Bill Murray's Blog, page 131

You, Too, Can Be a Vietnamese Millionaire

At March, 2014 rates, 1,000,000 VND = about $47.50.

Russian Walks into Immigration….

Passport control official: “Nationality?”

Russian: “Russian.”

Passport control official: “Occupation?”

Russian: “No, no, just visiting.”

New Stuff

The new version of EarthPhotos.com is live at last, with 19,968 photos as of today.

I hope you enjoy it.

There are bound to be bugs in there somewhere. If you find any please point them out.

 

Turkish PM, Off the Rails

Ahead of local elections, tonight Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s government is said to have blocked Twitter. The PM has been through a rough patch since he mishandled last summer’s Gezi Park protests. In the process he has grown steadily more intolerant and now he may have gone off the deep end.

He’s been under pressure.

Last summer the government’s scheme to replace a park with a shopping mall just off Taksim Square drew protesters to a sit-in at Gezi Park. It remained entirely peaceful until the Prime Minister’s developer/supporter crowd grew impatient and finally prevailed upon the PM to clear the protests with tear gas and water cannon, resulting in deaths.

Suddenly the squishy Gezi Park left was in unlikely alliance with the Besiktas Ultras, passionate supporters of the local Besiktas football club down on the Bosphorus. Together, all of them were clubbed by agents of the AKP, Erdogan’s ruling party.

The protests and the violence put the regime way back on the back foot. Then starting about a month ago and continuing nearly every day since, tapes have been leaked showing the PM’s direct, personal and just stunning complicity in really astonishing corruption.

•••••

Last week Berkin Elvan died. He was 14 during the Gezi Park protests. His family says he was out to buy bread during the siege last summer, when he was struck in the head by a tear gas canister. Then he lay comatose for months before dying. Which brought more people to the streets. This photo of a protest in Istanbul following his death is dated 14 March, from the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet:

Decent people across Turkey expected something if not compassionate, at least conciliatory about the death of the child from the PM. Erdogan was silent for a few days, then declared that the boy was a terrorist:

“This kid with steel marbles in his pockets, with a slingshot in his hand, his face covered with a scarf, who had been taken up into terror organizations, was unfortunately subjected to pepper gas,” Erdogan told a crowd of supporters in a speech broadcast on state-run TRT-Haber news channel.

“How could the police determine how old that person was who had a scarf on his face and was hurling steel marbles with a slingshot in his hand?”

•••••

Exactly a year ago, a confident Erdogan meant to lead Turkey to solve its Kurdish problem. Once lauded and encouraged by the world, now the Turkish PM is in full, blooming denial.

He remains haughty on the campaign trail. In Bursa on 20 March he said, “We now have a court order. We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.”

It’s the ham hand of the autocrat, gorged with power, out of touch, in charge too long, crazy.

Election day is ten days away.

I don’t know any nicer people on earth than Turks and I love my Istanbul. This isn’t an easy time for the good people of one of the world’s great and timeless cities. I wish them well.

•••••

Here are 384 photos from Turkey.

That Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway

Once upon a time the Russian Czars ruled a vast empire. In those days, Palestine was ruled by the Ottomans. One day a feud broke out among Christian sects in the Holy Land. The Armenians and the Orthodox had keys to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem but the Catholics did not, and they wanted one.

A petty squabble among distant infidels would hardly vex the Sultan’s court in Constantinople. Perhaps it penetrated Topkapi Palace as a trifle, as mere amusement. Taking their nargiles and gazing down on the Golden Horn, the effendis and the beys must have shrugged in wonder.

Except the real feud in Palestine went deeper than keys. The Orthodox Patriarch had moved from Constantinople to Jerusalem, so the Pope sent the Catholic Patriarch down there too. The French already had a diplomat there who agitated for the Catholic cause, and before long all the parties were joined in a second raucous quarrel, this one about renovating the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, just up the road from Bethlehem. Finally the exasperated Ottomans sent troops to separate the crazy, feuding monks.

Believing he was smoothing things over, the Sultan granted a set of keys to the Catholics. But Nicholas I, Czar of the Russians, took offense. He saw the Sultan favoring France at about the same time Napolean III was proclaiming the Second Empire, and Czars were no fans of Napoleans. Besides, the Czar had other issues with the Ottomans. Just now tough, mountain-dwelling Orthodox Montenegrins were rising up against the Sultan, and the Czar fashioned himself protector of the Orthodox in the Balkans.

So on orders from the Czar an old and arrogant Prince named Menshikov sailed from Russia across the Black Sea and demanded that within five days the Sultan publicly declare Russia’s right to protect the Orthodox subjects of the Sultan in Palestine and Montenegro – deep within his own empire.

The result was the Crimean War. In which Russia asserted its right to protect people in a separate, sovereign land.

The Czar ultimately lost the war to a European and Ottoman coalition, and some half a million people lost their lives.

•••••

The title of this post is the name of a new book subtitled Russia and the Communist Past by David Satter. Today’s little fairy tale comes thanks largely to Clive Ponting’s The Crimean War: The Truth Behind the Myth.

Independence Square, Kyiv

Geoff Barker shares these photos of Independence Square, aka the EuroMaidan, from his recent visit to Kyiv. Thanks very much Geoff.

Visiting Chernobyl, This Month

A British fellow named Geoff Barker bought my book Visiting Chernobyl ahead of his own visit there and has just returned. He’s been kind enough to allow me to share his photos and impressions of his trip. Here we get a couple of nice closeup views of reactor four, and progress on the New Safe Confinement structure, which is meant to cover the entire reactor four.

Mr. Barker used the same tour company that we did, Solo East Travel, and writes that

“…we travelled with Solo East to the Ukraine Missile Museum some 300 kms south of Kiev, a long but worthwhile day. The highlight is descending 45 metres into the control room of the ICBM silo that had the capacity to wipeout the whole of the USA. To have your finger on “the button” certainly makes you realise what a very dangerous place this use to be.

 Wednesday was our trip to Chernobyl, again unlike on your visit the skies were blue and we were blessed with sunshine. Igor collected us from the hotel and we followed the route you know so well. It is certainly the most surreal experience to see the new sarcophagus appear on the sky line and then the first glimpse of reactor 4. Being a bit of an old bloke I remember very well the accident and watching the story unfold day by day on the television. Never did I think that one day I would be up close and personal with the Ukraine let alone reactor 4. The whole day was superb and wandering around Prypiat is again something that is difficult to convey to people who have not had that experience. We also enjoyed lunch in the canteen at Chernobyl and the mix of nationalities made for good conversation.

Igor from Solo East was excellent and their organisation for both trips was spot on.”

Mr. Barker’s an intrepid kind of guy and went in spite of all the turmoil around Kyiv just now. In a separate post I’ll publish a couple of photos he took around Independence Square and was kind enough to share.

Thanks very much, Geoff!

Might Want to Keep This in Mind

Saudi Cleric Issues Fatwa against All You Can Eat Buffets.

Friday Photo Quiz #193 – Where in the World?

Canopy walks, stilt villages, cycle rickshaws, mountains.

Feels like this place is far away. Can you guess the country?

Click through for the answer. And a good weekend to all from CS&W and EarthPhotos.com.And the answer is ………………….…….. it’s the peninsular and island nation of Malaysia. Peninsular Malaysia borders Thailand and Singapoer, and the provinces of Sabah and Sarawak share the island of Borneo with Indonesia and Brunei.

There are more photos in the Malaysia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

And take all the CS&W photo quizzes.

Yesterday the Tide Came In. And Stayed.

The Marshall Islands are going under.

“… even the most conservative estimates of sea-level rise … suggest that RMI [the Republic of the Marshall Islands] will literally be wiped off the map some time before the end of the century….” says Marshall Islands Minister for Foreign Affairs Phillip Muller.

Might want to make that trip before they’re gone.