text:
One afternoon in 2000, a high-school principal in Arslanköy, a village in the Taurus Mountains, in southern Turkey, received an unexpected visit from a middle-aged, blue-eyed peasant woman in a head scarf. Averting her eyes and covering her mouth when she spoke, she introduced herself as Ümmiye Koçak, and asked him to help her start a theatre for the women of the village. "Imagine," the principal, Hüseyin Arslanköylü, later wrote. "She leaves the fields and orchards, and turns up here! . . . Theatre, she says!" He told her to come back when she had assembled a cast and asked permission from the women's husbands.
Ümmiye Koçak, a forty-four-year-old farmworker with a primary-school education, had caught the theatre bug from a school play that the principal had staged the previous year. The play dramatized the village's role in the Turkish War of Independence, in 1919, when a company of locals fired the first shots against the occupying French Army. To honor their bravery, Kemal Atatürk, Turkey's first President, gave the village its current name, which means "lion village." Ümmiye had never seen a play before, and it seeped into her thoughts. For a long time, she had been puzzling over the situation of village women—the many roles they had to play. In the fields, they worked like men; in villas, they became housekeepers; at home, they were wives and mothers. "I kept turning it over in my head, how is it that I do all these things," she later recalled. "Then I saw Hüseyin's theatre. That's when I decided that the thing I'd been turning over in my head was theatre."
The day after her meeting with the principal, Ümmiye returned with seven village women. Some could barely read. Most were in their forties and had several children. She later told me that it hadn't been easy to get them all on board: they kept saying that they didn't know how to act. Ümmiye persuaded them that they already played roles, every day—that the theatre was all around them, whether they liked it or not. The principal warned them that their theatrical aspirations would expose them to gossip and derision. But Ümmiye thought that she could curtail gossip by excluding men: women would play all the male roles themselves, wearing mustaches made of goatskin.
The Arslanköy Women's Theatre Group met every night at the school, after the women had worked ten- or twelve-hour days on farms. Their first production, a contemporary Turkish play called "Stone Almonds," sold out a theatre in the provincial capital of Mersin, and was written up in the national press. They were invited to Istanbul, to be on TV. None of the women had even been on an intercity bus before. At a rest stop, Ümmiye confronted her first set of revolving doors. For a long time, she remained on one side of the doors, despairing of ever reaching the other side.
Slowly, more productions and more successes followed. In 2003, the women collaborated on a play called "Woman's Outcry," based on their own difficult life experiences, which included kidnapping, forced marriage, and domestic abuse. They performed the play in Arslanköy, in front of their husbands and village officials. In 2006, "The Play," a documentary film about "Woman's Outcry," became an international success, winning prizes at the Trieste and Tribeca festivals. Ümmiye travelled abroad for the first time, attending galas in Spain. She began to dream of staging Shakespeare, and of making a movie. In 2009, she played the title role in her own adaptation of "Hamlet." This spring, she finished shooting her first screenplay, about a downtrodden mother and daughter who herd goats in the Taurus Mountains.
It can be difficult to grasp just how remarkable these achievements are. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, Atatürk's secularizing reforms put Turkey at the vanguard of feminism. Turkish women got the vote in 1934, before women in Italy and France. Atatürk's daughter was a combat pilot. But in rural Turkey the new secular constitution had little effect on the old patriarchal culture, and women's lives continued much as they always had. Today, some Turkish women are C.E.O.s, best-selling novelists, Olympic gold medalists, and Constitutional Court judges. Other Turkish women—hundreds of thousands of them—are rape victims or child brides. Women make up only twenty-seven per cent of the Turkish paid workforce. An estimated thirty per cent of rural Turkish women haven't completed elementary school, and forty-seven per cent have been beaten or raped by their husbands.
The Islamist party headed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been Turkey's Prime Minister since 2003, has signed a charter condemning child marriage. His government has passed laws criminalizing rape within marriage and making honor killings punishable by a life sentence, and it has provided classes to teach police how to handle domestic violence. Nonetheless, during the first seven years of Erdoğan's tenure, the murder rate of women rose fourteenfold. Legal measures are worth little when the Prime Minister openly promotes the patriarchal mores that made them necessary in the first place. Erdoğan has often stated that every married woman in Turkey should bear at least three children. Once, he boosted the number to five. He thinks that Cesarean births decrease women's fertility, and has characterized both Cesareans and abortions as an insidious plot to stunt Turkey's growth. The number of requests filed by parents to marry underage daughters has risen in the past year, and fourteen per cent of all marriages now involve an underage girl.
Ümmiye comes from a world where women don't read books, control their finances, or leave home in the evenings. They keep men's secrets, because when they don't they can't count on shelters or the police for protection. In most documented cases, the police have sent battered women back to their violent relatives. At least three women who went to state shelters were ordered to make peace with their husbands and were later murdered by them. Last year, the bloodstained handbag of a woman shot eight times by her partner on a crowded street was found to contain a legal complaint she had registered against him two days before.
When I drove into Arslanköy on an overcast afternoon in May, it looked like a typical one-street Turkish village, with a mosque, a coffeehouse, a baker, a butcher, and a general store. The store sold Coke, but not diet Coke. The village has twenty-five hundred inhabitants, most of whom are descended from the Yörük, a nomadic people believed to have migrated to the Taurus Mountains from Central Asia in the eleventh century. Perhaps because of the Yörük influence, Islam is observed less strictly in Arslanköy than in some other southeastern Turkish villages. The women are famous for their toughness. They cut wood and work on construction sites. During the War of Independence, they carried ammunition on their backs to the soldiers. In 1946, several Arslanköy women, some of them pregnant, defied the police rather than turn over the village's ballot box to a corrupt headman. Many were shot at and imprisoned, including a certain Grandma Halime, who reportedly threw herself on the ballot box, declaring, "The vote is our honor—we won't surrender our honor."
I met Ümmiye at her house, a little way from the main street, up a wooded slope. She was dressed in the loose shalwar pants, head scarf, and bright-blue vulcanized-rubber shoes commonly worn by Anatolian village women. Now in her mid-fifties, she projects an air less of strength than of tenacity. She has a distinctive voice—soft and almost girlish, but with a piercing quality. One of ten siblings, she was the only girl to receive any formal schooling. When she was eight, a new initiative required families to send at least one daughter to primary school. A younger sister was six, the right age to enroll, but she was shy. Ümmiye took her place. She was dying to learn to read. Her village, some distance from Arslanköy, had no library, but she talked people into lending her books. The first book she borrowed, from a teacher, was "Mother," by Maxim Gorky. It taught her that people everywhere were basically the same. "He wrote about people like us in the village," she told me. "The stove was a stove like ours, the shivering was shivering."
When she was in her early teens, Ümmiye began writing stories herself. Her first one, "The Goat Beauty," was about a childless woman who prays to God, "Please give me a daughter, even if she's a goat at night." God gives her precisely such a daughter, who grows up to be so beautiful that a rich man's son wants to marry her. "Ah, my girl, you can't marry anyone," the mother says. "Just look: at night, you become a goat." The rich man's family decks the girl out with bracelets and gold watches, and the mother prays again: "Either make her a full-time girl or take her back!" In the morning, she goes to her daughter's bed and finds her dead.
Ümmiye describes her own mother as young, uneducated, and innocent: she would pick up cigarette papers on the street and, because they had Arabic writing on them and looked to her like pages from the Koran, kissed them and kept them in a high place, as befits the word of God. A few years ago, a reporter asked Ümmiye if she knew the meaning of her name. She didn't, and wasn't pleased to learn that ümmi is Arabic for "illiterate." (It's one of the epithets of Muhammad, who is said to have been illiterate at the time he received the prophecies.) Üm is also the Arabic word for "mother," and thus the two preoccupations of Ümmiye's dramatic work—education and mothers—were prefigured in her name.
As one of the few literate girls in the village, Ümmiye wrote love letters for older girls. When her brothers were in the military, she wrote them letters from the family. She liked to listen, and to know everything about everyone. She says that's why she doesn't have to invent anything in the plays she writes. When I asked how the plays were received by the people she wrote about, she said that they usually didn't recognize themselves. She left school at the age of twelve. At nineteen, she married a man from Arslanköy, in an arranged marriage. She has two sons and a daughter, who acts in, and helps manage, the theatre.
In 2006, Ümmiye wrote an autobiographical play called "Flowers of Longing," describing her philosophy of theatre. The first act is about a woman called Hatice, whose daughter Elif wants to go to school, but whose husband needs Elif to work in the fields to finance his drinking habit; he has already promised her in marriage to a village man. When Hatice objects, he beats her, causing her to miscarry their fifth child. In despair, she decides to drink poison. Elif stops her just in time, and tells her that all mothers are "flowers of longing." The second act isn't a continuation of the first but a new story, about a woman who starts a theatre. Her name is Hasret, which means "Longing." The title, "Flowers of Longing," has a double meaning: the play narrates the creative flourishing of a woman called Longing, but it also represents the artistic transformation of Hatice's longing.
Ümmiye keeps an archive of her theatre at a rented cottage on the outskirts of Mersin. One afternoon, she invited me over for lunch, with some of the theatre members. We sat on a blanket on a concrete patio, by a little grove of apricot, fig, and lemon trees. Prickly pears were just turning red on the cacti. Ümmiye and her daughter, Duygu, brought out tomatoes, cucumbers, and mint, which some of the theatre members started slicing for tabbouleh. Ümmiye's husband followed them out of the house. Kindly and dishevelled in appearance, he didn't impress one as a forceful personality. Ümmiye sent him back to the kitchen to fetch boiling water for the bulgur.
Duygu came out with some of the archive: armloads of plastic folders, typescripts, and appointment calendars given away by banks, which Ümmiye uses as notebooks. I began perusing nine years' worth of yellowed newspaper clippings. One headline—"WITH DOUGH ON HER HANDS, SHE WILL SHOOT A FILM"—alluded to a venerable idiom of Turkish patriarchy: "Those with dough on their hands shouldn't meddle with a man's work." There were many articles about "Woman's Outcry," the 2003 production based on the theatre members' life experiences.
The plot drew most heavily from the stories of two of the women: Zeynep and Ümmü. In the documentary about the production, Zeynep describes how, when she was heavily pregnant and suffering from cramps, her husband, who beat her when he drank, gave her one-way bus fare to take their sick toddler to a clinic. The doctor took one look at Zeynep and said that she was about to give birth. Alone, with no money, she delivered the baby and got seven stitches. Later, as she collected wood to heat water for the baby's bath, she wondered why God hadn't let her die in labor. Ümmü's story was about her longing to become a teacher: she had made it all the way to the second year of high school, when her elder brother kidnapped a thirteen-year-old to make her his wife. To avoid a blood feud, Ümmü's parents insisted that she marry the girl's brother. They locked her in a room for three days and wore her down. Two months later, Ümmü ran away, but she had nowhere to go. Later, she got married again, to a lazy drunk.
"Woman's Outcry," written by the school principal, combined these stories into two acts. In Act I, a battered wife gives birth to a premature daughter, whom her husband names Aytül, after an old sweetheart. (Two of the nine actresses had been named after a former girlfriend of their father's.) In Act II, set fifteen years later, Aytül's brother has kidnapped a thirteen-year-old girl. Ordered to marry the kidnapped girl's brother, Aytül—played by forty-seven-year-old Ümmiye—runs away to her teacher's house.
One rehearsal of "Woman's Outcry" was broken up by the police, because the women hadn't applied for a permit to stage a play. Police oppression was duly incorporated into the script. In the final scene, an officer tries to stop Aytül and her teacher from starting their own theatre. When Aytül talks back, he beats her to the ground. The play's narrator steps forward and deplores Aytül's fate: "She received her first beating from her father, when she was in her mother's belly. Her last beating came from the police. . . . This theatre, it seems, is over." But then Aytül stands up. "This theatre isn't over," she declares. "Our children won't suffer what we suffered." The cast chants the final lines in unison: "We will work, and we will succeed. We are humans! Humans!"
In the documentary, you can see a large assembly of villagers at the opening night of "Woman's Outcry." Many women in the audience seem completely lost in the performance, eyes shining, mouths ajar. The men's reactions are more complicated. Most look alternately bemused, uneasy, and proud. At least two husbands have come out to support their wives. They seem not to be bad sports. One of the women says that her husband praised her performance as a wife-beater. "You guys made him just like me," she quotes him saying. "It came out good."
After "Woman's Outcry," Ümmiye decided to start writing and staging plays herself, with a new group of actors, from the Mersin area. (The school principal continues to write for the original group, now known as the Arslanköy Tent Theatre Women's Group.) While writing, Ümmiye slept, like Napoleon, three or four hours a night. Every morning, she got up a little after two to do the day's baking. At three, a truck came to take her to an orchard two hours away, where she picked oranges and lemons for up to twelve hours. Then, after cooking dinner for her family, she wrote for two hours before bed. Ümmiye has written ten plays, most involving mother-daughter relationships. The new group included two high-school graduates. One, Seher, married at sixteen, and completed high school as an adult. She is forty-six, and has two grandchildren. She has a large, expressive face and wide-set eyes, and can play pretty much anyone, from dramatic leads to comic characters. The other, Ayfer, who is forty-one, started acting in her teens. She gave it up when she got married, and joined Ümmiye's group after she got divorced. She specializes in male roles, especially villains. Men's clothes suit her trim figure, and she has a knack for handling a whip. She lives with her sixteen-year-old daughter, selling aloe-vera products, cleaning houses, and making occasional trips to Istanbul to play bit roles in soap operas.
Sorting through the pile of scripts in the archive, I found a copy of Ümmiye's "Hamlet," and opened it at random.
"Alas, poor Yorick!" I read aloud.
"I knew him," Ümmiye said promptly. "He had a way of joking, of conversation." Her expression turned serious. "You know," she said, "there's something I'd like to ask you about that scene. When Hamlet says, 'How many times I kissed this one, this Yorick, on the lips.' Well, Yorick is a man. And Hamlet is also a man." She asked if I had any explanation, and I confessed that I did not, observing only that Hamlet was a little boy at the time. "Well, of course he was," Ümmiye said. "But it still seems odd. With us in Turkey, little boys don't kiss grown men on the lips."
Everyone agreed that it was odd. "Hamlet was a homosexual," Seher said quietly, not looking up from the tomato she was dicing, and this theory was debated for some minutes. Ümmiye couldn't accept it, because wasn't the whole point that he was in love with his mother?
In her adaptation, Ümmiye changed many of the names to ones that a Turkish audience would know. Hamlet became Hamit, Horatio became Hurşit, and Polonius became Şahin, which means "hawk," perhaps because Hamit knows one from a handsaw. Only Shakespeare's name couldn't be changed, which was unfortunate, because the women couldn't pronounce it. Ümmiye wrote the Turkish transliteration, Şekspir, on their hands, so they could contemplate it while working in the fields.
"Hamit" toured in several Turkish cities, drawing sizable audiences. At some point, the actress playing Gertrude reached her eighth month of pregnancy and couldn't fall dead to the floor anymore, so Ümmiye wrote an alternate ending in which nobody dies and Hamit just goes really crazy.
During our first meeting, I asked Ümmiye if it had been difficult to go really crazy. She said that she had a nervous temperament, so it came to her naturally. "I just did this," she said and, raising her eyes to the ceiling, set about the most terrific shrieking and wailing. "Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, what's happening, you're a murderer!" We were at her house in Arslanköy, and a neighbor stuck her head in the door to see who was being killed. "Nothing's wrong—we're just doing 'Hamlet,' " Ümmiye said. "If only this body would blow away or dissolve, turning into a dewdrop. Or if only God hadn't forbidden suicide!" The neighbor wordlessly withdrew.
The success of "Hamlet" in Arslanköy might attest to Shakespeare's universality. Alternatively, it might attest to certain similarities between Shakespeare's world and a twenty-first-century Anatolian village. Rural Turkey is a place where revenge killings, honor suicides, and blood feuds are real. The question of whether it's better to be alive or dead is a genuine one for village women, many of whom have had the occasion to ask themselves, quite literally, "who would fardels bear, / To grunt and sweat under a weary life." Often in "Hamlet," the farmer's lot is a stand-in for the futility of life. The lines Ümmiye recited, about her body turning into a dewdrop, are from the first soliloquy, "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt," which goes on to describe the world as "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable . . . an unweeded garden, / that grows to seed": lines likely to resonate with anyone who does much weeding. In her staging of the graveyard scene—the one about the secret brotherhood of "gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers"—Ümmiye expressed the metaphor neatly by using pumpkins for skulls.
Her production opens with the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet's father, played by a woman wearing a white sheet with eyeholes. It's funny, because it looks a bit like Charlie Brown awaiting the Great Pumpkin, but it's also scary, because what's under the sheet is something the women have suffered at first hand, whether you call it tradition, economy, patriarchy, or fate. "Hamlet" and "Woman's Outcry" ask a lot of the same questions. Who is this guy who's ordering me to leave school and come home, to die in the place where I was born: a real father or a fictive demon? Is my life mine or does it belong to my parents? Is it a blessing or is it a curse?
When Ümmiye first told the school principal that there would be no men in her theatre, he expressed surprise, and asked if she was a feminist. It was a word she had never heard before, but the absence of men is a powerful part of her theatre. It reflects a certain reality about the villages, where the women's emotional lives center on children, animals, and other women, and the men are always elsewhere—loafing, drinking, gambling, working, or dead. In Ümmiye's plays, men are a backdrop, like weather: either they cause problems or they don't. It's the women who perform actions, who reach decisions and change as people. In general, Ümmiye is far less concerned with reforming men than with educating women. Once you educate the women, she says, they'll bring up their sons and daughters as equals, and then the men will come out better anyway.
One day, I accompanied Ümmiye and her group to a remote village, smaller and poorer than Arslanköy, where they were to take part in a women's outreach program run by the Human Resources Foundation of Turkey. Following presentations by a health educator and a psychologist, there was to be a performance of "Free Clinic," a play that Ümmiye wrote, based on a woman she knew, who wouldn't go to the doctor even when it was free.
The village was in the mountains, about an hour's drive from Mersin. We passed a Coca-Cola plant, a vineyard, a graveyard. I noticed a village called Dalakderesi—Spleen Creek—and a row of gigantic shirts flapping on a clothesline. At the beginning of the session, some twenty attendees were given a questionnaire about marriage and pregnancy. A few, unable to read or write, dictated their answers. The women looked physically different from the members of Ümmiye's group, their faces more coppery, their relationship with furniture more cautious. Many had missing or gold teeth. Despite their open expressions and ready smiles, their unhappiness was like an object in the room, to be wrestled with and made the best of. Everyone knew that it was why we were there.
The health educator's talk touched on cervical cancer, the morning-after pill, and I.U.D.s. Projecting a giant diagram of the female reproductive system on the wall, she pointed out the clitoris, explaining that it was the source of female sexual pleasure, and could be thought of as a tiny penis. The psychologist talked about happiness and endorphins, and explained that endorphins were released during sex. "I know you're all taught to do it only when your husbands want," she said. "I know you're all thinking, Why should I create extra work for myself at night, when I could be sleeping?" They had to overcome such thoughts, she said, because deriving pleasure from sex was their right. The women burst out laughing.
The psychologist told them to go home that night and tell their husbands how lucky they were, to have such fantastic wives. She said that they had to love themselves, because you can't feed someone else when you're hungry; and that you could get through to anyone if you found the right language. If you hadn't got through yet, you hadn't found the right language. Men were implied in every sentence, but in such a theoretical way that they started to seem like God, or terrorists—entities who affected you, but whom you would probably never see face to face.
Finally, it was time for "Free Clinic": the story of a doctor who opens a free clinic and is visited by a series of patients with humorous complaints that can't be solved by modern medicine. A thirty-year-old "old maid" comes to the doctor with complaints relating to not being married. "What am I supposed to do about that?" the doctor demands. At first, the women in the audience, who had never seen theatre before, stared at the cast with incredulous expressions. Gradually, they started laughing at the jokes, and answering the rhetorical questions. The pedagogic content of the play lay in the story of the one patient with an actual medical complaint: a pain in her breast. Defying her husband, who considers it shameful, she goes to the doctor, who diagnoses a serious disease: if she had waited any longer, she would have died. After a moment's silence, the local women seemed to recognize this as a happy ending, and applauded loudly.
Until the twentieth century, Turkish women did not perform on the stage. Female roles were played by men or by non-Muslim women, mostly Armenians. The tragic fate of Afife Jale, the first Muslim woman to defy this convention, is still well known. When the teen-age Afife appeared onstage, in 1919, covering for an absent Armenian, her father called her a whore and disowned her. The police raided all her subsequent performances, and the Ministry of the Interior issued a formal decree banning Muslim women from the stage. Atatürk revoked the ban in 1923, but Afife had already succumbed to ignominy, migraine, and morphine addiction. She died, destitute, in a mental hospital, in 1941. Today, the Afife Theatre Awards are among the highest honors in Turkish theatre. Ironically, although "Woman's Outcry" received a mention at the 2007 Afife Awards ceremony, only the high-school principal was cited, and none of the women. Ümmiye wept bitterly. Afife Jale had been an inspiration for her—someone she thought about a lot when she was building her theatre.
In the Turkish theatre, comedy is older than tragedy and melodrama, which became known only in the nineteenth century, through Western examples. Previously, the main dramatic form was the shadow-puppet play, which grew popular in the late sixteenth century. Shadow plays feature two recurring characters, the yokel Karagöz and his refined friend Hacivat, in a series of satiric dialogues and skits. The main "plot," staged as a play within a play, is typically a device bringing Karagöz and Hacivat into contact with a range of human types: Karagöz and Hacivat enter a poetry contest, and Karagöz wins by beating up all the other poets; they set up shop as scribes, and Karagöz writes crazy letters; or Hacivat puts Karagöz in an insane asylum, and then feels sorry.
During the time I spent with Ümmiye's group, they were touring the Mersin school system with a play called "The Price of Two Oxen," performing up to five times a day. I watched this play many times, and was often reminded of the shadow plays, which used to be on television when I was little. The central plot, about a father who decides to sell his schoolgirl daughter for the price of two oxen, is presented as a play within a play. In one sketch, a city woman comes to Arslanköy, trying to sell the village women tickets to their own theatre, which results in some Karagöz-and-Hacivat-style back talk. Another features a cooking contest, in which three contestants come to blows over whose village has the most authentic lepe (a tomato stew with bulgur and potatoes). Last comes the story of the schoolgirl sold for the price of two oxen. This plot, although more serious, still received a relatively lighthearted treatment, with slapstick interludes and a happy ending.
At the last performance before summer vacation, I watched the play from backstage. When I arrived at the school theatre, Seher was adjusting the grotesquely padded bosom and posterior of her "city woman" costume, and Ayfer was bandaging her heel, blistered from ill-fitting men's shoes. As usual in Ümmiye's productions, everyone played five or six roles. Ümmiye, who played three village women, started out the show wearing three near-identical shalwars layered on top of each other, and she furiously peeled down to the next layer between scenes. For her fourth character, she pulled on an enormous purple dress and momentarily got lost inside, unable to find the sleeves or the neck opening. The dress turned out to have a tear, and the other women urged her to change into something else. But Ümmiye said that the tear deepened her character's backstory: "That's the kind of man her husband is. He sells his own daughter, but doesn't give his wife money for clothes."
The others were impressed by her quick thinking. "Let's say that in the play," someone suggested.
"Absolutely not!" Ümmiye declared. "The perceptive ones will perceive it anyway, and the unperceptive ones are in God's hands."
"Wool Doll," the movie that Ümmiye finished shooting in the spring, is set among the Yörük, some thirty years ago. It tells the story of a mother and daughter, Hatice and Elif, who lead a life of oppression at the hands of Hatice's mother-in-law. (Many of the daughters in Ümmiye's plays are called Elif, which is the Turkish word for the first letter of the Arabic alphabet: to say that someone "doesn't know elif" is to say that the person is illiterate.) Ümmiye directed it with the help of Yasin Korkmaz, a twenty-six-year-old Mersin-based filmmaker. The budget, eked out from local government agencies, was less than seventeen thousand dollars. Ümmiye wrote the script as if it were a play, and Yasin edited it for film. The first thing he did was cut out all the male characters. Women with fake mustaches were O.K. in theatre, he said, but not in film. Elif's father is still part of the story, but he never appears onscreen. He's always about to come, or he's just left. Then he dies. Ideally, Yasin told me, a viewer might not notice that the father had never appeared; someone might watch the whole film and not notice that there weren't any men.
The action was supposed to take place in springtime, when the Yörük bring their sheep to pasture in the mountains, but, owing largely to fund-raising troubles, shooting did not begin until the start of 2012, when Arslanköy lay buried under more than ten feet of snow. Anyone who could leave town had done so. Practically, the only souls remaining were the street dogs, the village lunatic, and the mayor. "And the dogs and the mayor mostly stayed indoors," the cinematographer told me.
"What was the lunatic doing?" I asked.
"The same thing as us! Being a lunatic! He would give us this look, like he recognized us."
It had been difficult to cast Elif, since no parents wanted to let their children outside in such weather. Nobody would even let out the goats. It took two days to get together enough goats to shoot a scene with goats in it, and two weeks to find a little girl. In the end, the projected fifteen-day shoot lasted two and a half months. The women slept in Ümmiye's two-room house, sharing a single outdoor toilet, while the crew—seven men, at first—occupied a vacant boarding house. They installed a stove and pushed together three beds, and all seven of them squeezed into the three beds. Ümmiye gave them a duvet and some sheets, which had originally been intended for Duygu's trousseau. The village imam contributed some blankets from the mosque. The blankets had been used for transporting corpses.
Every night, the crew members slept in dead people's blankets, and every morning they got up to confront a frozen auto transmission. Once, the producer—a semi-professional singer of melancholy Turkish ballads—opened the trunk and leaned in to get something, and the lid came crashing down on his head: the hydraulic mechanism had frozen. A sound technician fell off a ladder and broke something in his back. There was no doctor, and the roads were closed, so he had to be treated by the village bonesetter. Eventually, four crew members decamped to the lowlands, leaving only the cinematographer, the producer, and the director. Seher, who was playing Hatice, broke her wrist and had to wear a cast. At least that fit into the story of a woman who had been beaten by her wicked mother-in-law. Meanwhile, the wicked mother-in-law broke her pelvis.
Some actresses got fed up with the cold and quit, meaning that new actresses had to be found and the scenes shot again from scratch. Retakes were often impossible. When you'd once asked a woman to walk across a yard carrying seventy pounds of firewood on her back, sinking to her waist in snow with each step and slowly turning purple, you couldn't ask her to walk across that yard a second time. Even if you could have, she had already left a track in the snow.
In May, I joined Ümmiye and her cast and crew for the last day of filming: a scene in which the village teacher and a city official try to persuade Hatice to send Elif to school. We met in Arslanköy, where the cast and crew distributed themselves between my car and Yasin's minivan, and we headed into the mountains.
Clouds hung low and heavy overhead. Farmland scrolled by on all sides, so green it hurt your eyes. As the road wound up into the mountains, the minivan vanished for longer and longer intervals, smaller each time it reappeared. "Don't try to keep up with Yasin—it's hopeless," the cinematographer advised, sitting in the back with his wife and their five-month-old son.
A light rain began to fall. The snow was long gone, but the roads were muddy and pitted. Often, I had a choice of driving either into a ditch or over a boulder. I usually chose the boulder, which would scrape against the undercarriage of the car. Once, for variety, I tried a ditch and the tires spun alarmingly in the mud, before catching again. We were looking for a pasture with sheep, a lake view, and a Yörük goatskin tent. It wasn't clear to me whether this description referred to a particular place or whether the filmmakers were, like the ancient Yörük themselves, simply wandering the mountains with an eye out for somewhere matching their requirements.
After driving for two hours, we arrived at a grassy ridge overlooking a lake, complete with a pasture, a flock of sheep, even a tent. The clouds had parted, and the pasture shone golden-green in the late-afternoon sun. Unfortunately, the tent was made of blue plastic, and not traditional goatskin, so the crew couldn't shoot inside it. Yasin, who is of Yörük descent, remembered goatskin tents from his childhood, but nobody here used them anymore.
As the crew set up the equipment, I sat on the grass next to Melisa Yıldız, the eight-year-old girl who plays Elif. Dressed in a red knitted vest and a child-sized shalwar, she was occupied in some mysterious way with two rocks and a stick. Her acting was serious, with an undercurrent of fierceness. In one scene, Elif, who has never owned a toy, sees another little girl playing with a doll and is consumed by every kind of emotion, the way children sometimes are. Her mother gives her a hank of black wool swaddled in a blanket. This eponymous "wool doll" looks somewhat like a baby, but has coarse black tufts where its face should be. It's a frightening, almost repulsive object, but Elif cradles it as if it were the most precious thing on earth.
Finally, the equipment was ready. Seher, as Hatice, sat on a rock, and the women playing the schoolteacher and the official stood in front of her. "We've come to see to Elif's education," the teacher said.
"But we're Yörük—we don't have anything," Hatice replied.
"The state has resources for children like Elif."
Every minute or two, something went wrong, and the scene had to be reshot. The boom—a grayish moplike object, partially eaten by goats—cast a shadow on someone's face. The microphone picked up the sound of an airplane flying overhead. The noise could have been filtered out in the studio, but then the distant sound of croaking frogs would have been lost. Next, Yasin stopped the teacher when she repeated her line about the state having resources for children like Elif.
"Do you realize that you smile every time you say 'state'?" he demanded. "Does the mention of the state fill you with uncontainable joy, or what?"
"I'm not smiling, I'm squinting," the actress replied. "The sun comes in my eyes. It's not because of the state."
"It might be related," Yasin said. Everyone sighed, thinking about the state.
Ümmiye pulled a large housedress out of her bag, clambered up a nearby slope, and stood there, arms outstretched, like Batman, shielding everyone from the sun. Shooting resumed. The city official told Hatice that the state could give Elif a scholarship to a boarding school. Hatice started to cry. "But my daughter is all I have," she said.
"Cut!" Yasin called.
"What is it this time?" the teacher asked.
I heard a small voice say, "An engine." It was Elif. She was right: a moment later, a car came up the winding road.
The actors took the scene from the top. This time, the state was spoken of with appropriate gravity. The sheep stood placidly in the golden light, occasionally clanging their bells. The sky remained free of airplanes, while the frogs continued their whirring chorus. A lonely mother was persuaded to give her daughter up to the powers of state education. As the sun slowly dropped behind the mountains, the company started loading up the cars to head home.
The closest airport to Arslanköy is in Adana, my father's home town. On the way back to Istanbul, I stopped by my grandparents' old apartment, where my aunt now lives. Her younger daughter, Umut, was visiting from Kahramanmaraş, where she studies business administration, a subject that she isn't crazy about. As usual, my aunt brought up her regret that her older daughter and I both live alone and spend all our time working. Umut, a peacekeeper by nature, promised to have ten children to make up for us. She already had names picked out. "Abdüllatif, Abdurrahim, Selahattin, Feyzullah . . . " she said pensively.
"What about the girls?" I asked.
"I'm not going to have girls," she said, deadpanning.
Conversation turned to an anti-abortion speech that the Prime Minister had made the week before. "Every abortion is an Uludere," he declared, alluding to a botched airstrike last year that killed more than thirty Kurdish civilians near the eastern city of Uludere. He couldn't understand why people cared more about murdered Kurds than about murdered fetuses.
Back in Istanbul, I kept thinking about the situation of women in Turkey. I started paying more attention to the Turkish papers—to the sensationalistic headlines I used to avoid. In September, my eye was caught by "THE PRICE FOR RAPE: FIVE SHEEP, ONE COW, AND A BRIDE." The story read like a cross between "Woman's Outcry" and "The Price of Two Oxen." E.D., a thirteen-year-old village girl from Erzurum, was forced to marry a relative who had raped and tortured her; in exchange, the relative's parents gave E.D.'s father five sheep and a cow, and his thirteen-year-old sister had to marry E.D.'s brother. (The rapist was later arrested.) That same month, in an echo of "Flowers of Longing," a fifteen-year-old kidnapped bride from a town near Adana hanged herself from a window grille, after her husband kicked her in the stomach and caused a miscarriage.
Ümmiye is currently working on a screenplay called "Footless on Her Own Feet." It tells the story of a handicapped girl whose fifty-year-old mother pushes her to school every day in a wheelbarrow. Eventually, she wins a national drawing contest, making a super-realistic picture of herself in the wheelbarrow. With the prize money, she buys a wheelchair. Like the Arslanköy theatre, the girl's drawing uses artistic representation to change the thing represented. By drawing a truthful picture of the humiliating wheelbarrow, she transforms it into a dignified wheelchair—much as a theatre, by representing the injustice of village women's life, might make that life more just. Nabokov once claimed that the inspiration for Lolita was an art work produced by an ape in the Jardin des Plantes: a drawing of the bars of its cage. It's a good metaphor for artistic production. What else do we ever draw, besides the bars of our cage, or the wheelbarrow we rode in as crippled children? How else do cages get smashed? How else will we stand on our own feet? ♦


text:
Its that time of year again when we all have to think about throwing down big bucks on our significant other's for christmas presents.
what route are you taking this year?
i'll probably do what i do every year, buy him some shirts from the store i work at. there are tons of band shirts, and he's really into rock and roll so its usually pretty easy for me. heres the link if anyone else knows someone like that: http://www.rockworldeast.com
i'll probably get him a few. maybe bake him some goodies or something. i've learned guys love baked stuff, so it's all good.
what about you guys?

subset: commoncrawl


text:
COLIN HAY - Gathering Mercury (Lmtd Ed.)
LP Regular
Notify me when back in stock
Limited Edition 180 Gram Vinyl - Over the course of a solo career that has spanned the decades since he made his musical mark on popular music as the front man of the multi platinum selling Men at Work, Colin Hay has never delivered a finer, more keenly honed solo set than GATHERING MERCURY. In response to fan demand, Compass is releasing a limited edition version of GATHERING MERCURY on 180 gram vinyl. This 2011 release reveals Hay's emotional depth and musical diversity and earned Hay appearances on TV appearances on Craig Ferguson, Ellen and CNN as well as an ARIA award nomination in Australia. The songs are deeply affecting but never maudlin. Despite the serious subject matter, they're full of Hay's usual optimism with arrangements featuring his quizzical, instantly recognizable tenor vocals supported by acoustic instruments and melodic electric guitar accents. "Hay has been attracting new fans with gentle, ruminative acoustic songs." -The New York Times.
Vinyl release of Colin Hay - Gathering Mercury (Lmtd Ed.). Released through COMPASS and available on LP.
Cat No: COM49741
Barcode: 0766397457413
Packaging: LP Regular
|Barcode #
|Colin Hay
|Shipping Weight
|LP Regular
Be The First To Review This Product!
Help other Vinyl Destination users shop smarter by writing reviews for products you have purchased.


text:
Welcome to TurkoTek's Discussion Forums
Archived Salons and Selected Discussions can be accessed by clicking on those words, or you can return to the Turkotek Home Page. Our forums are easy to use, and you are welcome to read and post messages without registering. However, registration will enable a number of features that make the software more flexible and convenient for you, and you need not provide any information except your name (which is required even if you post without being registered). Please use your full name. We do not permit posting anonymously or under a pseudonym, ad hominem remarks, commercial promotion, comments bearing on the value of any item currently on the market or on the reputation of any seller.
|Miscellaneous (rug-related) Topics Opinions on books, articles, recent auctions, exhibitions, etc.
|Thread Tools
|Display Modes
|November 29th, 2010, 04:04 PM
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: damascus
Posts: 2
A Tale of Two Books
Like many men over forty - especially those whose work requires a lot of attention to colors - I am going partially color-blind. To make up for this aging problem, I decided to read as much of the available literature that has been written about dyes and colors as my time permits.
One trip to some book stores and I came back with titles that included Koekboya by Harald Bohmer, Indigo by Jenny Balfour-Paul, Color a Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay, Comprehensive History of Madder Red by Robert Chenciner, A Perfect Red by Amy Butler Greenfield, The Root of Wild Madder by Brian Murphy and others. I must admit that in spite of my infatuation with colors as a visual language, reading the written language about those same colors that have consumed my sight is overall a very boring trip through dry life-less scientific colorless desert.
Two books, however, broke this norm; namely the last two mentioned above. I thought so from the minute the guy in the bookshop told me apologetically that they are not "professional readings about dyes". In A Perfect Red, Amy makes the history of cochineal an interesting thriller that hardly feels like reading about the insect or the dye that is obtained from it, instead of that the book makes it a humanitarian study of the toil of the dyers, the lavish luxury of the upper classes, discovering new lands and their treasures, greed, curiosity, different ways of life, different legal systems, adventures, competition and so on and so forth. The book ends and you still want it to last longer. One gets to learn about the dye, the insect that produces it, those who introduced it to us, etc., but unconsciously. The book is by no means a technical one that tells the chemical structure of the colors particles nor how mordant work. Very few of us want to learn about that anyway.
In The Root of Wild Madder, Brian fascinated me with his childish naïve pursuit of "understanding the oriental carpet". He managed to keep the torch of curiosity kindled inside him for years and managed to be above the material values he was raised with. He managed to find the very subtle line that ties rugs to poetry. Neither the sufferings of the Afghan war nor the thugs in the bazaar of Isfahan nor the rug that he overpaid for stopped him from his love to learn more; quite the opposite, he turned those to motives to keep his interest alive. One doesn't feel that the book is teaching anything: neither about a dye nor anything else. One only gets the feeling that one is in the presence of a child breathlessly sharing an experience.
I strongly recommend reading the two books especially by those who give more weight to human experience than they do to "scientific facts", like myself.
|December 1st, 2010, 06:32 PM
Join Date: Oct 2009
Posts: 87
Hi Yaser,
I haven't yet read "The root of wild madder", but indeed "A perfect red" is an outstanding and fascinating book. A travel in time! As not everybody realizes, Central American cochineal, once was about as important for spanish economy as all the silver and gold mines of Mexico and Peru.
Thanks for the lead.
Although a minor member of the odd little sect of scientists myself, I can easily understand that Chemistry, Botanic and even History are perfectly boring for many Turkotekers and that therefore you are surely right: Prof. Cardon's and dr. Böhmer's books will not appeal to all.
Best regards
|December 1st, 2010, 08:38 PM
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Massachusetts
Posts: 43
Hi Yaser and Pierre,
I also found both A Perfect Red and The Root of Wild Madder enlightening and entertaining. While I wouldn't class Koekboya as a similarly "good read", I nonetheless found that working through Bohmer's text enhanced my understanding of my own reactions to color in textiles and more generally. I didn't at all feel as though I was traveling through a "dry life-less scientific colorless desert." Good science writing, like all good writing, deepens our perception of the world.
I don't find the dichotomy between "human experience" and "scientific facts" too useful, since the study of human experience can yield scientific facts and the practice of science (both formal and informal) is a quintessential human experience.
Joel Greifinger
Last edited by Joel Greifinger; December 2nd, 2010 at 03:35 AM.
|December 14th, 2010, 02:33 PM
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: damascus
Posts: 2
hi joel;
i wish i could get rid of my science related complex but it looks like when it comes to dyes even Ethel Mairet shares my view; in her book Indigo Jenny Balfour-Paul quoted her saying: " dying is an art; the moment science dominates it, it is an art no longer, and the craftsmman must go back to the time before science touched it, and begin all over a gain." page 115
|December 14th, 2010, 03:35 PM
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 99
Hi Yaser
Using natural dyes is an art. The physical and chemical explanations of how and why the artisans get the results that they do are science. You don't have to know that fuchsine is a triphenylmethane dye to know that it fades when exposed to strong light. But you do have to know something about the interactions of such compounds with light to understand why it fades.
Steve Price
|September 6th, 2012, 02:13 PM
Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 1
Hi Yaser,
in the last 30 years I spent a lot of time with nomads and countryside people
in Anatolia concerning with handling methods of natural dyeing.
Perhaps you cab find interesting hints under my website: www.exoriente.de
|September 6th, 2012, 10:30 PM
Join Date: Jul 2009
Posts: 10
Hi Yaser and all,
A reference book like Boehmer's "Koekboya" that provides some amusing moments is "The Dyer's Companion", by Elijah Bemiss, first published in 1806 and reprinted by Dover Books. Not only does it include an enormous number of recipes for making "natural" dyes, it also provides cures for dropsy, cancer, hydrophobia, dysentery, cholera, St. Anthony's fire (?), consumption, and other maladies. Who could ask for more?
Lloyd Kannenberg
PS I've passed three score and ten years.
|Thread Tools
|Display Modes
Linear Mode


text:
Covil: The Dark Overlords
In Covil: The Dark Overlords you will struggle for the supremacy of the regions surrounding an isolated town. Each player controls a Dark Overlord with unique powers and countless minions to "defend the world from enemy hordes" and bring "peace and security to the territories" — at a cost, of course!
The game is a tribute to awesome 70's,80's & 90's cartoons, filled with references to our favorite and unforgettable characters.
Supported Languages
"Covil: The Dark Overlords" and "Chaotic Evil Expansion" and all Stretch Goals will be printed in three different languages. Vesuvius Media will produce the English Version, Mandala Jogos will produce the Portuguese version, and Arrakis Games will produce the Spanish version. You will be able to choose the version you want when we will send you the survey after the end of the campaign.
Also, with the help of our great community we will have the rulebook and the cards translated in downloadable PDFs
Printed Versions
Downloadable PDFs
- Greek (by Alexandros Manos)
- Italian (by Fabio Piovesan)
- French (by Nicolas Quesque)
- Spanish (by Cartón Olvidado)
- German (by Martin Mathes)
- Japanese (by Kei Kouji)
When you choose ANY of our add-ons, there is NO extra shipping cost during the Kickstarter Campaign.
If you choose to add add-ons after the end of the campaign (using our webshop), then extra shipping ($2-$4) will be charged to be fair towards all the backers that supported us and helped us unlock all the great stretch goals.
The Expansion will be available in all three languages: English, Portuguese and Spanish.
Expansión también disponible en Castellano !!!
This add-on includes enough sleeves for all cards in Covil: The Dark Overlords. We will make sure you receive enough sleeves even if we unlock more stretch goals.
You need to add a SECOND pack of sleeves for the Chaotic Evil Expansion.
The "Empires Expansion" includes all Stretch Goals from the original campaign that applied to it.
This add-on includes enough sleeves for all cards in Dwar7s Fall plus its Promo Cards plus the Royal Decrees Expansion (which means everything included in the Overlord pledge).
Covil is a tableau building resource management game where your resources are: attack (melee/ranged); defense; and gold. The game consist of 4 days, each of them is divided into 3 phases:
Phase 1: Morning (Summoning troops)
Phase 2: Afternoon (Performing Actions)
Afternoon lasts until all troops are lying down on the board. You may execute any of the following actions once, in any order:
Phase 3: Night (Dominance and Clean-up)
You earn gold based on the number of territories that you control.
At the end of the 4th night phase, the game ends. The player with most Victory Points wins.
How to Play by Cardboard Stacker
Click here to go to our BGG Fan Page.
Dwar7s Fall is a standalone game from the same designer! The "Overlord" pledge includes all stretch goals from the original campaign except the Game Mat which can be purchased as a separate add-on and the stickers that are part of the "Empires Expansion" add-on.
For more information about Dwar7s Fall, visit our BGG page or visit our previous Kickstarter Campaign.
Covil is scheduled for production in August 2017. Please note that the published product may have differences regarding sizes, quantities, colors and layout because of production limitations and/or adjustments. This includes any type of the game's components (e.g. cards, meeples etc).
Kickstarter Rewards: Backers of $35 USD (+shipping) or more will receive all stretch goals generated from this campaign. The game itself and any stretch goals will be available in the future as separate products from Vesuvius Media Ltd.
We will be collaborating with Mandala Jogos and Arrakis Games for the production of the game in Portuguese and Spanish.
Arrakis Games somos una editorial de juegos de mesa española, afincada en Valencia que nos dedicamos tanto a editar juegos editados en otros idiomas como juegos nuevos de autores españoles. Vamos a editar el juego COVIL: THE DARK OVERLORDS, en su versión española COVIL: LOS SEÑORES OSCUROS. El juego se va editar totalmente en castellano para los backers españoles que además podrán adquirir otros juegos de la compañía ya editados (independientes del idioma) y por supuesto todo el material desbloqueado. Los envíos se realizarán desde España por lo que el coste total del mismo se reduce hasta los 8$ (en vez de los 12$ originales) para todos los backers en España. Además se podrá realizar entrega en mano en Valencia.
A Mandala Jogos fechou uma nova parceria com a Vesuvius Media para disponibilizar a versão totalmente em Português do jogo Covil: Mestres das Trevas. A Campanha será realizada no Brasil simultaneamente com o Kickstarter e todo o valor adquirido na campanha — Covil: Mestres das Trevas será adicionado ao valor arrecadado no Kickstarter e somado as metas de Stretch Goals. Todos os Stretch Goals alcançados no KickStarter serão entregues para os apoiadores do Brasil que comprarem durante a campanha. O Frete será calculado através do site da Mandala Jogos, pois a Mandala irá importar os componentes do jogo e montá-los no BRASIL.
DELIVERY DATE: November of 2017!
In some pledges we made a mistake and set as delivery date 2019. Unfortunately we can not change it because they have already been pledged.
To date, we have successfully fulfilled three campaigns. Now, we have the experience to deliver our products at low costs to United States, Canada, Europe and Brazil, from our local distribution centers. No extra customs fees should be charged.
To keep the cost of shipping as low as possible, our current shipping solution does not offer tracking. If you require order tracking please contact us at support [at] vesuviusmedia.com. Be advised that this may incur additional cost. If you have any concerns regarding customs and import taxes for large cost orders, please contact us at support [at] vesuviusmedia.com and we will try to offer some advice.
Bellow you can see shipping costs for the "Minion" and "Mercenary" pledges:
If you happen to be close to any of the following locations, then you can choose the "Pick up" pledge and not pay for any shipping costs!
Valencia, Spain
Metropolitan Comics
C/Cervantes 8, Valencia, Tel: 963 81 34 30
Halifax/Bedford, Canada
The Board Room Cafe (Halifax)
1256 Barrington St, Halifax NS, B3J 1Y6
The Board Room Cafe (Bedford)
936 Bedford Highway, Bedford NS, B4A 3P1
Athens, Greece
Avalon Games.gr
Agiou Konstantinou 6, Ilioupoli, 16346
Game Rules
Aiantos 10, Peristeri, 12133
Char. Trikoupi 141, Nea Erithrea, 14671
Salaminos 43-45, Athens, 10435
We will ask you to specify the exact pick up location during the survey after the end of the campaign.
Vesuvius Media is a small (but mighty!), Canadian, indie development company. Starting off by producing online strategy games, Vesuvius Media has branched into new areas of production and currently boasts online games, mobile games, graphic novels and board games in its portfolio.
What makes Vesuvius Media different from all the other studios? Vesuvius Media is community-driven. Whether online or on the table, its game designers and developers interact with players, listen, debate, and continually gather feedback. Its community of players help shape the future of its games!
To date, Vesuvius Media has successfully Kickstarted four board game projects: Centauri Saga, Cosmic Pioneers, Dwar7s Fall and Centauri Saga: Season 1. The first game's delivery was delayed by one month, while the second and the third games were delivered one month early! The fourth game is scheduled for delivery in October 2017.
We learn from our mistakes, we listen to your suggestions, and we strive to become better.
Risks and challenges
Even though we do our best to ensure a quality product and a timely production, there is always the risk of delays. Supplier shortage, holiday traffic and weather conditions are just a few of the reasons a production could be delayed. Vesuvius Media Ltd should not be held responsible for delays caused by third parties. In addition, some of the items shown might differ from the final product due to supplier/manufacturer error.
When dealing with a large number of orders, there is always a chance that errors will occur. If after you receive your order, you find that there are items missing or they are damage, please contact us at support [at] vesuviusmedia.com, and we will send you the missing items as soon as possible.
If your package arrives damaged, please take a few photos of all damaged items and email them to us at support [at] vesuviusmedia.com. We will send you replacements for the damaged items as soon as possible. The games shipped through this campaign will be sent out in a larger and stronger package, which will better protect the contents against damage.
Our current estimation for delivery is November 2017. We want your orders to be delivered on time as much as you do; however, history has shown that despite the best laid plans there is always a chance of delay.
If a package is not delivered due to a backer's fault (wrong address given, backer didn't claim the delivered package from their post office, etc), the backer may be requested to pay additional shipping fees for the item to be sent out again.
As soon as this campaign is over, you will be requested to complete a survey through which you can let us know which items you have ordered as well as where you would like us to ship your order. Keep in mind that your order may be shipped sooner or later than the estimated date. Please give us an address that will surely not change (If for example you think that you may be moving to a new house around October, please give us the address of a friend or relative to ensure a successful delivery).
Please read the Shipping section above.
Please note that your order may be delivered in multiple packages. This is done due to weight limitations for group shipments. Even though the items you ordered will be shipped at the same time, there is always a chance they will arrive to you several days apart. This may occur due to each country's postal service sort-and-dispatch system.
Through this campaign you may receive updates on Vesuvius Media's other upcoming projects. Such updates will not be frequent.
Thank you very much,
Vesuvius Media Ltd.Learn about accountability on Kickstarter
Funding period
- (23 days)


text:
Edward Henry Potthast
Edward Henry Potthast
The Bathers, Narrow Cove - Ogunquit, Maine
Oil on Canvas
20 x 24 inches
Signed Lower Right
Edward Potthast was born in Cincinnati and studied at the Cincinnati Art Academy and in Antwerp, Munich and Paris. His earlier work is quite academic in style, but it is as a colorist that he gained his lasting fame. The bright, impressionistic paintings so avidly sought, typically showing children at play in beach or park-like settings, as well as harbor and other water scenes, can usually be traced to his New York years, where he moved in 1896. Around 1914, Potthast began to exhibit the beach scenes for which he became so well known. The works of this National Academician hang in major art museums.
McMicken School of Design (1869, 1873, 1879-82, 1885-87); Antwerp (1882);
Munich (1882, 1887); Paris (1887)
SAA, ANA, NA, AWCS, NYWCC, SC, Lotos Club, Allied AA, Cincinnati AC, P&S Gal. Assn, SPNY
PAFA Ann. 1895-1927; NAD 1897-1927, 1899 prize; Boston AC 1896-1909; Paris Salon 1889-91; AIC 1896-1925; AWCS 1901 prize 1914 prize; SC 1904 prizes, 1905 prize; Corcoran Gal biennials, 1907-23 (8 times); Pan-Pac. Expo, San Fran., 1915 (med.)
Cincinnati Art Museum; Brooklyn Institute Museum; Hackley Art Gallery, Muskegon, MI; AIC
WW25; Cincinnati Painters of the Golden Age; Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons; Falk, Exh. Record Series


text:
A power stretch denim washed down to an upbeat, fresh mid blue with ever so subtle layered abrasions and anatomy shading to the thigh and calf and double-pocket seams, elongating the leg. Laser abrasions to the back pockets plus a curved contoured panel help to create our best rear view yet.
We've kept the details sleek with indigo stitching, gunmetal hardware, a slim black leather back patch, and special Body Optix domed Lee button.
Lw High Stretch Denim 10 Oz


text:
Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns used his visit to the National Cotton Council's Beltwide Cotton Conferences to announce the allocation of $100 million in market access promotion funds to 67 U.S. trade organizations.
Speaking to reporters following his speech at the Beltwide's opening session in New Orleans, Johanns said the funding would include $13 million in Market Access Program funds for Cotton Council International, the export promotion arm of the National Cotton Council.
"I scanned the allocations pretty quickly, but I think this is the largest allocation we will be making," he said. (The next highest amount was $6.2 million for the U.S. Meat Export Federation for use in promoting exports of U.S. beef, followed by $4.77 million for the Florida Department of Citrus.)
"U.S. cotton exports hit a record $4.7 billion last year, and we are anticipating that that number will grow this year, probably to about $5 billion," said Johanns. USDA has been forecasting the cotton merchants would export 17 million bales in 2006-07.
"This program provides the kind of support that helps our farmers and ranchers compete in the marketplace," he noted. "I believe it's good farm policy, and I'm very pleased to announce these allocations of funding."
He said USDA economists are expecting U.S. agricultural exports to reach a new record in the coming year. "The fact that we are on track to sell a record $77 billion of U.S. agricultural products to overseas markets this year highlights the importance of the Market Access Program to help U.S. exporters reach new customers around the world."
The secretary said USDA will not announce its proposals for the 2007 farm bill until next month, but he did list criteria he thought the new law should have, including being written to withstand challenges in the World Trade Organization.
Under the MAP, USDA uses Commodity Credit Corporation funds to enter into agreements with U.S. agricultural trade organizations, state regional groups, and cooperatives to share the costs of overseas marketing and promotional activities.
USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service administers MAP. Program applicants undergo a competitive review process based on weighted criteria, such as the degree to which the applicant contributes resources to the program, historic export performance, projected export goals, and accuracy of past export goals. The MAP recently eliminated multi-year funding in order to improve program efficiency and to align program years with fiscal years.
For more information on the MAP, contact the FAS' Office of Trade Programs staff at (202) 720-4327, or visit the FAS web site at http://www.fas.usda.gov/mos/programs/map.asp.


text:
Resort Overview
Sunset Vistas Beachfront Suites on Treasure Island
Bask in the warm Florida sun at our spectacular all-suite beachfront resort; located on Treasure Island in the heart of the Clearwater and St. Pete Beach resort area. Famous for white powder sands and stunning sunsets, Sunset Vistas Beachfront Suites is the perfect destination for your vacation!
Each of our island style, Florida beachfront condo rentals and suites provides two bedrooms (each with a queen-size bed), a separate living/dining room with a queen sofa bed, a fully furnished kitchen, washer and dryer, and a private balcony with views of the Gulf of Mexico.
At Sunset Vistas Beachfront Suites you can cool off in a large resort swimming pool (with a separate children's pool,) relax in our whirlpool spas, revitalize in the spacious fitness center or refresh yourself by the fountains in the tropical courtyard. Satisfy your cravings at our café and convenience store and sample a tropical cocktail at the beach bar.


text:
About pesti
The only chance we have of fixing any of this and the rest of the police state BS thats smothering our constitution is to start by reigning in congress. Here's an interesting item I got in an Email the other day........
*Congressional Reform Act of 2013
1. No Tenure / No Pension.
A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay
when they're out of office.
2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security
system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system
and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for
any other purpose.
3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans
4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay
will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the
same health care system as the American people.
6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American
7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void
effective 12/31/13. The American people did not make this contract with
Congressmen/women made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in
Congress is an honor not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen
legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.
When I got done reading this I wanted to make a thousand copies and plaster them all over town
I'm wondering if anyone else sees the pattern that I think is there:
The Government gets called out for lying about Iran having nukes, We get 9/11, now we conceed
The government wants our guns, We get the Boston Marathon Fiasco, will we conceed???
Manning/Assange/Snowden et all. Lets see..hmm what was this BS that flew around last week about our embassies shutting
down because the Gov had good info that a plot was in the works, with the inferrance that it was the great and observant NSA that would save us from this threat...
It makes me afraid to wonder what kind of things they might come up with next, something to convince the people that these intrusions into our private lives are necessary for our safety.
Should we be thinking of how to go about monitering them before they make a plan to sacrafice another large number of us in the name of safety...Jesus who are these people
and what made them think that they have the right to play "Gods"
..is a felony!!!my god and if I really think about it...3 strikes...omg.I'm looking at life.
Am I reading this right?...Need an opinion...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/04/national-liberty-counter-terrori sm-secret-courts
And we know why, because now the artists and actors, musicians and writers, and all the real creative folk, have a medium to be heard and seen, with out the help {if you can call it that..}of the fat and thirsty corporations that have sucked them dry for years.They no longer have to sell their literal soul to the devils that be. Those that are talented
and motivated and ambitious enough to be recognized can flourish thru their own efforts, and along with them will come all those who help and facilitate them. Our community appreciates talent and entertainment and we will support those who supply those thing to us because we want them.
If Joe blow posts that he needs a new guitar or a car to have transportation, We as a community, will do what we can to help and support, why because we like it. The Internet is our connection to one another near and far. It has given us the ability to stay connected now that the human family has grown. The powers that be have no right to take this away...we will fight....
I come from that ever growing community of "Chocolate Lovers"
and I definitely know the difference between a Hershey product and a Dove/Mars. With all the damn consumer surveys they do for everything else, you think that Hershey would spend a little money doing one of those on the subject instead of a lot more on litigation.....Every time I have to spend a $1.50 on something that used to cost .50 cents, I see the day coming that I can no longer afford to indulge. Why can't big companies like these take note of consumer popularity and loyalty and pass down the perks by spending less on advertisement (*which they hardly need now) and stupid litigation like this one.
So if Cal Trans builds a freeway and Drunk drivers kill people on it then it's only logical to sue the state cuz they didn't employ enough policemen....How many people drive the roads? as many that watch you-tube? Or maybe they should sue us the, taxpayers, for providing the funds, or how about our employers, they paid us..Well as far as emb. videos, don't forget our INTERNET providers, they give these criminals the means to distribute, view, the content performed by these poor destitute entertainers and their corporate buddies...
Jesus, They gotta quit with all this mind boggling,"I have nothing better to do" bullshit!
It amazes me when I think about all the righteous and upstanding "Cowards" that support the illegal actions of a government agency . Why are they afraid to identify themselves............
I just read this comment by Paul Harris of the Observer (UK)and just about fell off my chair..
It is one of the most irritating and ubiquitous annoyances of the internet age: the anonymous commenter. Hiding behind a made-up moniker, anonymous commenters surface on virtually every blog or news website, posting bile, insults, prejudice and ignorance, often for the sheer hell of it. In the free for all that has so far marked internet-based publishing, there seems to be no recourse for those targeted by the so-called "trolls". Certainly not of the sort they would have if such comments were published in hard copy on the letters pages of old media newspapers and magazines, where the threat of libel has kept up standards. But, perhaps, no longer. A law suit filed last week in New York has threatened to hold some of the internet's more unpleasant denizens to account: a rare example of old media rules starting to be applied online. The heroine of the tale is Carla Franklin, a former model and graduate of Columbia Business School. She is taking Google to court over anonymous comments that called her a "whore" on the firm's YouTube website. She is seeking a court order to force Google to identify the person behind the insult. According to her lawyer, Franklin already suspects a certain individual of posting the comments, but needs concrete confirmation before she can go after them in a court of law. She is claiming the insult, which was posted several times by the same YouTube user, was "… made with the intention to harm Ms Franklin's reputation and interfere with her relationships, employment and livelihood". It is hard not to cheer Franklin's cause. Anonymous commenters claim that the cloak of secrecy allows greater frankness and honesty and means whistleblowers and others perhaps hampered by their jobs can post things online with greater safety. But in reality it is all too often just a handy excuse to be rude, juvenile or racist. Franklin is also riding a growing wave against anonymity online. Several American news websites, including the Buffalo News newspaper, have recently forced commenters to use their real names when posting their opinions on storiesAfter a few idiots posted supportting comments, raising my hair even more a breath of fresh air revived me
SergioBlumenfeld 22 August 2010 5:29AM ..........I chose to post this comment under my real name; otherwise Paul Harris (and others like him) would imagine that they can automatically dismiss it as some "ignorant troll"'s annoying blabbering. This article is beyond bad, it's outrageous. The author believes he can lump together all the anonymous commenters on all subjects on the Web, be equally derogatory of all of them, and then proceed to recommend an end to publishing any anonymous comments. You are so wrong in your pompous arrogance, Mr. Harris! Having read huge numbers of comments on a wide variety of subjects, I can tell that you find a whole gamut of them - ranging from juvenile inanities and nonsensical rudeness, to many intelligent and well-informed comments. It's not so hard to tell which ones come from a silly and ignorant kid having great fun with his computer keyboard, and which ones come from serious people, many of them with academic degrees. Hey, I'm not prejudiced, many good comments come from smart people without college degrees, but with plenty of common sense. As a matter of fact, it's a rather common occurrence to find several comments on an article which are more intelligent than the article they criticize. An example: this article. I don't need to know the real names of Volucre, anon102, ashiraz, stenchofpc, etc. (and I apologize to other good commenters whose monikers I left out) to tell that they are making better points than Mr. Harris. Just the fact of signing your name doesn't add any value to your writing, Paul H. People's ability to publish their thoughts under a chosen moniker is a huge asset of the Internet age, it is a huge enhancement of people's freedom of speech. It allows people to feel free and safe to make an honest statement of their real thoughts. Particularly in these days of political correctness gone to endless extremes, taking control of much of the media, and not tolerating dissent, publishing under a moniker is a shelter and a refuge for free speech. Professional journalists are mercenaries, trading their freedom of speech for a good salary - paid to those who write what their publisher wants them to write. By contrast, the anonymous commenters care only about making a true statement of their thoughts and feelings, while getting no pay for their time and effort. As I explained above, the better among these comments provide a genuine enrichment of the sites publishing them - even though, inevitably, you have to make allowance for the publication of the lowly ones as well. The strongest impression I'm left with from Harris's article above is that he took an opportunity to vent out his frustration with the many critical comments that he and his colleagues had to endure countless times. Oh, if only we could have a strong-handed censorship, or at least, not allow publishing one's opinions under pseudonyms!. Then, we'll see a lot less unwanted criticism, and life will be easier for the mercenary journalist; then, he could sing happily the praises of Freedom of Speech - as long as it's firmly kept under control! Thank you for your attention, Sergio Blumenfeld Raleigh, NC (USA)


text:
The Basics
Score: VCU 2, Saint Louis 0
Record: VCU (12-5, 4-3 A-10), Saint Louis (1-19, 0-7 A-10)
Location: Cary Street Field - Richmond, Va.
The Short Story: The six seniors on this year's squad went out in style, accounting for a goal and two assists in VCU's 2-0 home win over Saint Louis. The victory secured a berth in next weekend's Atlantic 10 Conference Tournament.
VCU STARTERS: #1 Megan Botteri (GK), #2 Kelsey Scherrer, #4 Stephanie DeMasi, #5 Emilie Soares, #7 Chelsea Hill, #12 Melanie Marotta, #16 Arialle Hess, #17 Meaghan Neylon, #19 Kacie Yang, #23 Haley McBee, #24 Nicole Barry
SAINT LOUIS STARTERS: #29 Tori Westhead (GK), #1 Tori Lycett, #6 Shannon Knobloch, #7 Lexie Lindbland, #9 Alanah Busby, #12 Lisa Smith, #16 Jami Alexander, #19 Clanic MacKenzie, #20 Megan Rogers, #21 Caiti Brownell, #23 Caitlin Brenner
How it Happened:
- It looked like the Rams may start quickly for the second game in a row, drawing a penalty corner less than four minutes into the game. Senior Haley McBee got off a great look, but Saint Louis defender Lisa Smith came up with the defensive save to keep the game scoreless.
- VCU would continue to control possession, but couldn't find the back of the cage until junior Steph DeMasi came up with the deflection off a corner when Kelsey Scherrer unleashed a shot off a stick stop by Chelsea Hill.
- The Rams took the 1-0 lead into halftime after drawing five penalty corners and ripping off seven shots in the first 35 minutes.
- Saint Louis would try and get something going early in the second half, but redshirt junior Megan Botteri turned away shots all day long, racking up five saves on the day.
- Senior Melanie Marotta would give VCU an insurance goal in the 53rd minute after DeMasi drew a stroke, battling with the SLU keeper for a looseball. Marotta deposited the stroke into the corner of the cage to push the Rams' lead to 2-0.
- That lead would hold up as Botteri came up with three saves in the final 15 minutes to record VCU's third shutout of the season.
Beyond the Box Score:
- With virtual the same roster as last year (only two departures from last year's squad), the Rams completely reversed last year's record, going from 5-13 to 13-5.
- The 13 wins is the second most in VCU Field Hockey history, equaling the total of the 2010 and 1990 squads. The record continues to be held by the 1992 team who tallied 16 victories.
- After posting double-digits wins just once in a span of 17 years, VCU has now done it twice in the past three seasons
- Scherrer completed the "triple crown" of VCU career records with her assist on DeMasi's first half goal. She now holds the record for career goals (53), career points (130) and is tied for career assists (24).
- Hill's assist on that DeMasi goal moved her into a tie for eighth-place on the career assists list, equaling the 19 assists that Flore van Dessel racked up during her four years at VCU.
Head Coach Shannon Karl
- "Today was an emotional game as we honored our six seniors who have done a great deal for this program. It was quite fitting that on their senior day, we were able to earn a berth in the A10 Tournament."
- "I am happy and proud of their accomplishment, but our job is not done. We now turn our attention to a very talented and strong University of Richmond squad.
Senior Melanie Marotta
- "I think we were solid as a team today. Saint Louis came out ready to go and really challenged us for a full 70 minutes. Fortunately, we came up with the goals and the stops that we needed to come away with the victory." one
- "When we created our mission statement prior to the season, one of our goals was to make it to the A10 Tournament. To be able to accomplish what we set out to do is so special and I'm so proud of this entire team. But we're not satisified, our goals don't stop here. We now have to prepare for a very good Richmond team."
Coming up:
- The Rams will spend the week preparing for the Atlantic 10 Tournament, where they will battle top-seeded and 16th-ranked Richmond on Friday. Game time in Amherst, Mass. is set for 11 a.m.


text:
The book doesn't specify if the monster was created by one man or several or how he was brought to life. I think we can safely guess that the monster was brought to life using electricity because it has such an influence on Victor. SPOILER ALERT. I would also say that is safe to say that the monster was probably created using more than one man because later on Victor tears apart/destroys the monster's companion before he completes her creation. These are just my thoughts and if anyone has anything else they would like to add please comment
53 out of 305 people found this helpful
When you say the the Monster was created by more than one man, do you mean that Victor was assisted by other people; or that the contents of the Monsters body were the product of more than one person?
66 out of 100 people found this helpful
The contents of the body were made from different pieces in the graveyard.
25 out of 44 people found this helpful


text:
Top Items:
Jonathan Fildes / BBC:
'$100 laptop' to sell to public — Computer enthusiasts in the developed world will soon be able to get their hands on the so-called "$100 laptop". — The organisation behind the project has launched the "give one, get one" scheme that will allow US residents to purchase two laptops for $399 (£198).
Discussion: Guardian Unlimited, broadstuff, Between the Lines and Mashable!
Jack Schofield / Guardian Unlimited: Buy one, give one away — OLPC for everyone
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines: OLPC to offer two-packs to jump start sales
Pete Cashmore / Mashable!: $100 Laptop: Get Your Own!
Steve Lohr / New York Times:
Buy a Laptop for a Child, Get Another Laptop Free — One Laptop Per Child, an ambitious project to bring computing to the developing world's children, has considerable momentum. Years of work by engineers and scientists have paid off in a pioneering low-cost machine that is light, rugged and surprisingly versatile.
Discussion: IP Democracy, Wall Street Journal, Smart Mobs, Compiler, Memex 1.1, Digital Trends and Slashdot
Cynthia Brumfield / IP Democracy: One Laptop Per Child Aims for the Heart
Jessica E. Vascellaro / Wall Street Journal: Laptop Charity Seeks Help From Home Market
Marius Chitosca / Smart Mobs: "Buy a Laptop for a Child" Project going steady
Scott Gilbertson / Compiler: OLPC Laptops Available In The U.S. With "Give One Get One" Program
Nick Mokey / Digital Trends: OLPC XO-1Goes On Sale to Public
James Sherwood / The Register:
OLPC to offer consumers $400 two-laptop bundle
OLPC to offer consumers $400 two-laptop bundle
Discussion: PC World and The Tech Report
Nancy Gohring / PC World: One Laptop Per Child Group Expands its Audience
Cyril Kowaliski / The Tech Report: Retail '$100 laptop' to cost $400
Carolyn Y. Johnson / Boston Globe:
Building a critical mass
Building a critical mass
Discussion: Xconomy, Telegraph Blogs, TeleRead and The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
Robert Buderi / Xconomy: Consumers Asked to Lend "$100 Laptop" Initiative A Hand
Ian Douglas / Telegraph Blogs: One Laptop Per Child and everyone else
Louise Story / New York Times:
Company Will Monitor Phone Calls to Tailor Ads — Companies like Google scan their e-mail users' in-boxes to deliver ads related to those messages. Will people be as willing to let a company listen in on their phone conversations to do the same? — Pudding Media, a start-up based in San Jose …
Discussion: GigaOM, p2pnet, MediaBytes with Shelly …, Incremental Blogger and BloggingStocks
Om Malik / GigaOM: The Mad Ad World & Cheap Calls
Shelly Palmer / MediaBytes with Shelly Palmer Video: MediaBytes - 09.24.07 — Click to view today's MediaBytes video.
Zac Bissonnette / BloggingStocks: Big brother: Company to listen in on phone calls to target ads
Peter Svensson / Associated Press:
New service eavesdrops on Internet calls — NEW YORK - A startup has come up with a new way to make money from phone calls connected via the Internet: having software listen to the calls, then displaying ads on the callers' computer screens based on what's being talked about.
Discussion: dslreports.com, CrunchGear, Gizmodo and The Raw Feed
Karl / dslreports.com: 'The Pudding' Listens In On VoIP - And displays context-sensitive advertisements...
Peter Ha / CrunchGear: Your VoIP Calls Are Being Tapped
Wilson Rothman / Gizmodo: VoIP: ThePudding.com Phone Service Listens to Your Calls, Makes You Watch Ads
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Today's Terrible Idea: Pudding Media
Today's Terrible Idea: Pudding Media
Discussion: TechCrunch, IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband and VoIP Watch
Mark Hendrickson / TechCrunch: ThePudding: Targeted Advertising Comes to Phone Calls
Russell Shaw / IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband: New service would display ads based on keywords you say in phone calls
Andy Abramson / VoIP Watch: Henry Blodgett on Pudding
Duncan Riley / TechCrunch:
Google Prepping A Second Life Competitor? — Rumors of a Google powered virtual world based on Google Earth surfaced in January; today there is word that Google may be testing their virtual world at Arizona State University (ASU). — According to Google Operating System …
Discussion: Between the Lines, The Social Web, Mark Evans, 3pointD.com and Portfolio.com
Steve O'Hear / The Social Web: More on Google's social networking plans
Mark Wallace / 3pointD.com: Google Virtual World Back in the Rumor Mill
Ionut Alex Chitu / Google Operating System:
A Social Network for Google Earth?
A Social Network for Google Earth?
Doug Caverly / WebProNews: Google Earth Could Go After Second Life
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land: Google To Pressure Facebook To "Free" Social Data & Planning Google Earth World?
Philipp Lenssen / Google Blogoscoped: Google Tests "My World" Program
Caleb Booker / Metaversed: Rumor: Google Virtual World Imminent
Bryan Alexander / Infocult: MyWorld: towards avatar-based social Google Earth
MG Siegler / ParisLemon: Google Earth To Get Virtually Social?
Kristen Nicole / Mashable!: Google Earth's Social Network, Complete with Avatars?
Dave Winer / Scripting News: The year of the social network
Jackson West / NewTeeVee:
Rocketboom Moves to Blip.tv — Rocketboom, the popular news and entertainment show which has pioneered a number of innovations for online video programs, has chosen Blip.tv as a publishing partner. Besides taking on the duties of serving new and archived videos, Blip.tv will also be helping …
Discussion: Beet.TV and Contentinople
Andy Plesser / Beet.TV: Rocketboom Lands at Blip.TV
A. L. Friedman / Contentinople: Rocketboom Joins Blip, Adds QT Overlays
Mike / the blip.tv blog:
Rocketboom debuts on blip.tv
Rocketboom debuts on blip.tv
Discussion: Read/WriteWeb and Dembot
Marshall Kirkpatrick / Read/WriteWeb: Blip Lands Deal with Rocketboom and Claims Revolution in Video Advertising
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch: Rocketboom Moves to Blip.tv
Vince Veneziani / CrunchGear:
And The Halo 3 Reviews Trickle In... Tomorrow is September 25th and at midnight, hundreds of thousands of gamers will flock to stores to purchase Halo 3, the year's most anticipated title. But unlike the general mass of Halo fans, myself and others enjoy reading reviews first before plunking down $60 of our hard-earned cash.
Yi-Wyn Yen / The Startup Game:
Halo 3 hits stores at midnight
Halo 3 hits stores at midnight
Discussion: Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog, CrunchGear and Ryan Stewart
Todd Bishop / Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog: After Halo 3: What's next for Bungie
Peter Ha / CrunchGear: Halo 3 Just Wants You To Believe
Stealing Clicks — The devil is in the data—and in this case, in the clicks. Google and third-party auditors disagree on whether click fraud—the practice of inflating pay-per-click ad fees with automatic clicking software—is at bay or on the rise. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has dismissed click fraud as "immaterial."
Discussion: Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim
Mike Butcher / TechCrunch:
Blyk launches ad-based mobile network — Blyk, the mobile virtual network operator offering free phone call minutes and messaging in return for sending customers advertising, launches in the UK today. Renting airtime from France Télécom's Orange network and targeting only 16-to 24-year-olds …
Discussion: Roam4free, CrunchGear and International Herald Tribune
Mike Butcher / CrunchGear: Here Come the Ad-Powered Mobiles
Eric Pfanner / International Herald Tribune: Battle joined for cellphone ads
Gary Gentile / Associated Press:
Myspace to launch ad-supported cell phone
Myspace to launch ad-supported cell phone
Discussion: PDA, Compiler, /Message and TechCrunch
Jemima Kiss / PDA: New ad-supported MySpace mobile site
Scott Gilbertson / Compiler: MySpace Goes Mobile With Targeted Ads
Stowe Boyd / /Message: Free Ad-Sponsored Cell Connection
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch: MySpace To Launch Free Mobile Phone Service Today
Starbucks to give away music as new service starts — Starbucks on Monday said it will give away millions of songs via downloads starting next month, as it launches a wireless music service with Apple. From October 2 to November 7 at more than 10,000 U.S. Starbucks locations, customers can receive …
Discussion: InfoWorld, Engadget and Infinite Loop
Jeremy Kirk / InfoWorld: Virgin drops Windows Media-based music download service
Jacqui Cheng / Infinite Loop: Starbucks to spread 50 million pieces of iTunes love
Tony Smith / The Register:
Virgin unplugs music download service
Virgin unplugs music download service
Discussion: CrunchGear
Peter Ha / CrunchGear: Virgin Digital Goes Under
Eric Bangeman / Ars Technica:
Victorious RIAA defendant gets attorneys' fees, turns to class-action plans — Calling the RIAA's case unjustified "as a reasonable exploration of the boundaries of copyright law," a federal magistrate judge late last week awarded former RIAA defendant Tanya Andersen attorneys' fees …
Discussion: Inquirer, TechSpot News and p2pnet
Nick Farrell / Inquirer: RIAA suffers another court defeat
Justin Mann / TechSpot News: Another RIAA defendant awarded attorneys fees
Enigmax / TorrentFreak:
Porn Industry Infighting As Pirate Bay Takes On Big Media — The fallout from the MediaDefender debacle has seemingly reached every corner of the Internet, with sites springing up dedicated to the dissemination of every last detail of the leak, it seems everyone with an interest in BitTorrent has this hot topic on their lips.
Discussion: Inquirer
Alice Winter / Inquirer: Pirate Bay fires a salvo
Duncan Riley / TechCrunch:
Pownce vs Digg: Who Will Kevin Rose Back? — I've speculated previously on the growing conflict Kevin Rose has between his roles at Digg and Pownce, and now it would appear that we may finally be on the eve of Rose being forced to decide between the two. — Leah Culver, a co-founder …
Discussion: mathewingram.com/work, Valleywag and Mashable!
Marc Andreessen / blog.pmarca.com:
Ning passes 100,000 social networks — As I've previously discussed, my new company Ning exists to give everyone the ability to create your own social network for anything — in less than two minutes, for free — with the ability to customize your network any way you want.
Discussion: Insider Chatter, PDA and TechCrunch
Jemima Kiss / PDA: DIY social net site Ning reaches 100,000 users
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch: Ning Milestone: 100k Social Networks
Wendy A. Lee / New York Times:
As the Fall Season Arrives, TV Screens Get More Cluttered — Kyra Sedgwick, star of "The Closer" on TNT, walks under a police tape and scans the screen with her flashlight. And every time she does, she makes Gretchen Corbin, a technical writer in Berkeley, Calif., irate.
Discussion: Silicon Alley Insider and TVNewser
Peter Kafka / Silicon Alley Insider: Ad Creep: TV's In-Show Spots Will Increase
Chris / TVNewser: The High Value Of Lower Thirds
Richard MacManus / Read/WriteWeb:
FeedHub Launches - Individualized RSS Feeds — Personalization startup mSpoke is launching a new product to mashup and personalize RSS feeds today at DEMO [disclosure: Read/WriteTalk host Sean Ammirati works for mSpoke]. The product is called FeedHub and it creates an "individualized RSS feed" …
Discussion: ScobleShow, Between the Lines and Mashable!
Robert Scoble / ScobleShow: Demo of FeedHub digging through information overload
Kristen Nicole / Mashable!: FeedHub's Personalized TechMeme


text:
Miley Cyrus Granted a Three-Year Restraining Order Against Fanby Mandi Salerno | PopCrush
Miley Cyrus had to take an obsessed fan to court today in order to receive a restraining order for her protection.
Lawyers representing the 21-year-old singer were in court for a hearing to seek a permanent restraining order against Devon Meek, TMZ reported. The over-eager fan claimed he'd rather die than live without her, and told police if he couldn't meet Miley, they might as well shoot him.
Yikes! No wonder Miley was concerned for her own safety.
The court ruled that Meek must stay at least 100 yards away from the 'Adore You' star for three years. That includes music venues, so there won't be any 'Bangerz' shows for him any time soon. According to TMZ, he also told police that Miley speaks to him through the radio, and that he hears screaming voices in his head.
The Los Angeles Police Department's Threat Management Unit first arrested Meek on May 16 after he was caught trying to meet Miley near one of her properties. He is still being held for psychiatric evaluation.


text:
As, I guess, most of the prospective Android developers, I started my Android experience by going through the Tutorial. This tutorial assumes Eclipse-based development environment. Many people love Eclipse but I am kind of old-fashioned and I prefer command line development tools. Somehow I feel myself more in control of what is happening during development. :-)
The documentation coming with Android is pretty exhaustive on command-line tools but I had to figure out myself how to use them because step-by-step tutorial similar to the Eclipse-based one is not available.
First, I created a root directory for the project then I created the project skeleton with the activityCreator script (I assume that the SDK was installed correctly so the SDK tool binaries are on the path).
C:\USERS\paller\android\helloworld>activityCreator aexp.helloworld.HelloWorld
This created the project skeleton into the current directory. The project skeleton is actually a functional HelloWorld application that can be compiled by invoking ant in the project root directory and may be executed on the emulator. Adb is the tool that talks to the emulator. In order for adb to function, the emulator needs to be running. Adb can be requested to query the available emulators.
C:\USERS\paller\android\helloworld\bin>adb devices
List of devices attached
If the emulator was started with the emulator command, the same adb command detects it.
C:\USERS\paller\android\helloworld\bin>adb devices
List of devices attached
1 emulator-tcp-5555 device 0
The ant script creates the installable package with apk extension in the bin subdirectory of the project root directory.
C:\USERS\paller\android\helloworld\bin>adb install HelloWorld.apk
151 KB/s (0 bytes in 2421.000s)
Now let's see the emulator. Our application can be found in the Applications folder that is the leftmost icon on the rolling bar.
Entering this folder, the application can be found and executed.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
My first steps with command-line development tools
Posted by Gabor Paller at 12:10 AM
Labels: command line, tools
7 comments:
- David said...
Hi, Gabor. How feasible is it to develop Android apps from the command line? I am thinking about doing it with a metaARPA membership from SDF.
- November 20, 2008 at 12:21 AM
My first steps with UI tools
- June 3, 2009 at 1:13 PM
- Gabor Paller said...
"Hi, Gabor. How feasible is it to develop Android apps from the command line?"
Well, I use them all the time. Others say it is the stone age. You have to decide yourself. :-)
I feel more in control with command-line tools.
- June 23, 2009 at 8:16 PM
- Gabor Paller said...
- June 24, 2009 at 12:18 PM
- Gabor Paller said...
Another test
- July 6, 2009 at 1:22 PM
- Richard Lalancette said...
I'd rather not to have to deal with command line.
I very rarely do and feel great about avoiding it :)
To each is own as long as we have fun, that's what matters :)
Richard L.
- September 13, 2011 at 9:12 PM
- Gabor Paller said...
- October 23, 2016 at 12:03 PM
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)