Anywhere you go in Turkey, every town, every village, and every borough of every city has a weekly bazaar. In our neighbourhood it’s on a Thursday, and it happens rain or shine, without fail, every week. The merchants start arriving before dawn to set up their tables, which they arrange in the streets, blocking traffic for the rest of the day. Things start rolling an hour or so after sunrise, and continue to gain momentum until sunset, at which point it all winds down again. After dark the merchants pack up, the cleaning crews come overnight, and by Friday morning it’s business as usual.

The bazaar is roughly divided into two sections, food and clothing, but really you can buy just about anything you’re looking for, from housewares to jewelry, cosmetics to office supplies. Haggling is the norm, of course, but even if you’re not in the mood to buy anything, you can just do what I do and wander around looking for treasures.

I’m in a fortunate situation in that

1. I live pretty much exactly in the centre of the bazaar area;
2. I speak fluent English and therefore can fully enjoy the great wealth of Turklish on offer (Turks, like many nations, love to put English phrases on their clothing but don’t seem to care too much whether the English makes any sense);
3. I am not Turkish and therefore don’t get hassled for taking photographs (ah, foreigners— who can predict what sorts of misconduct they’ll get up to?).

So today I took my camera down to the bazaar and wandered around, enjoying the spring-like weather and taking pictures of various articles of clothing that caught my eye. Below are some of my best Turklish finds.

[click on each image to see a larger version]

This shirt was on a table of clothes for pre-teen girls, which sounds reasonable enough until you get to the phrases “sexy show” and “free love.” They grow up so fast nowadays.

These are children’s pajamas. “Happy unruly” sounds like something you’d wish your friends as they’re pulling out of the drive on their way to Burning Man. And no, the photo’s not cropped badly, the bottom of the shirt really does only say, “on the sunny sunny of the.”

WOO! Signature of from! I have no idea what “AXI-CE” or “ACAD” means, though. Yeah, like I know what “Signature of from” means.

Sure, I’m familiar with the NOS, but back when I was on the scene, there was just the one system. Now they’ve got a logo and everything. Times have changed. There’s probably a web site, too.

I didn’t find this shirt quite as funny as the others, but I thought the sheer absurdity of it deserved a mention. Oddly, I found it on a table of men’s shirts, and the size of it was men’s XL, leading me to believe that it wasn’t on the men’s table by accident. So now you can raise an eyebrow.

“I wish I was a Victorian vintage pretty butterfly.” See kids, this is the kind of shirt you design when you spend too much time on the Nitrous Oxide System.

My girl’s barmy— probably won’t be funny to any of the Americans reading this unless you happen to live in a Commonwealth country or were weaned on a steady diet of British television.

Apparently the Nevada Challenge is to play hockey without the bottom half of your hockey stick. I’m glad for the clarification, because I always thought the Nevada Challenge was to hang on to your cash for longer than an hour.

At first I thought this shirt just didn’t make any sense, until I got home and Googled “Zagora” and discovered that it’s a town in Morocco, which means the shirt… still doesn’t make any sense.

Hilarity of the shirt! This children’s nightshirt was probably my favourite find today, and the best part (you’ll have to click on the image to see the details) is the photocopied “newspaper” article featuring the headline, “Local Irish War in Military en and.” What a lovely sentiment to get the kids relaxed for bedtime.

And on that note, nighty-night.

If you’re tired of the using the same five ringtones as everyone else on the planet, Kakophone offers a way to break out of the box. Their music composition generator creates original MIDI files on the fly, based on values and codes you enter into the machine. The possibilities are virtually endless, you can create and download as many different ringtones as you want, and best of all, it’s completely free. Link

If you’re looking to shake your life up or hit the reset button, here’s as good a place to start as any: Hack Yourself, an essay on self-reinvention by writer Michael Montoure. I first saw this piece several years ago, and though I’m usually unmoved by the great majority of nonsense written under the heading of “self-help literature,” I found that Monture’s essay voiced, in a concise way, a lot of things we all know but still need to be reminded of from time to time. Well worth the five minutes it takes to read it. But be careful, if you’re like me you might find yourself suddenly packing up and moving to another continent because you’ve decided that’s who you are now.

And to that, I say go for it.

Keep the ball in the air. That’s all you have to do. Frustratingly addictive. Let me know what your high score is. I’ve been playing this for a few days and so far the best I’ve managed is 124. Link

I have about a million ideas in my head for web sites I’d make if I had infinite resources. But since I don’t have infinite resources, I’m going to advertise my ideas publicly in the hopes that someone will steal them. I’m not possessive about ownership, I just want to play.

Recently I’ve been mulling over the (albeit nebulous) details of one of the web sites I’d most like to see. It would be a cross between a “how well do you know yourself” site and a ratings community, but with a twist— it’s all about perceived intelligence. Here’s how it works, in general:

Step 1. The first thing that happens when you sign up is you takes a test to measure your intelligence. I personally like the IQ test at snopi.com because it doesn’t require the user to understand English, but really it doesn’t matter what test we use providing that everyone is measured with the same ruler (my rants about the uselessness of IQ tests will come later; for now let’s just have fun). Then, after the test is finished, you are not notified of your score, but rather that score is stored on the database and you’re taken on to

Step 2, where you’re presented with a list of various potential essay titles (”in a language of your choice” would be great). You can click on any essay title that interests you, at which point you are prompted with a form window to write a short essay (no longer than 500 words) on the subject you chose. After you’re finished, you can go back to the list as many times as you want and write as many essays on different subjects as you care to. The more essays each user writes, the more fun it is for everyone (and perhaps more accurate as well?).

Step 3. Now, the fun part. After you write at least one essay (you can go back to step 2 later, as many times as you want), you can then go to the “ratings” section of the site, where you are randomly presented with an essay written by another (anonymous) user. After reading the essay, you then have to decide whether you think the author of the essay is

• more intelligent than you,
• not as intelligent as you, or
• about as intelligent as you.

Once you’ve clicked on the appropriate rating button, you’re given another essay, and so on, until you choose to stop.

I haven’t really thought too much about the statistics part of the site, but I’m sure one of you out there could come up with some great ideas— perhaps as a user you have to wait a while before you find out how smart you are compared with the other people on the site, or perhaps you never find out. Maybe you only learn the percentage difference between how smart you think you are and how smart you actually are. There could be charts and graphs comparing users by country or other criteria. The possibilities are endless.

Now, of course an idea like this has problems, and there would have to be a huge disclaimer on the site that “this is for entertainment purposes only.” For one thing, some people are going to argue that whatever IQ test you give them isn’t fair to them because [insert reason here]. And they probably have a point. But again, if you make it clear that it’s just for fun, I think the right people with the right coding skills could turn it into a popular site. For my money, it would certainly beat rating photos of people who are desperately trying too hard to find someone who wants to have sex with them. But maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, I’m curious to hear your modifications or additions. Fire away.

I’ve been spending more time than I’d like to admit over at likebetter.com. The premise is simple enough: you’re presented with two images, and you click on the one you like better. Then you get two more images, rinse, repeat. After you do this a few times, the brain at the bottom of the page turns pink, letting you know it knows something about you. Click on the brain, and it tells you what it knows. Then you go back to clicking on images until it knows something else.

I’d be curious to learn something about the intelligence-gathering algorithm at work here, because of the fifty or so things the brain has told me, only three have been off the mark. Well, two really, because I actually changed my mind about one thing— the brain was right, I would lead a cult if I had the opportunity!

Well, you gotta give me credit for knowing what motivates me— six days ago I wrote a century-long task list under the grand title “Get New Blog Going,” and over the following five days I managed to complete a whopping two of the hundred items, both under the sub-heading “Make It Pretty,” and neither having anything to do with actual writing.

Yesterday morning I was wondering how to force myself to stop playing around and get some real, non-lorem-ipsum content out into the ether. And the answer I came up with was this: invite people over. If you’re at home alone you’re much more inclined to sit around in your underwear and not worry about the dishes piling up. But if you think guests will be arriving at any moment, it’s time to take the dirty socks off the sofa and make sure there are drinks in the fridge.

So despite the blatant lack of content, I got the feeds burning and the Technorati Technorati-ing, and here you are. Welcome to the party. I’ll be back in five with the snacks.