January 2012
33 posts
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The 'Vogue of the Veiled': Turkish Women's... →
It wasn’t the usual images — those of long shapely legs and deep cleavage — that outraged Ibrahim Burak Birer, 31. Rather, it was pictures of penises and of fake, strap-on breasts which convinced him that things were getting out of hand. Birer had happened upon a series of photos on the subject of trans-sexuality printed in a major international fashion magazine.
The photos...
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“But I should have been there with you
The night you died
I think a part of me...”
– Thomas Dolby, Neon Sisters, Astronauts and Heretics
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After Being Stricken By Drought, Istanbul Yields... →
For 1,600 years, this city — Turkey’s largest — has been built and destroyed, erected and erased, as layer upon layer of life has thrived on its seven hills.
Today, Istanbul is a city of 13 million, spread far beyond those hills. And on a long-farmed peninsula jutting into Lake Kucukcekmece, 13 miles west of the city center, archaeologists have made an extraordinary find.
The find is Bathonea,...
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me: Craaazy ex-boyfriends, you can't find 'em in a grocery store~
anne: what
me: Craaazy ex-boyfriends, you can't buy 'em in a ba-ke-ry~
anne: All my ex-boyfriends are dead.
baba: That's because you were thorough.
He was kidding, but this actually happens.
d: "No applicant of the company will discriminate against an applicant for employment or a fellow employee because of race, creed, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, or other physical or mental disability."
r: BUT SINCE BEING QUEER IS A CHOICE, UR FIRED
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Edith Grossman Frowns: On the Challenges of... →
As a teenager, when I started to read novels in translation, I ran so often into expressions like “fruncir el ceño,” “entrecerrar los ojos” and “encogerse de hombros” that I thought they were common usage in Spanish. Only later, when I learned that Spanish-language writers didn’t use them (or they shouldn’t), I realized that these phrases had been made up by the translators, who had agreed to...
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Rick Perry Camp Explains Suggestion That Turkey Is... →
In response to a question about whether or not Turkey should still be a part of NATO, Rick Perry suggested some consider the country to be ruled by “Islamic terrorists.”
“Obviously when you have a country that is being ruled by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists,” Perry said during the debate.
Victoria Coates, foreign policy advisor to Perry, further...
-> Ft. Lauderdale
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As I was napping, I thought of something profound.
And then I woke up with the intent to write it down and it slipped delicately out of my head without even leaving me a note.
I hate when this happens.
Checked in.
Let’s get this conference started.
-> Orlando
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Daft Punk's Alive 2007 is great everything music.
End of line.
There’s a certain stillness out there that you can’t find in the city, out there where the radio waves and the television and the wireless internet stops and the true silence begins.
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“When he married, when he bought the nasty little apartment out in Ferhatpaşa and...”
– Ian McDonald, The Dervish House
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I think the Doomsday Clock is a stupid symbol.
Instead of debating how close a metaphorical clock is to midnight and what that means in terms of our imminent destruction, why don’t we put on our grownup pants and acknowledge that, as the human race, we’re fucking up pretty hard and just start doing things about it?
because of this
Next thing you know, truant officers will be...
Me: (lifting an 18-foot palm frond and bringing it to the curb)
Jamaican woman walking by: Wot a little gyal like you doin liftin a branch that big?!
Me: Well, it fell off one of our trees...
Her: (looking stern and shaking a finger) Be kyerful!
Dear Twitter,
If you’re going to encourage translation for fun and not translation for competition you should probably stop telling your users their current level and how far they have to their next one after
every
thing
we do.
I see this as an inadvertent encouragement of lower quality in exchange for a sweet translator badge, as well as a bit of a double standard.
Occasionally, very very rarely, something comes along that is so beautiful, so impossibly good, that you find yourself challenging your own beliefs, because you’ve been bitter and cynical and hiding in your own shadow for so long that anything that challenges you mustn’t be real, but it is real, and you almost find yourself praying to an uncertain god that it isn’t taken away...
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Bundan sonra
sadece mutluluğuylu ağlayacağım.
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The Minute.
Sixty seconds.
Sometimes it’s a hot minute. A short, sizzling instant, or a more prolonged smolder.
Sometimes it’s only a minute. Just a minute, to be taken advantage of, trifled with, endured. Just wait a minute. It’s not so difficult.
Other times it is the collective body of the agonizingly small, the detailed, the meticulous, possibly the unimportant, the cousin of the...
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December 2011
25 posts
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Astrologers and the Ottoman →
No one knows the future, although a lot of people would like to. No one knows either when mankind first looked at the stars and thought they saw the future. There is general agreement that astronomy and astrology arose in the Middle East and passed through the ancient Greeks to the Romans. Where Islam is concerned, it was the Arabian Desert Bedouins who knew about the moon and stars. Later,...
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“This day I had ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the...”
– Elie Wiesel, Night
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A couple weeks ago, I was involved with localizing...
Pretty cool, right? Here’re some screenshots of the Google docs we were using.
One was solely for the .tr people, and this was a collection of all the languages. Both are now closed, and any suggested translation fixes will be submitted as bug reports via email.
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The most important lesson I have taken from the last three and a half years is this: that even though we find ourselves drawn to the things we know and are comfortable with, it is important to challenge this comfort. If you are standing at the edge of a precipice between two stages in your life and you feel nervous or even scared, you’re doing it right.
So I guess I’m an alumnus now.
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“Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? The Facebook...”
– William Deresiewicz, Faux Friendship
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Can Turkey Make Its Mosques Feminist? →
A campaign to make Istanbul’s roughly 3,100 mosques more welcoming for women could set off a gender revolution in Turkey’s places of Islamic worship - and one that may not be uniformly welcomed.
Read more…