I’ve been making a lot of contacts on flickr over the past couple of weeks (add me!), and I’ve been surprised and delighted at the wealth and variety of stuff people are doing. I have contacts who are graphic artists, some who are street photographers, and others who use the camera to document their daily lives. I find it all very inspirational.

This morning I made a new contact by the name of byezdomny, who apparently lives in Vietnam. My first thought was, I bet they have a lot of good Engrish there, and sure enough, right on the first page of the photostream I hit the jackpot:

My favourite part is how the first commenter didn’t get the joke, and thought it was something about domestic violence. That made me giggle almost as much as the DVD cover itself. It reminded me of the time some of my high school friends and I got together for coffee to talk about the old days, and when one girl lamented that she’d wasted most of her teenage years doing blow, one of the other girls perked up and said, “me too! I didn’t really want to, but I thought it was the only way I could keep my virginity!” She was confused when we all erupted into laughter.

Why yes, I did grow up in the ’80s, why do you ask?

I bought some socks today:

According to the description on the package, it’s a 3-pack. Except, there’s only one pair (and all the 3-packs had only one pair). But I guess I’m not supposed to stress about it, regardless of my sex.

Clear Men shampoo comes in two types:

So you can either be the sporty type with this shampoo, or you can grow a mohawk— your choice.

I saw this sign at the Shakespeare Bistro today:

What, the Los Angeles Kings? I think it’s unlikely they’ll be eating in Antalya anytime soon. But it’s good to know my meal would meet their standards.

Seriously though, this particular sign struck me as odd, because although Shakespeare Bistro is a Turkish company, they always go out of their way to print everything in English as well, and their English signage is usually perfectly worded. It’s rare to see them blunder, but it’s cute when they do.

Incidentally, I had a wonderful meal at the Shakespeare this afternoon, and the service was impeccable. Highly recommended if you’re ever in this neck of the woods and you’re having a day where you fancy something other than Turkish food.

We went out for a very lazy, extremely casual dinner tonight, because the weather was nice and I wanted to sit outside somewhere. Within five minutes of sitting down at the kumrucu, however, we saw two highly amusing things that I just had to share with you. Forgive the crappy cameraphone photos— it was all I had with me at the time.

Extra apologies for the quality of this one; this guy walked in close to where we were, but then he sat down about four tables away from us, so I had to use the ultra-zoom function in night mode, which is never a good combo on a cameraphone. But the shirt says, “coming of age serial code next identity town community.” Something for everyone there.

Not two minutes after that guy sat down, this car pulled up beside us:

I have no idea what to make of this— as far as I can tell, it appears to be a jumpy watermelon car. Which… makes perfect sense.

Anyway, thought I’d share. Just another Friday evening in Turkey.

Steve in Ankara has sent in a fantastic link to this chilling tale (link in Turkish) of a local Antalya man and his sad, sad plight. I got Steve to put together a little translated summary for those of us who don’t read Turkish so well:

It’s about a chap who is suing an Antalya clothing seller for selling him a top that says “Mod Pimp, Fetish Machine.” He claims he wasn’t warned what it meant and that his honour has been tainted. He discovered something was wrong when foreigners came up to him in the street asking to buy women, it says.

Hmm. Interesting.

Okay, first of all, clothing in Antalya with inappropriate messages… that never happens. Never.

Seriously though, this falls into the same category as people who get one of those ridiculous Chinese tattoos, thinking it means something deeply philosophical, and then when they find out their tattoo actually says “demon bird mothballs,” they want to sue the tattoo artist. Because of course, all tattoo artists should also be expected to be fluent in Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Korean. And furthermore, they should be responsible for any decisions you make about what you put on your body.

The reason the clothing seller did not warn this guy about the meaning of the shirt is because he doesn’t read English himself, and has no clue what any of his shirts say. He just displays what he has on offer, which is whatever he got in bulk this week from his distributor (who also doesn’t speak English). If you choose to buy something, frankly, that’s your problem. No one is forcing anyone to purchase a t-shirt.

If you insist on putting something on your body with words in a language other than your own, you either need to do the appropriate research, or you need to accept the possibility that there might be mistakes that will make you look silly. T-shirts with “English” on them are very popular here, and even though I often point out to Turks what their shirts really say, more often than not they don’t care— they just giggle and shrug. And that’s exactly the attitude you have to take if you’re going to pay two dollars for a “Nike” shirt with English writing on it because you think English makes you look cool.

On a side note, I’d like to express my disappointment that a Turk is suing another Turk over something so silly. Normally people in this part of the world aren’t as ridiculous as we are about frivolous law suits. Next stop: someone will probably sue a restaurant because he wasn’t warned the hot tea was hot, and it burned his tongue. Link, much thanks to Steve in Ankara

I was tagged by the lovely Carpetblogger to tell seven silly stories about myself. It took me a few days to scour my memory for anecdotes worth telling, but here they finally are, and I hope you find they’re worth reading. I’m not really into tagging, so if you choose to do this in your own blog please post your link in the comments so we can all laugh together.

1. When I was in my early twenties, I dated a Type A who thought it was standard procedure to bring his dirty laundry to my house, tell me to wash it, and then come pick it up later, as if I were his personal maid. So instead of telling him what was what, I came up with a better plan: I smiled graciously and took the laundry as if it were my privilege to do it, and then after he left my house I ironed the dirty clothes so they looked nice, and folded them and gave them back to him as if they’d been washed. I never actually claimed that I washed them; I just said, “here are your clothes,” with the same subservient smile. A week later he’d bring the clothes back and I’d do the same thing again. After about the fourth week I could smell the clothes before he even knocked on my door. Soon after that he stopped bringing them, and he never once said another word to me about doing any domestic chores for him.

2. I never had a babysitter when I was a kid, because my mother didn’t trust anyone other than herself— not even my dad. One morning when I was four my dad wanted to run into town to buy a newspaper (we lived in the middle of nowhere), and I begged my mom to let me go with him. His car was in the shop at the time and he was driving our motor home, and I loved riding in the motor home. I had never been completely alone with my dad before, but after about twenty minutes of my whining my mother finally relented, and she told my dad not to leave me in the car when he went into the convenience store to pay for the paper. She warned him that if he left me unattended for even a second and she found out about it, she’d castrate him. He told her not to worry and that we’d be back in less than half an hour.

Fast-forward to the convenience store, and guess what? Dad told me, “you stay right here and don’t move, I’m just going to go in and get a paper and I’ll be back in two seconds.” Then he went inside to pay for the paper, and I guess he got to flirting with the cashier girl, because he didn’t come back for a few minutes. So after a while I decided I was going to go in and get him. I opened the side sliding door of the motor home. A few inches inside the door frame was the fire extinguisher, mounted on the floor of the vehicle. So instead of just exiting out the door, being the strange kid that I was, I decided to see if it was possible to squeeze myself between the door frame and the fire extinguisher and go out that way. It was a really tight fit, but I kept pushing, and eventually when I got past the halfway point the extinguisher broke away from its mounting and I shot out all at once, falling headfirst out the door and landing on my skull. Screams, blood everywhere. My dad came running out of the store with the cashier girl behind him. When she saw the blood she said she was going to call an ambulance, but my dad knew he had to get me back home or my mother would freak out, so he asked her to bring some paper towels and he would try to stop the bleeding himself. She brought the paper towels, but I soaked through the roll pretty quickly, and she told my dad that there was no getting around it, we were going to have to go to the hospital. Well, my dad pointed out to her that someone was going to have to blot up the blood while he was driving, so the manager told the cashier girl that she could go to the hospital with us, which she did.

The emergency room was pretty exciting. I didn’t get any stitches, but they had to shave a little square of my hair off to determine how bad the damage was. So then I had a bald spot right on the top of my head, which I thought was great. My clothes were soaked in blood, as were the cashier’s and my dad’s, but after some x-rays and aspirin I was right as rain and frankly enjoying all the attention.

Then my dad really panicked because we’d been gone almost two hours and he knew my mother would be calling the police by now. So he told the cashier girl that he was going to have to drop me off at home before he took her back to work, which she agreed to. We drove home, and he asked the cashier to wait in the car because this was going to be hard enough to explain as it was without having to explain the presence of a pretty young girl. I ran inside, all smiles and happiness, with my bloody clothes and my bald head and my amazing tale of adventure. I remember my mother’s open mouth, and the look she gave my dad. After making sure I was okay, she screamed at my dad for about fifteen minutes. Then, to make matters worse, there was a knock at the door, and when my mother answered it there was the cashier girl, and she asked if Mike was ready to go yet.

The next morning when I got up at the crack of dawn to watch cartoons, I found my dad sleeping on the sofa.

3. One time at a party I slow danced with this guy who was not so tall, and while we were dancing he laughed nervously and said, “I like dancing with you because you’re five foot two.” But with the noise level at the party being what it was, I thought I heard him say, “I like dancing with you because you’ve got big boobs.” I wasn’t sure how to react, so I just gave him a mildly annoyed expression and said, “er, okay.” He sensed my unease and hastened to clarify: “I mean, it’s great because I can actually look down while I’m dancing with you instead of having to look up all the time.”

Incidentally, I’m not 5′2″ anymore— I had a freak growth spurt when I was 21 years old and now I’m nearly 5′7″.

4. When I lived in Kemer, my friend and I were at a club one night, and after midnight an older man with a look of distress came into the club holding something I couldn’t readily identify. He was going around to the tables and the people on the dance floor, speaking to each person for a minute or so, and then moving on to the next person. When he came around to our table I could see that he was holding a toothbrush, still sealed in the package, and he was trying to sell it. He said that he had bought the toothbrush earlier in the day and was having regrets about it, but he’d lost the receipt and so the store where he bought it wouldn’t take it back. As far as I’m aware he had no takers, and left the club with his toothbrush.

5. One time I was eating with a couple of friends at the lunch buffet at Pizza Hut. I love that crushed red pepper they put on the tables next to the salt and pepper, but I like a lot of it and it never comes out of the shaker fast enough for my liking, so I always unscrew the top and just shake it directly out of the little jar. This requires a bit of delicate control, but usually I’m up to the task. On this particular occasion I shook the required amount of pepper onto my first piece of pizza, and then replaced the top to cover the pepper, but didn’t screw the top back on because I knew I’d be using the pepper again in a few minutes (you see what’s coming, don’t you?). Anyway, the obvious thing happened and I forgot that the top was unscrewed, and without thinking I went to shake pepper onto my second piece of pizza, and dumped the entire contents of the jar onto a single piece. My friends and I burst into laughter, and one of them called the waiter over to help us. As I tried to get control of myself I thought about the two things I needed to speak to the waiter about: one, to apologise for the mess and get him to take my plate away; two, to ask if he could bring us a fresh shaker of red pepper since obviously I’d wasted the first one. Unfortunately, I got my points in the wrong order, and as soon as the waiter arrived at the table I looked at him and said, “uh, we’re going to need some more red pepper here.” He stared at the mountain of red pepper on my pizza while my friends and I laughed so hard we couldn’t breathe.

6. I love dogs, and one time I visited a friend who has a gigantic rottweiler. My friend’s mother was holding the dog back by the collar, but I insisted that she let him go because I was keen to say hello, and clearly so was he. She shook her head and said that no, she didn’t think it was a good idea to let him go. I asked if he wasn’t friendly. She said that that was the problem, he was very friendly, and she didn’t want me to get knocked down with his enthusiasm. I laughed— I have made friends with bigger dogs than this. Let him go, I insisted. My friend and his mom exchanged looks of trepidation, she tried one more time to talk me out of it, and then finally my friend shrugged at her, and she shrugged back and let the dog go.

Then I was on my back looking at the ceiling, my vision blurred by the presence of a slurping tongue. My friend’s mother was screaming apologies at me and trying to pull the dog off of me; my friend just stood there and laughed.

7. The first time I went to Italy I spent a day in the Dolomites with my then-boyfriend, and we took a cable car up to a peak that was a little over 10000 feet (3000m). He had warned me about altitude sickness, but since I’d never actually been that high before I didn’t really know what he was talking about. So when we got up there we separated and he went off to the gift shop while I walked around the observation deck, taking photos. After about ten minutes of stomping around out there, I became confused, and couldn’t remember where I was or why I had gone there. Then I saw the camera around my neck and remembered that I wanted to take pictures. Then I couldn’t remember how the camera worked, and stared at the little knobs and dials for a while. Then I remembered how to turn the camera on, but couldn’t remember what I wanted to take a picture of. Then I thought it would be nice just to lie down in the snow and have a nap. The next thing I remember is one of the security personnel helping me to my feet, and taking me back inside the little building, where they gave me water and let me “sober up.” I wasn’t right for the rest of the day, though, and as soon as we got back to the hotel in the afternoon I went to bed and didn’t wake up until the next morning.

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

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.