You can forget Marmaris, even Icmeler, aks me and I will open your eyes. Just look at Marmaris, if you ask me it feels like a British Colony. Same in Icmeler.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT
City of imperial purple
By Ali Sirman

ALL over the world, cities and countries have trees, fruits and even vegetables as their symbols. Lebanon has its cedar, which flourishes on the national flag. Canada has its instantly evocative maple leaf. And Paris for me, although Hollywood prefers to identify it by the Eiffel Tower, means chestnut trees.

Some natural bounty does cause negative reactions. Parisians no longer enjoy Jerusalem artichokes, because they remember being forced to eat them during the hungry years of the second world war. (The Eiffel Tower has its detractors too: they say that Anatole France so hated it that he made a point of lunching there every day. When a friend asked him why, he answered: "Very simple. It’s the only place in Paris from where I can’t see the Eiffel Tower.")

In Istanbul, when I was young, the city itself and all its separate neighbourhoods each had their own symbols. Cengelkoy had a cucumber. Bayrampasha (whose green fields later became the site of the biggest prison in the Middle East and the Balkans) had an artichoke. Langa had romaine lettuce, which you don’t find anywhere these days. Kanlica had yoghurt. Whenever anyone mentions Arnavutkoy, you instantly think of strawberries. And Kavak had its figs, which people went out and picked in the gardens when they ripened in autumn.

When I look back and ask myself which fruit or vegetable was most characteristic of Istanbul - and which left the most profound mark on the city - the answer is Solanum melongena, the aubergine. Istanbul fell deeply in love with it, and created some of its best recipes.

I have good reasons for saying that the aubergine has left a profound mark on the life of Istanbul and its urban fabric. It caused whole neighbourhoods to burn and others to be built. Ahmet Rasim, an Istanbul-based author, tells that in the 19th century, during summer (the aubergine season), wooden houses, thoroughly dried out by the sun, would catch fire when cats tipped over braziers where people had been frying or grilling aubergines on hot coals. With the poyraz, the north wind, fanning the flames, entire districts would be reduced to cinders.

At the time Istanbul had no fire brigade. What it did have were tuhumbaci, who would run to the scene of the fire carrying water pumps on their backs, more of a competitive sport than a public service. Each neighbourhood had its own team of firefighters. They were young men, good-looking, fast runners, and, of course, poor. The point of the competition was not putting out the fire but getting to the scene of the fire first. The sport had its own rules. A person would think twice before asking "Where’s the fire?", for fear of insult. The first proper fire brigade was set up by the Hungarian Count Szecseny, who was made a pasha in 1874, after the famous fire of Pera in 1870 when 3,000 buildings burned down.

So what happened to these neighbourhoods destroyed by fires sparked by that guilty vege table culprit? Their inhabitants found themselves a new building site on a piece of wasteland, which was plentiful in those days. First they built a house, then a mosque (leaving room for a cemetery), and once all that had been set in place, what was left over became the street. That is how Istanbul was built - the houses came first, and improvised streets followed. Foreigners sometimes wonder why Istanbul’s roads, even its main avenues, are never straight, but always winding and twisty. Well, that is the reason: first came the buildings, and the roads a poor second. When Turks complain about Istanbul’s straggling layout, they are forgetting that its structure has literally grown out of their history.

The aubergine has had a profound influence on the social life of the city. It was said to have been brought by the Spaniards from southeast Asia in the 17th century, but it already featured in cookbooks at the time of Sultan Fatih Mehmet the Conqueror a century before. The tastiest recipes were created in Istanbul, because the city was the capital of the Ottoman empire, a multinational creation with one of the three best culinary traditions in the world. This makes nonsense of the battles between Greeks and Turks as to whether a certain recipe is "ours" or "yours". Ottoman cuisine was the result of collective creativity arising from multi-ethnic cohabitation.

In my opinion the subtlest dish in the aubergine repertoire is hunkar begendi ("the sovereign relished it"), a delicacy of the Ottoman court. The aubergine is grilled, and with a little flour and cheese, served as an accompaniment to meat. It was a palatial dish.

In Ottoman times the variety of aubergine dishes, some eaten hot and some cold, ranged from tursu (a pickle) to aubergine preserve. This jam, which is made in the south of Turkey, in Antalya, is exquisite. It’s a great surprise to anyone tasting it for the first time, and until you taste it you can’t imagine how well the aubergine suits the art of jam-making.

It is hard to list all the possible aubergine dishes, so the following are just a few suggestions. Salad, made with grilled aubergines, has five variants: ordinary salad; braised, which is eaten hot in the southeast of the country; the chaka-chuka eaten in some regions, which contains fragments of tomatoes and finely chopped green peppers; and a dish eaten in Izmir in which the aubergine is braised but not pureed. Sometimes the differences between these dishes are a matter of nuance, as with French cheeses. If you want to eat a really delicious aubergine salad in Istanbul, try Pandeli, one of the city’s oldest and most traditional restaurants, which is above the Spice Bazaar in Eminonu. You can also try their aubergine borek, a flaky pastry that comes in 30 different varieties.

Aubergine also features in the preparation of kebabs. In Istanbul these are prepared with diced meat and animal fat. In the southeast the skewer is prepared with pieces of aubergine and balls of hand-minced meat. Ali nazik (Ali the courteous), from Gaziantep, also in the southeast, is a less refined and sophisticated variety of hunkar begendi. In Gaziantep people also cook dolma - stuffed aubergines - made with the dried version of the vegetable.

It would be wrong to think the aubergine was restricted to the palace or a rich man’s table. Quite the contrary: the world-famous imam bayildi ("the imam fainted"), is a popular dish made with olive oil and lots of onions.

Of course there are aubergine devotees in a cuisine where it is so richly represented. One of my friends who likes to eat in restaurants that specialise in local dishes and are not tourist haunts - Haca Sabh in Beyoglu, Kucuk Hudadat in Eminonu and Kanaat Lokantasi in Uskudar - amuses himself by asking the chef how he is going to prepare his aubergines today.

Besides being the foundation of the city and its non-planning, the aubergine also has its place in Turkish jokes. Let me tell you a story. One day the sultan was praising the aubergine to his court flatterer: "How excellent is the aubergine for karnayarik ("split belly") and imam bayildi." So the flatterer agreed: "You are right, my sovereign. The aubergine has no equal." Very soon the sultan had had enough of aubergines, so he said: "I want another vegetable. One that grows in springtime. I want to eat peas with meat. I can’t stand the bitter taste of aubergine."

The flatterer said: "I agree, my sovereign. The aubergine is over-rated." The sultan grew angry: "A moment ago you were singing its praises, and now you say it’s over-rated!" The flatterer bowed his head: "What can I say, my sovereign? My job is to flatter you, not the aubergine."

http://mondediplo.com/2003/06/15sirman

How the most powerful nation disabled itself
US: security’s bottom line

Just 15 numbers tell the history of the past seven years, in which a once wealthy and relatively secure nation near-bankrupted itself, pursued chimeras and funded chaos-causing wars that left it poorer and less safe then ever before.
Once upon a time, I studied the Chinese martial art of tai chi, until I realised I would never locate my “chi”. At that point I threw in the towel and took up western exercise. Still, the principle behind tai chi stayed with me, that you could multiply the force of an act by giving way before the force of others; that a smaller person could use the strength of a bigger one against him. Now, jump to 11 September 2001 and its aftermath, and you know the tai chi version of history from there. Think of it as a grim cosmic joke that the 9/11 attacks, as apocalyptic as they looked, were anything but. The true disasters followed and the wounds were largely self-inflicted, as the most militarily powerful nation on the planet used its own force to disable itself.

Before that fateful day, the Bush administration had considered terrorism, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida subjects for suckers. They were intent on pouring money into developing an elaborate boondoggle of a missile defence system against future nuclear attacks by rogue states. Those cold war high frontiersmen (and women) couldn’t get enough of the idea of missiling up. That was where the money and the fun seemed to be. Nuclear was where the big boys – the nation states – played. “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” the CIA told the president that August. Yawn.

After 9/11, George W Bush and his top advisers almost instantly launched their crusade against Islam and then their wars, all under the rubric of the “global war on terror”. (As Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld pungently put the matter that September, “We have a choice – either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live; and we chose the latter.”) By then, they were already heading out to “drain the swamp” of evildoers, 60 countries worth of them, if necessary. Meanwhile, they moved quickly to fight the last battle at home, the one just over, by squandering vast sums on an American Maginot Line of security. The porous new Department of Homeland Security, the NSA, the FBI, and other acronymic agencies were to lock down, surveil and listen in on America. All this to prevent “the next 9/11”.

In the process, they would treat bin Laden’s scattered al-Qaida network as if it were the Nazi or Soviet war machine (even comically dubbing his followers “Islamofascists”). In the blinking of an eye, and in the rubble of two enormous buildings in downtown Manhattan, bin Laden and his cronies had morphed from nobodies into supermen, a Legion of Doom. (There was a curious parallel to this transformation in the second world war. As historian John Dower documented in his book War Without Mercy, before Pearl Harbour American experts had considered the Japanese bucktoothed, near-sighted military incompetents whose warplanes were barely capable of flight. On 8 December 1941 they suddenly became a race of invincible supermen without, in the American imagination, ever passing through a human incarnation.)

Homeland insecurity
When, in October 2001, Congress passed the Patriot Act, and an Office of Homeland Security (which in 2002 became a “department”) was established, we were welcomed to the era of homeland insecurity. From then on, every major building, landmark, amusement park, petting zoo, flea market, popcorn stand and tollbooth anywhere in the country would be touted as a potential target for terrorists and in need of protection. Every police department would be in desperate need of anti-terror funding. And why not, when the terrorists loomed so monstrously large, were so apocalyptically capable, and wanted so very badly to destroy our way of life? No wonder that, in the 2006 National Asset Database, compiled by the Department of Homeland Security, the state of Indiana, “with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50% more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation”.

In the administration’s imagination (and the American one), they were now capable of anything. From their camps in the backlands of Afghanistan (or was it the suburbs of Hamburg?), as well as in the murky global underworld of the arms black market, al-Qaida’s minions were toiling to lay their hands on the most fiendish of plagues and pestilences – smallpox, botulism, anthrax. They were preparing to fill suitcases with nuclear weapons for deposit in downtown Manhattan. They were gathering nuclear refuse for dirty bombs. Nothing was too mad or destructive for them. Every faint but strange odour – the sweet smell of maple syrup floating across a city – was a potential bio-attack. And everywhere, even in rural areas, politicians were preparing to run imminent-danger, anti-terror campaigns, while urging their constituents to run for cover.

So, thank you, Osama bin Laden for expediting the Department of Homeland Security, glutting an already-bloated Pentagon with even more money, ensuring that all those “expeditionary forces” would sally forth to cause havoc and not find victory in two hopeless wars, enabling the establishment of a vast offshore prison network (and the torture techniques to go with it), and creating a whole new global “security” industry to “thwart terrorists” that was, by 2006, generating $60bn a year in business, its domestic wing devoted to locking down America.

When the history of this era is finally written, Osama bin Laden and his scattering of followers may be credited for goading the fundamentalist leaders of the United States into using the power in their grasp so stupidly and profligately as to send the planet’s sole superpower into decline. Above all, bin Laden and his crew of fanatics will have ensured that the real security problems of our age were ignored in Washington until far too late in favour of mad dreams and dark phantoms. In this lies a bleak but epic tale of folly worthy of a great American novelist. In the meantime, consider the following list – 15 numbers that offer an indication of just what the tai chi principle meant in action these last years; just where American energies did and did not flow; and, in the end, just how much less safe we are now than we were in January 2001, when George Bush entered the Oval Office:

536,000,000,000: the number of dollars the Pentagon is requesting for the 2009 military budget. This represents an increase of almost 70% over the Pentagon’s 2001 budget of $316bn, and that’s without factoring in “supplementary” requests to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the president’s global war on terror. Add in those soaring sums and military spending has more than doubled in the Bush era. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, since 2001, funding for “defence and related programmes... has jumped at an annual average rate of 8%... four times faster than the average rate of growth for social security, Medicare, and Medicaid (2%), and 27 times faster than the average rate for growth for domestic discretionary programmes (0.3%).”

1,390,000: the number of subprime foreclosures over the next two years, as estimated by Credit Suisse analysts. They also predict that, by the end of 2012, 12.7% of all residential borrowers may be out of their homes as part of a housing crisis that caught the Bush administration totally off-guard.

1,000,000: the number of “missions” or “sorties” the US air force proudly claims to have flown in the Global War on Terror since 9/11, about 353,000 of them in what it still likes to call Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is a good measure of where American energies (and oil purchases) have gone these last years.

509,000: the number of names found in 2007 on a “terrorist watch list” compiled by the FBI. No longer is a Ten Most Wanted list adequate. According to ABC News, “US lawmakers and their spouses have been detained because their names were on the watch list” and Saddam Hussein was on the list even when in US custody. By February 2008, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, the names on the list had ballooned to 900,000.

300,000: the number of American troops who now suffer from major depression or post-traumatic stress, according to a recent RAND study. This represents almost one out of every five soldiers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Approximately 320,000 “report possible brain injuries from explosions or other head wounds”. This, RAND reports, represents a barely dealt with major health crisis. The depression and PTSD will, the study reported, “cost the nation as much as $6.2bn in the two years following deployment”.

51,000: the number of post-surge Iraqi prisoners held in American and Iraqi jails at the end of 2007. The US now runs “perhaps the world’s largest extra-judicial internment camp” (1), Camp Bucca, in Iraq, whose holding capacity is being expanded from 20,000 to 30,000 prisoners. Then there’s Camp Cropper, with at least 4,000 prisoners, including “hundreds of juveniles” (2). Many of these prisoners were simply swept up in surge raids and have been held without charges or access to lawyers or courts ever since. Add in prisoners (in unknown numbers) in our sizeable network of prisons in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo, and in offshore and borrowed prisons; add in the widespread mistreatment of prisoners at American hands; and you have the machinery for the manufacture of vast numbers of angry potential enemies, some willing to commit almost any act of revenge.

Though there is no way to tabulate the numbers, many tens of thousands of prisoners, at least, have cycled through the Bush administration’s various prisons in these last seven years, many emerging embittered. (And don’t forget their embittered families.) Think of all this as an enormous dystopian experiment in “social networking”, a Facebook from Hell.

5,700: the number of trailers in New Orleans, issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as temporary housing after Hurricane Katrina, still occupied by people who lost their homes in the storm almost three years ago. They have been found to contain toxic levels of formaldehyde fumes. Katrina was but one of many security disasters for the Bush administration.

658: the number of suicide bombings worldwide last year, including 542 in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than double the number in any of the past 25 years (3). Of all the suicide bombings in the past 25 years, more than 86% have occurred since 2001, according to US government experts. At least one bomber, who died in a recent coordinated wave of suicide bombings in the Iraqi city of Mosul, was a Kuwaiti, Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, who had spent years locked up in Guantanamo.

511: the number of applicants convicted of felony crimes, including burglary, grand larceny, and aggravated assault, who were accepted into the US army in 2007, more than double the 249 accepted in 2006. According to the New York Times, between 2006 and 2007, those enrolled with convictions for wrongful possession of drugs (not including marijuana) almost doubled. For burglaries, the number almost tripled, for grand larceny/larceny it more than doubled, for robbery it more than tripled, for aggravated assault it went up by 30%, and for “terroristic threats including bomb threats” it doubled (from one to two). Feel more secure?

132: the number of dollars it took to buy a barrel of crude oil on the international market towards the end of May (4). Meanwhile the average price of a gallon of regular gas at the pump in the US hit $3.88, while the price of gas jumped almost 20 cents in Michigan in a week and 36 cents in Utah in a month. As Memorial Day weekend arrived, a time when Americans traditionally hit the road, the average price for a gallon of gas in the state of California crossed the $4 barrier. Just after the 9/11 attacks, a barrel of crude oil was in the $20 range; at the time of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, it was at about $30. In other words, since 9/11, a barrel of crude has risen more than $100 without the Bush administration taking any serious steps to promote energy conservation, cut down on the US oil addiction, or develop alternative energy strategies (beyond a dubious programme to produce more ethanol).

82: the percentage of Americans who think “things in this country have gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track”, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. This is the gloomiest Americans have been about the “direction” of the country in the last 15 years.

40: the percentage loss “on a trade-weighted basis” in the value of the dollar since 2001. The dollar’s share of total world foreign exchange reserves has also dropped from 73% to 64% in that same period. According to the Center for American Progress, “By early May 2008, a dollar bought 42.9% fewer euros, 35.7% fewer Canadian dollars, 37.7% fewer British pounds, and 17.3% fewer Japanese yen than in March 2001.”

37: the number of countries that have experienced protests or riots in recent months due to soaring food prices, a global crisis of insecurity that caught the Bush administration completely unprepared. In the last year, the price of wheat has risen by 130%, of rice by 74%, of soya by 87%, and of corn by 31%.

0: the number of terrorist attacks by al-Qaida or similar groups inside the United States since 11 September 2001.

So consider the homeland secure. Mission accomplished.

One last figure, representative of the ultimate insecurity that, by conscious omission as well as commission, the Bush administration has left a harried future to deal with. That number is 387. Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii have just released new information on carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere, and it’s at a record high of 387 parts per million, “up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years”. Its rate of increase is on the rise as well. Behind all these figures lurks a potential world of insecurity with which this country has not yet come to grips.
http://mondediplo.com/2008/06/06ussecurity

I just happen to stumble over this video and find it delightful

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqXdha0cuEY

one example:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/quasicrystal_Darb-i_Imam.jpg

Islamic Tile Fountain:

Researcher: Quasicrystals mastered centuries before West explained them.

Those wondrously intricate tile mosaics that adorn medieval Islamic architecture may contain a mastery of geometry not matched in the West for hundreds of years.

Historians have long assumed that sheer hard work with the equivalent of a ruler and compass allowed medieval craftsmen to create the ornate star-and-polygon tile patterns that cover mosques, shrines and other buildings that stretch from Turkey through Iran and on to India.

Now a Harvard University researcher argues that more than 500 years ago, math whizzes met up with the artists and began creating far more complex tile patterns that culminated in what mathematicians today call “quasicrystalline designs.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17282496/

Teaschip, also have a look at the tile work from EL MAROC and IRAN (Isfahan)

For Justine:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO_CejvHDc8