An apology: I never got around to going to the bazaar on Thursday, and for that I’m truly sorry. I spent the day in Kemer with my close friend who was visiting from Denmark, and I thought I’d be back in time to hit the bazaar, but as often happens with good friends, we milked the time until well after dark. And then I made the excuse that about 80% of you were probably away on Thursday with your families anyway, so I that’s how I let myself off the hook. <sheepish look>

So here’s the consolation prize— a few photos from our day out in Kemer:

We went inside the mosque, and the imam was nice enough to let us take photos. The Kemer mosque is small, but it’s beautifully decorated.

No seats in a mosque, you just kneel directly on the floor.

I was surprised at the amount of bling they have in there now. The mosque has had a remodel since last I saw it.

In fact, Kemer has changed a lot over the past two years since I lived there. This clock tower, for instance, didn’t exist when I was a resident.

But some things will never change— no peon schmucks allowed.

I hope you guys have all had a great week— I’m writing like a madman and drinking a lot of wine. It’s fantastic.

This year Antalya are proudly hosting the 2007 World Cup Amputee Football Championship. The International Amputee Athletes Association provides their own shuttle bus (pictured above) to transport the athletes between the hotel and the stadium. Hint to the graphic designers for next time: when deciding where to place each image on the side of the bus, put the marksman to the left of the basketball players. Otherwise it looks like they cut him from the team and he didn’t take it very well.

It reminds me of the time my ex-boyfriend tried to explain the biathlon to me and failed to elaborate beyond “it’s skiing and shooting.” For a long time I thought this must be the most awesome sport ever, because I was picturing downhill skiing with automatic weapons. I still think that would be a great way to make competitive skiing more interesting— give the skiers AKs and send them all down the hill at the same time, like horses out of the gate… first survivor to the bottom wins. You’d need fabulous prizes and chicks in bikinis, natch. Cash bar and VIP lounge. It’s too bad the weather in Vegas isn’t suitable, because the Men’s Grand Rambo Slalom is a Vegas sport if ever there was one.

Category: It Started Out Pretty Well

Ha, lucky me, I managed to get done with my weekly rounds just as the rain decided to kick off. Mind you, the bazaar doesn’t usually stop for rain— I remember one particularly bad storm last winter when most of the vendors stayed away, but on days like today it’s business as usual. Here are the goods.

[click on each image to see a larger version]

That famous authentic USA sport… star & grand raw. You guys all have a local league, right?

for some reason, “rusty neal” made me think of “redrum! Redrum!” Don’t ask how my brain works.

Okay, you got me here… I think it says, “St. Wath joison cleared of anwar.” Or something.

These G-Star shirts are popping up all over the place… is there some pop culture reference I’m missing here?

And it’s more familiar cousin, The Dark Loan.

According to the tag inside the shirt, the actual name of the company is also “de puta madre.” I’ll give you a minute to look it up if you didn’t grow up in a Spanish-speaking town like the rest of us.

Now is this a university where they teach girls illustration, or is it a university full of illustrations of girls?

Don’t stop believin’.

Up until a few minutes ago I had been reading that verb as plain old putting, like, “put the glass on the table.” But just now I realised maybe it means putting, like, to hit a golf ball with a putting iron. So who wants to explain where the baseball fits in?

If you want to see more of these, the bazaar archive is here, and if you want some Turklish of your own you can find it over at the store. Ma

I was out and about this morning and couldn’t resist a photo of my favourite thing:

Can you see what I’m talking about? Here, let’s have a close-up:

Snow! The first signs of snow in the mountains. That means winter is coming! No more sweating, no more unbearable baking sun, no more heat exhaustion! Yay!

Actually, though, this autumn weather we’ve been having is lovely. Not too hot, not too cold. Can we just stay in November forever?

Okay, so quite a few of you wrote in asking for more details and photos of the camera sling I fashioned from a sock and fixed to a sliding curtain tab on a track in the ceiling. To be honest, it’s a lot simpler than it sounds, and since it enables one to take photos from really cool angles, I thought I’d share the not-so-amazing secret. Here it is, get ready to be underwhelmed:

See, it’s just a sock hanging from the ceiling, like I told you. Well, there’s a little more to it than that. Look, here’s a blurry and not really helpful close-up:

You can kind of see how I pinned the sock to the tab. If you want to make one of these yourself, a lot depends on what kind of curtain fixtures, if any, you have in your home. I’ve lived in lots of different places and I don’t think I’ve ever seen any two houses that have the same type of fixtures. Some have curtain poles or rods, some have tracks fixed to the wall (of which there are many varieties), and others have tracks like ours that are fixed to the ceiling. In any case, here’s a step-by-step instruction guide; if you’re smart and creative, which I know all my readers are, I’m sure you can adapt it to whatever your curtain situation is at home:

1. Place your camera in an old sock
2. Hold the sock by the top with one hand and let it hang, with the camera down in the foot part
3. Arrange the camera with the other hand until you have it in the approximate position you want
4. Mark places in the sock to correspond to the lens and the shutter release button, remove the camera, and cut appropriate holes in the sock (don’t make the holes too big or the camera might fall out)
5. Cut one of the plastic tabs off an old curtain (here’s where you’ll have to take your own sitch into account and improvise if you don’t have tabbed curtains)
6. Safety-pin the tab to the top of the sock
7. Slide the tab into the track
8. Play around with your camera and memorise the sequence of buttons to push so that you can focus a shot, set the timer, and hit the shutter release with your eyes closed and the camera lens facing you
9. Place the camera into the sock, being careful so that the camera does not fall out
10. Fiddle around with positioning as much as you can or want to
11. Do your blind magic with the focus and the timer (this took some practice in my case)
12. Hit the shutter release and run like hell to get into position and try to look natural

Obviously there’s some guesswork with camera direction and focus, and cutting the sock isn’t an exact science either— basically I just made some random holes, which worked out well because they’re all interchangeable and I can face the camera either straight down, straight to the side, or at an angle. There are also pros and cons to having a wall mount versus a ceiling mount. Wall-mounted cameras have restricted positioning but are more stable; cameras that hang from the ceiling can be positioned a variety of ways but have that dangly-swingy thing going on (if you have good light and set a short exposure time this annoyance can be minimised).

If you don’t have any curtain fixtures at all in your house, there’s nothing stopping you from putting a hook in the ceiling or high up on a wall and attaching your sock to that. You won’t be able to slide your camera around the room, of course, but it’s better than nothing. If you got really crazy I suppose there’s nothing stopping you from using multiple hooks on various walls, but now you’re starting to creep me out.

Anyway, I’d like to see your own SockCam photos, so I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

Well, since I haven’t been around here much lately, I thought it only fair that I let you in on what I’m up to these days, since it’s taking up so much of my time. We’re nearly a third of the way through NaNoWriMo, and I have to say things are going much more smoothly than they did last year. In fact, I think this is the best attempt at a novel I’ve made since my first novel back in 2002.

The idea for this year’s story came from a key (pictured above) that I found on the floor of the room I stayed in at the Vipassana Retreat That Went Horribly Wrong. I thought it was a cool-looking key, so I stuck it in my bag, and then promptly forgot about it. I came across it when I was unpacking after I got back from the trip, and since I had been in plot-storming mode in anticipation of NaNo, I came up with this idea: what if a girl found a key that she thought was no big deal, but it ended up changing everything? I took that idea and ran with it. I’m still not exactly sure which direction I’m running or where the finish line is, but that’s half the fun of NaNoWriMo. My current word count is 13363, so I’m right on target.

As I finish chapters I’ve been uploading them on my Vox, which also has an RSS feed. Obviously the posts on Vox display in reverse chronological order, with the most recent first, so if you want to read from the beginning you’ll have to scroll down to the bottom.

NaNo is about quantity rather than quality— the idea is to get the damned thing written in November, and save the editing for December. So please don’t write to me about my typos or misspellings or awkward word choices or the fact that my plot doesn’t make any sense. I have put the chapters up as-is for now because people asked for them, and therefore they’re all first drafts. The repairs and rewrites will come later, I promise. The important thing right now is to have fun and be a word factory.

If anyone else is NaNoing, please post links to your novels in the comments, and by all means do add me at the NaNoWriMo site.

Ah folks, the change of seasons is coming. It’s wonderful outside today, partly cloudy and a high of 20°. There are lots of new winter clothes coming into the bazaar, so let’s get started digging through them.

[click on each image to see a larger version]

This is a maternity shirt… er, I don’t know what else to say about it. Once you know that, though, it gives a new meaning to “inside from the lost world.”

That’s great, because I was getting tired of all this conventional anonymous fame.

I was, until I got a good dose of unconventional personalised fame. Now I’m okay.

It’s kind of like clay pigeons— a more humane alternative to hunting a real fox.

I love everything about this, but especially the “partir au pause.”

I know you can’t see it because it’s white embroidery on a white background, but the word next to “little” is “builder.” Yeah, “finger little builder.” Let’s move on. Quickly.

There’s so much about the children’s clothing in this country that makes me cringe, but if I could choose only one thing to ban, I would get them to stop putting the word “pleasure” on shirts for little girls. About half the shirts you see for under-10s have the word “pleasure” on them somewhere, and even though there’s nothing wrong with that word per se, something about the way it’s used freaks me a out a little.

This is actually funny because it’s true, but I’ve never heard a tow truck referred to as a saviour car.

I couldn’t believe this— on the table where I found this there were literally hundreds of different items, shirts and pants and skirts and bags and socks and underwear, all with that same embroidered outline of a lady’s head, and all with the same address. I looked it up when I got home, and as it turns out, 1400 Alton Road in Miami Beach is a Gold’s Gym. The phone number is correct, also. None of the clothing items had any company name anywhere on them, just the lady and the address.

Honourable mention: I saw a bra today with embroidered writing on the cups— one cup said “everyday” and the other one said “someday.” I tried to get a photo, but the bra was hanging up above the tables and I couldn’t get close enough to it. But I thought you needed to know about it anyway.

If you want to see more of these, the bazaar archive is here, and if you want some Turklish of your own you can find it over at the store. See you guys tomorrow.

It’s not often I do an early-morning edition of the bazaar, but what with NaNo starting today and real life still getting in the way, I have a ton to do and thought I’d get this going ahead of schedule. So today you can enjoy your coffee and newspaper with a bit of Turklish on the side. Enjoy.

[click on each image to see a larger version]

Now see, I’d been using those boring fraudulent flowers, maybe that was the problem with my lack of glamour.

Yeah, we got your pie-eating contest right here, buddy.

Which, you know, after all that pie…

I like this word “sleeky”— it’s kind of a cross between “sleek” and “sneaky.”

Yeah, that’s pretty much illegal in most sports now.

Resist survival! What a sexy way to say “lie down and die.”

I’m not even sure why this one is funny, but I laugh every time I see it. They’re kids’ pants.

I’ll admit, I was empted to buy this one.

Otherwise known as “running around without a diaper.”

IThis offer would have been much more empting ten or fifteen years ago.

If you want to see more of these, the bazaar archive is here, and you’ll want to head down to the store to fill your closet with Turklish goodness. See you guys tomorrow!