DAY ONE HUNDRED!!!!!!!

Major marker today! Day one hundred! AND TO CELEBRATE THE NETWORK HAS BLOCKED THE EVIL WEBSITE THAT I REQUESTED THEY BLOCK WITH INFORMATION ABOUT GRAD SCHOOLS! STEP ONE OF GRAD SKOOL IS EVIL IS COMPLETE! With congratulations and thanks to everyone for this momentous victory, make sure to keep the pressure on foiling grad skool's attempt to brainwash our friends.

last night was one of two celebrations for the greek orthodox mardi gras. beginning with a fairly large parade (with a maypole and fire dancers!), the party continued on at a club where the maypole came out as a rembetiko band played lively music. friends of the band also gave us the mish on all of them, including that there are, in fact, clarinet groupies, some of whom hit on my future husband, a talented clarinet/sax player who also plays guitar all while lookin fine. the celebration continues tonight in ferikoy with what has been reported to me to be a more authentic experience.

rumor has it that i'll be able to help make and install a maypole in the garden of a friend's house for may day. this excites me to no end!

taksim comes from an improvisation in music which is very common to rembetiko (as well as turkish and arabic music).

A story about Zedzed, one of the first and greatest international men of mystery. Born in Anatolia, he was a bigamist, pimp, honorary knight, friend of kings (and hated by others), and international arms dealer. Plus, his adopted name is Zedzed, which I think is awesome. The story is seriously fascinating, telling of his life in numerous countries, including Turkey/Greece, Belgium, the UK, Ireland, Cyprus, America, Russia, France and Argentina. Every facet of his life is just as unusual, including that he was given 10 million GBP and traveled to Switzerland in an effort to buy Turkey (as it's called in the article, actually, the Ottoman empire) out of WW1. Apparently stopped at the border, Turkey would have done much better accepting that bribe, though the article does seem to indicate land concessions would have been part of the deal.

As interesting is that the article mentions the corruption within the Constantinople Fire Brigade, which was explored in a great fictional book about Ottoman Istanbul, the Janissary Tree, which also notes the roles the Janissaries had doing the same thing before the brigade: setting fire for intimidation and profit. Shoutout to Ryan to use this stuff for his report on the Galata tower, which was used for a long time as one of the several fire watch towers in the city.

If you want to get riled up and angry at incompetent detectivizing, read this about an autistic man who may well have been killed by his caretaker.

Another really interesting longform article is this one, about the Seattle bridge and a suicide prevention fence. It quotes this article about jumpers from the New Yorker which brings back memories of one of the sadder events I remember from college, when the US decided to invade Iraq, announced as we were going to the CEDA debate tournament. Foremost in many on the teams' minds were the impact this would have on our various positions and cases, which I thought was just a horrible reaction (the impact on a fictionalized, fake world of a real world event that would deeply affect so many lives). I actually think the New Yorker article is more interesting, containing as it does an account from a man - one of 26 total - who fell from the Golden Gate bridge (accidentally, sort of) and lived, only to commit suicide as a form of war protest.

I do have one criticism though, which is that I'm not particularly sure that the survivor who is now making money being an inspirational speaker talking about depression is really the right signal to send... Survive the bridge attempt, live, and then make money off of it? I guess there's nothing wrong, per se, with it, but something just strikes me as not cool about that. one of the awards the individual who i'm not a big fan of won is called the "flying viking" award, which i think is awesome.

[And a final caveat regarding the study cited in the New Yorker and Seattle Net: in my opinion the study cited does not prove that the 515 individuals who are prevented from jumping from the bridge wouldn't or didn't try to kill themselves elsewhere. The study just shows that the rate -- about 10% die from suicide or violent deaths -- is much lower than the mortality rate of jumping from the bridge. If people attempted to commit suicide in a different way, noted in both articles to be much less effective, it is possible that the average success rate would only be about 10%, particularly since the people who lived were ones who were able to be talked down from the bridge.]

I HAD LASER PORTRAITS TOO! AND A PERM! ah the 90s.