Aside

These are some photos from the first few days in Istanbul. More coming soon.

For under $4, four new exclusive live tracks (“Spanish Techno”, “Bones of an Idol”, “Streets of Fire” and “Graceland”) from the best thing to come out of Canada since poutine can be yours. Friday is wonderful. Just fire up iTunes and head on over to the Music Store.

My buddy, the badass printer/artist Noah Breuer has one of his works on the home page of the Frank Bette Center for the Arts. He’s now getting his MFA at Columbia. If you’re in NYC, go check out his stuff. (Previous post on Noah’s work.) Jim Higdon, my Columbia j-school classmate, got a bookdeal with Putnam for his book “The Cornbread Mafia”, the story of how one rural county in Kentucky became a national center of drug-dealing and how it…

I was sitting next to a guy reading the January 2003 issue of American Window Cleaner magazine, formerly published out of Point Richmond, CA. (Now published out of Bedford, N.Y.). Who knew? During my 17 hour stint in Paris I managed to buy three of the four Marjane Satrapi Persepolis comics in French from a bookstore in the Parisian suburb of Issy, where my aunt lives, for a total of 45 euros. (Shipping to the US would cost me 15+…

Turkey is awesome. Especially awesome to see it with a couple of Columbia buddies of mine who have set up shop as journos in Istanbul — one at the Turkish Daily News and one at the Associated Press. Quick recap before I hit the sack (I leave Paris in about 12 hours for DC and then onto Oakland). Turkey is a European country trapped in a Middle Eastern country’s body — or at least it wants to be. Most obvious…

I’m in neveshir in central turkey. We arrived in ankara by train and then a 3 hr bus further. We’re staying with the uncle of a co-worker of a friend of a co-worker of my aunt heidi’s. Go figure, huh? they don’t speak much english but we’re doing our best and there is a neighbor 20 year old guy who’s english is pretty good. We saw some amazing 2000 year old caves here, where early christians fled from roman attacks.…

So I made it. Rebekah and I found Engin, (my aunt’s colleague’s best friend), who is an Istanbul native. He graciously picked us up from the airport, took us to his house a few miles from the airport and brought us to his family’s apartment. They served us a wonderful meal of kofte, rice, salad, french fries, Turkish cola, and something resembling Persian doogh. At the end of the meal, following five rounds of tea, two tangerines and a pear…

I’m in dc. slept the whole way over. podcasts will have to be done when I get back but I did bring recording gear. will post in paris.

Most likely communism can’t be established. But impotency can be treated!

AP: This tiny Baltic republic is breaking new ground in digital democracy. This week, the country nicknamed “e-Stonia” because of its tech-savvy population became the first country in the world to hold an election allowing voters nationwide to cast ballots over the Internet. Less than 10,000 people, or 1 percent of registered voters, participated online in elections for mayors and city councils across the country, but officials hailed the experiment held Monday to Wednesday as a success. “Everything has gone…