Although typepad is a very nice blog publishing enviroment, after a month of trial period I came to a conclusion that for my purposes, it's no different than free blog publishing sites like blogger. (Typepad costs 5$ per month). Tomorrow is the last day of my free period. Sometime in the next 24 hours this infant blog will cease to exist in it's old home.
As expected, there are plenty of coffee shops around Brown campus. I usually get my coffee from East Side Perks on Waterman st, between Thayer and Brook streets but as in the case with many people, from time to time I pay my dues to Starbucks on Thayer st as well.
I don't consider myself a coffee guy and most of the time I'm interested in the caffeine content (the more the merrier:)) rather than the taste. At Starbucks I, almost all the time, go for a tall bold coffee.
As fantasy thrillers go (sorry but it's a shame to call them sci-fi), the movie War of the Worlds definitely stands out on its own. Never mind some of the absurd assumptions in the film's plot, I think Spielberg's approach to tell the story is a lot more unique compared to movies such as Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. In the latter ones, you get to see the story from a few people's point of views (usually containing the president of the USA). In War of the Worlds, you experience the story just as you would if it were real in this world. Tom Cruise, while trying to get his kids to safety, desperately struggles in an environment of complete unknowns and neither he nor the viewer gets a chance to understand what the heck is going on in the entire duration of the movie.
Speaking of these movies, what I would really like to see on the silver screen is a movie about the aftermath, explicitly trying to predict how people deal with the near-total destruction of the world if it had happened today.
I remember reading a book as a child that is parallel to this idea. It was by this Turkish author called Halil Ibrahim Balkas and the name is 7 Iklimin Cocuklari (the children of seven climates? - a somewhat crude translation). It starts with the invention of a special weapon that kills anybody greater than 15 years of age but the weapon itself doesn't do any physical damage. By the end of the first chapter practically every nation has this weapon, war breaks out - everybody dies - and the story begins as the kids try to reinvent what has been used before in their quest to take control of the planet again.Common courtesy is a very common way for a lot of people to have an understanding of how civilized a society is. One example of showing some courtesy is to slow down while driving if you are about to go through a puddle next to a sidewalk (especially if there are pedestrians around the area).I was walking on the sidewalk near where I work when a car ran through a puddle and practically showered me. I was pissed, I looked back to swear at the car, I first thought it was a taxi till I realized that it was a Brown SafeRide car.
I remember that this type of a thing happened to me in a lot of places in Turkey, even though I probably was raised in the most civilized city in that country. So I thought - we say American's are a lot more civilized and still same stuff happens to me there. I kept thinking a little more (which is pretty unnecessary but I can't help it) and reached the following conclusion.You don't learn the common courtesy rules at school, you develop them through awareness. Turkish drivers go through a lot more situations to become aware of this common courtesy rule then their American counterparts, however they pretty much behave the same. Would Americans change their behavior if they lived in places like Turkish urban areas, that's a different and tough question to answer.
The first time I encountered this musician (the one sitting and playing baglama) was through a song of Bulent Ortacgil, Pencere Onu Cicegi. He was performing it in a tribute album to Ortacgil. I got to see him live, he does pretty experimentalist and weird stuff with old Turkish Music. Here is a video of him:
This song Selanik Turkusu (selanik=thessaloniki - so hard to spell the word) reminds me of the melodies I've heard at the synagogue back when I was growing up.
For a lot of people that watch these videos, this will all be about a Lebanese Christian lying to promote the "Zionist" interests by adding fear into the minds of regular people. Then I guess, to a lot of pro-Israel people this will be the truth in it's simplest form.
It's very hard to separate propaganda from truth these days. Still, I hope that the many people around me, so eager to accept the "truth" told from specific point of views (which is an oxymoron in itself) will consider this one as well.
Raki - the so called Turkish national drink is also my favorite form of alcohol, especially in the summer time back home on the Aegean sea with some good food and good Turkish music. I unfortunately never drank ituntil the age 19 (it has a very strong aniseed flavor). It all started when I was away from home, traveling in the USA for more than 45 days. I missed it. It seemed pretty strange then - you can't miss something that you have never experienced before, right? Now, when I look back I see it as a minor identity crisis of a guy in his late teens.
Turkey, especially in the 90's was becoming very Americanized, not in terms of
values and thoughts and ideas but in a very materialistic way. So I grow up in that era and almost everything I like in those days (music, film, magazines, books...) is either a direct or an indirect product of the USA... Finally when I made it to the USA for a long vacation, I clearly remember how I felt when my uncle picked me up from Logan and we started driving back to his house: like a kind of home, like a religious-Zionist Jew that found his way back to Israel... Fast forward
a month, I spent time with a friend from high school studying at Drexel at his house in Philadelphia, at a YMCA children's camp in upstate NY, in Boston at my uncle's house and at the end I find myself installing a nice picture of Istiklal Caddesi on my uncle's desktop, downloading bunch of MFO songs and desperately missing Raki.
I guess during my high school and early university years I developed a sense of belonging to merica through the popular culture items that I've chosen to accept from the set that finds it's way to Turkey. What I hadn't considered was that the group of items I've chosen to identify myself was only a very small subset of what USA has been producing and the big picture probably was a lot more different then what I thought. Those 40 days was a time where I, on a subconscious level, realized the surreality of my sense of belonging. Missing Raki was an instinctive reflex to find another notion to belong - because a person always needs to belong - and it somehow helped to figure out my relationship to the land where I was born.
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Raki: How it's consumed? and my current favorite.
My third attempt on blogging has officially begun...
The first one was an extremely personal blog which eventually found its way to deletion... The second one is actually still up and on-hold, it's a blog on my research at LEMS as a graduate student at Brown University. I was actively blogging during last winter break (january 2006) however I didn't work on a lot of research on spring '06 and the summer time was frustrating as none of my proposed algorithms worked due to a hardware error which I was finally able to identify a couple of weeks ago. Anyhow, that is a different story - that blog is still on hold and my aim is to get it back on track with the contributions of my fellow grad students working in my professor's group.
I'll try to update this blog frequently (a few times a week) about the ideas and feelings that I develop through my experiences I encounter in my daily life. I'm kind of aware that good blogging requires a level of discipline and commitment thus this will be a good way to see how I'm doing in these terms...current things going on in my life are:
- confronting two students in my professor's class for copying down answers from the solution manual of the book
- trying to persuade my professor to postpone my progress review 'till early february
- getting a good grasp of the topics in AM0211 - Real Analysis class and be ready for the final on December 12th to secure a B
- deciding between a sony dsc-w50 and casio exilim ex-s600 digital camera
- finishing a 1500 piece puzzle - the tower of babel
- deciding between buying an ipod - or some other form of an mp3 player to buy - this is a pretty interesting decision to make and the process is thought provoking because as I view it, by buying a digital music player you pretty much decide on the service you acquire music as well, which means it's not as simple as buying a digital camera (which in itself is not simple anyway)
