit natural resources and habitats. Hence, an optimum has to be sought by all environmentalists. Investment and property development may adversely affect nature but so does unemployment, hunger and poverty.

A few minutes ago I read Greenewalt’s and Ekolof’s names have been given to the meeting room and the main restaurant of Lydia Sardes Hotel which will serve as a thermal resort and congress center in Salihli, Manisa.

Professor Crawford H. Greenewalt is still directing the archaeological research and the digging of course in the ancient city of Sardes and he is not informed of the gesture, yet. Sufi poet Gunnar Ekolof on the other hand, was deeply in love with Sardes. His “Divan for Prince of Emgion” (published in 1965) was written in Sard, the ancient city of Sardes. After his death on 16 March 1968, his ashes were flown over the Sard river near Artemis Temple as per his will.

Although accepting guests since March 2008, the hotel will officially be opened in the Fall of this year and a “guest of honor” card will be given to Prof. Greenewalt (American). A ceremony for Swedish poet Ekolof will also be held in the event.

I consider most if not all of these as marketing pranks, but I have not seen the place, yet. If the management is as half considerate as in their selection of names, I expect something good. It will definitely be on my check list. Until then, I can only thank them for remembering Greenewalt and Ekolof.

I decided to give a try to this SezWho thing, Entrecard’s latest innovation. After registering, I duly went to the download page only to find a few plug-ins, naturally for the popular blogging scripts only. Probably being the only person using an obscure yet simple script, I decided to download the developer’s edition, hoping I could manage to make it work by editing a few files (One thing Slackware teaches you is you learn to edit all sorts of configuration files without being a programmer. I even managed to configure a working sendmail once, go figure. That incident did not repeat, though).

I skimmed through the code for a few hours with a 100% Zen attitude (vodka-martini also helped). Apparently comments had to be stored in database tables (my understanding, I could be wrong) and my script was just appending them to the post in pure text. Now that I knew the problem, I could solve it, could I not? There was a minor glitch, though: not only I did not write a single line of code in my life including the notorious Hello World!, I had zero knowledge of MySql. The solution? Easy! I immediately downloaded one of Juliet’s (in order not to offend anyone) Teach Yourself MySql in 10 Minutes type of books, the dummy’s edition.

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I have first read about Japanese bloggers Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki’s arrest in Sheryadi.com. According to Greenpeace, Sato and Suzuki have been arrested for the crime of exposing the truth [greenpeace.org]. They were writing about the whale meat embezzlement in Japan.

Frankly, I am really surprised. Had this been in Turkey, I would not have been shocked, it would have been an ordinary day. After all, we have a beautiful (get used to my choice of adjectives) government, smart business people disposing of dump a spoonful at a time, and fishermen attacking the Greenpeace vessel. But you see, unlike Japan, we are poor. Even with the new calculation method of our high-IQ government, the per ca pita income can not reach usd 8,000; this being temporary, though. I have been informed that they are devising a brand new method so that the figure will effortlessly (how about this adverb?) reach usd 10,000 in no time.

But Japan? One of the richest countries in the world? No, I am not talking about the two bloggers, if you talk too much you end up in jail, right? Why does a rich country like Japan depend on whale hunting for income? We have cows (not the mad ones, ours are smart) in Turkey, they can buy some, instead.

Look at Canada! They also kill those seals but nobody is arrested for blogging about it. Does whale meat taste that good that nobody can stand criticism? Apparently I’ve got to get some and taste it before I can make an objective decision about it.

No? You don’t want to taste it? Maybe you can write to bigger-than-whale-authorities for release of the two bloggers [Greenpeace].