I was going to write an entry today, about the handicapped parking spot in front of our apartment building, and my interactions with it and the people who park there - and it was going to be inspired! - but it wasn't, so I gave up.

Sorry. I've been too busy to do any writing, let alone good writing.

McCAIN CAMPAIGN: Hey, can we have some help here?

BUSH'S AMERICA: I'll see what I can do.

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BUSH'S AMERICA:Hey Putin's Russia! Can you create a geopolitical crisis or something?

PUTIN'S RUSSIA: What's in it for me?

BUSH'S AMERICA: Well, make me an offer.

PUTIN'S RUSSIA: Georgia.

BUSH'S AMERICA: WHOA! Slow down. We can't just give you Georgia!

PUTIN'S RUSSIA: I'll let you put the missile defense shield up in Poland. For now.

BUSH'S AMERICA: Good, but you only get South Ossetia.

PUTIN'S RUSSIA: Done!

BUSH'S AMERICA: But we will publicly condemn it.

PUTIN'S RUSSIA: OK, but not by Bush. And, in that case, we get to do it during the Olympics.

BUSH'S AMERICA: Fine. Not by Bush. And during the Olympics. We will send Condoleezza Rice in with a strongly-worded message after the fact, and hold a public press conference with the Georgian president.

PUTIN'S RUSSIA: Fine.

BUSH'S AMERICA: And, the Republican Party gets to be able to weakly condemn you with faint platitudes about freedom and sovereignty. Oh, and we'll make it look like it's all John McCain's idea. He'll look strong.

PUTIN'S RUSSIA: Sigh. Fine! But what about Poland?

BUSH'S AMERICA: We'll talk about Poland later.

---

BUSH'S AMERICA: OK man, Russia's going to invade Georgia.

McCAIN CAMPAIGN: Sweet! Who do we contact in Russia to coordinate our marketing?

---

Meanwhile...

CLINTON CAMPAIGN: Make me your running mate.

OBAMA CAMPAIGN: Uh, no.

CLINTON CAMPAIGN: Who the hell are you going to choose? Edwards?

OBAMA CAMPAIGN: John Edwards is a good man.

CLINTON CAMPAIGN: Edwards is through. We've got adultery on him. Whether you choose him or not, our media contacts are making him going down.

OBAMA CAMPAIGN: Ah, it can't be all that bad...

CLINTON CAMPAIGN: He cheated on his wife, Obama Campaign. And she has inoperable cancer.

OBAMA CAMPAIGN: Ouch...

CLINTON CAMPAIGN: And it looks like he has an illegitimate child with this woman. And he was paying her!

OBAMA CAMPAIGN: Damn it. OK, so what if I do? What's in it for me?

CLINTON CAMPAIGN: When we spill the beans, we'll coordinate our marketing to remind people of John McCain's past marital indiscretions.

OBAMA CAMPAIGN: OK, OK, that all sounds good. I guess I don't have a choice anyway. How's it going to go down?

CLINTON CAMPAIGN: I want roll-call vote at the convention. When I get it, I'll voice my full support of you.

OBAMA CAMPAIGN: ...Ummm, how do I know you're not going to pull something?

CLINTON CAMPAIGN: You can trust me! Oh, and we're going to be launching Chelsea's political career at the convention, too, so get ready for that.

At Zattoo, where I work, I arranged an international meeting last week in our calendaring/scheduling tool. I got one automatic email from one of my coworkers in Switzerland, which said something like Zugesagt: meeting.

I speak very little German, and I don't know this word - does it mean accepted or rejected? - so I used Google's translator tool. Here's what it said:

I was stupid enough to say yes

I LOL'ed, but I doubted our scheduling client nor my counterpart were trying to insult me. After investigating, it looks like the translation is for a phrase that contains the word, but Google did not have an adequate translation for the word, so it served the phrase. Machine translation is hard.

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I'm going to keep this entry short. I'm pretty tired and I want to hit the sack; Heather asked me if I wanted to go to the Washtenaw Fitness Center this morning. Ich habe dummerweise zugesagt.

Last week I wrote about Hagia Sophia, and its weeping column. I just scrounged up a video of the weeping column that illustrates exactly what's done.

This entry might gross some people out, but it deserves to be written.

While I was in Europe, in the bathrooms I saw many urinal flies. Not real ones, mind you, but decals of flies affixed to the inside of urinals. I did a quick Google search and found urinalfly.com, one of the companies that manufactures them. They claim: "Keeps Bathrooms up to 85% cleaner." The idea is that the fly is placed in a specific spot on the urinal surface so as to reduce "spillage" - which, in my experience, is more difficult than it sounds, because there are many varieties of urinal shapes, each with its own fluid acoustic signature. The urinalfly.com urinal fly even comes with instructions about how to position the fly for "maximum effectiveness."

I don't know what's so compelling about pissing on a fly - it seems a little cruel and, well, unpleasant if it were a real fly, and the urine-soaked real fly flew down your pant leg - but at least it's something to do. It is a bit of a shock seeing a bunch of flies in all the urinals as you walk in the restroom, but it soon gives way to laughter. I had seen these maybe once or twice before in America, but I saw them several places in Europe. In fact, I saw them in all three countries that we visited: Swizterland, Turkey, and Holland.

I wonder if there's a market for a urinal bee?

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Speaking of urinals, I had a weird dream about one the other night. I had to go to the bathroom, but when I entered the restroom I discovered that there was something inside the urinal. Not a fly this time, but an electrical socket. Complete with faceplate and everything, embedded right there in the urinal. Two vacant faces, mocking me.

So I had to go pretty bad, but I was faced with the dilemma, should I go ahead and do it and risk a rather painful and probably fatal electrocution? I woke up soon after.

Weird dream.

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Speaking of dreams, my buddy Rob has recently started a cool dream blog, in which he has cataloged and shared many of his dreams. Rob has some seriously weird dreams. I'm also very pleased and honored to have guest starred in one of them.

Below are a couple of pictures from Istanbul's Grand Bazaar.

It's a crazy place packed with people, and something like 3,000 shops. It's common to hear "Hey, friend, where are you from?" at you from across the corridor. I would stupidly say, "I'm American," and would see the dollar signs flash in his eyes. Or Turkish Lira signs, perhaps. YTL.

Had I been smart, I would have said something like, "Icelandic" or something. Anyway.

It was a pretty weird place. At one point, the first time I visited (of three times - and this time I was alone), a man and a little boy approached me in the clothing area of the bazaar (I was shopping for shirts since my bags had not arrived yet). The man said to me, "hey, sir, do you want to buy a boy?" Was he joking? The boy's face was sweet and smiling, but the man's face looked serious. If it wasn't a joke, then I don't know exactly what was for sale. Unsettling experience.

Here's a video that Heather took of the bazaar. Just to give you a sense of the activity inside.

There was a restaurant near our hotel that sold Doner Kebab. Here I am on the second floor. I'm not that tall of a guy, so this is pretty amusing. I guess they were really pressed for space?

This is one of only two bridges that cross the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul. These bridges connect the European part of Istanbul with the Asian part. Not too many for a city with a population of 11,000,000.

Here's a more dramatic view, from a cruise we took on the strait:

At the end of the cruise, we got out and did some hiking around this ancient keep. It looks out on the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. Here I am in front of the Black Sea. As you can see, I chubbed up a little bit on our honeymoon. ;)

On the way down, somebody had brought a sailboat way up on the hill and made a little garden out of it. I thought that that was pretty cool.

FInally, here's some unknown mosque (by us, at least) down by the pier.

This video was taken 180 degrees from that picture. Lots of people were fishing from the bridge overhead, as you can see:

OK, I'll spare you any more pictures and videos for the time being.

I'm getting a little tired blogging about our honeymoon, so I'm going to take a break. Instead, I'm going to turn to the esoteric topic of Japanese urination simulators. Introducing Super Pii Pii Brothers. From the ThinkGeek Article:

The play mechanics are simple. Prepare yourself by strapping on the included belt harness and jacking in your Wiimote. A series of toilets are presented on screen and the challenge is to tilt your body to control a never-ending stream of pee. Get as much pee in the toilets as you can while spilling as little on the floor as possible. Sounds easy eh? Well the toilets open and close whack-a-mole style and occasionally the stray cat or other cute critter pops up. Spray a cat for extra points. Get too much pee on the ground and your game is over. With realistic fluid dynamics for the pee and over 100 different bathrooms from bars and palaces to automatic Japanese style toilets you'll be entertained for hours. And wait until your friends see the multi-player mode with dueling pee streams... Super Pii Pii Bros

According to the Japanese text on the box "Super Pii Pii Brothers promotes good bathroom skills and allows women to experience for the first time the pleasure of urinating while standing." What we say is that virtual peeing is damn fun!

Here's a movie:

It's a Japanese game, but you can get a boot disk for your region-1 Wii (heh heh) from ThinkGeek.

I mentioned in an earlier post that Heather and I were going to take a Turkish cooking class at the Sarnic Hotel in Istanbul. Well, the day before, the Sarnic Hotel called us and canceled - they were short just one student before they could do the class. Which was a big bummer for us. At least now I can get out of my "cooking Heather food once a week" deal. Phew!

Instead, I think that that was the day when we went to Hagia Sophia. From Wikipedia:

Hagia Sophia (Turkish: Ayasofya, Greek: Αγία Σοφία; "Holy Wisdom", Latin: Sancta Sophia or Sancta Sapientia) is a former patriarchal basilica, later a mosque, now a museum, in Istanbul, Turkey. Famous in particular for its massive dome, it is considered the epitome of Byzantine architecture. It was the largest cathedral ever built in the world for nearly a thousand years, until the completion of the Medieval Seville Cathedral in 1520.

The current building was originally constructed as a church between 532 and 537 AD on the orders of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, and was in fact the third Church of the Holy Wisdom to occupy the site (the previous two had both been destroyed by riots). It was designed by two architects, Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles. The Church contained a large collection of holy relics and featured, among other things, a 50 foot (15 m) silver iconostasis. It was the patriarchal church of the Patriarch of Constantinople and the religious focal point of the Eastern Orthodox Church for nearly 1000 years.

This is the exit (or the entrance, if you follow the Rick Steves tour). Because of the Muslim injunction against icons, most of the mosaics were destroyed when the church became a mosque. This one survived though

I was fascinated to learn that banning icons was actually a very controversial measure at the time, and there were actually violent religious riots from the opposition - the populist faithful - about it.

Anyway, that's the Virgin Mary with Jesus in the center. To the left is Emperor Justinian, who is presenting a completed Hagia Sophia to Mary and Jesus. To the right is Constantine, who is presenting the city itself.

Here's the massive hall right after the entrance way:

This next photo is in the main hall. This is sort of like a pulpit. The imam did not climb up to the top, as you might think. Instead, he occupied the middle. The top was symbolically reserved only for Muhammad.

It's hard to illustrate the size of Hagia Sophia. This next picture doesn't even show the main dome - just a partial dome on the side. The main dome is large enough to house the entire Cathedral at Notre Dame - or even the Statue of Liberty, minus the torch.

Those black circles say things like Muhammad, Allah, and other major figures in Islam. There are four main ones. Two date from the sixth century, and two from something like the sixteenth - they had to be restored. Anyway, the names were displayed because images could not be. Beautiful, aren't they?

This next one takes some explanation. Legend has it that if you stick your thumb in this hole and make a 360 degree rotation with it, in this "weeping pillar" at Hagia Sophia, and if you feel a feeling of dampness, then your wish will come true. Here's Heather wishing her wish:

The metal has been worn away by literally millions of people sticking their thumbs into this hole. Luckily I had the Germ-X for my hands after I made my wish. Hope that that doesn't invalidate the wish.

Lastly, here's an interesting Christian mosaic upstairs:

I took this because of Christ's hand gesture. His thumb is touching the tip of his ring finger. Heather reckons that this signifies the trinity. It struck me as reminiscent of Buddhist and Hindu hand gestures, though, and I wondered if there had been some cross-fertilization of cultures and religions. It would be very likely in this part of the world, I thought.

Anyway, cool place!

A little while ago I blogged about the Euro 2008 statues in Zurich. I had taken some video of it, but I never uploaded it. I think it's worth watching the video just to get a sense of the scope of these things.

Well, here it is:

My friend asked this of me today.

If I told you that your face kind of looked like a clown, would you take it as a compliment, or would your feelings be hurt?

Ouch!