Turkish Lullaby

As a person without a TV set (by choice), I by no means pretend that I never watch shows and such. I, for instance, have enjoyed "Desperate Housewives," "Lipstick Jungle," "The Tudors," and even watched a bit of "Cashmere Mafia." Josie and I, too, frequently watch cartoons on youtube - the Soviet classics, as well as videos of various birds and what not. Eventually, I came across Russian world lullaby project - a series of videos featuring lullabies in different languages, accompanied by animation. I thought it was a great project all around. And here's my favorite (Turkish) one, which I actually began to sing to Josie and which she's been kinda learning too.

Oh, and the story is very familiar - I had cows get out on me once in May two years ago, where they got into the freshly planted garden (cows are attracted to bare dirt), and ate the tops of every single cabbage-related plant, so that felt terrible. We got intelligent since, and placed a fake ("unplugged") electric fence around the garden, and that kept them out when they got out again.



P.S.: I also loved the project because it was heaping with unsubtle cultural stereotypes, and I am a sucker for those.

Миллион Алых Роз

Like many of you, I have had the privilege of getting fairly deeply immersed in a couple of different cultures, language and all, and I am always on the lookout for comic elements within those cultures. This is why this article about an Iranian court ordering a man to pay his wife the dowry promised to her in the marriage contract is highly amusing to me. You see, the dowry he promised her, consisted, of all things, of no less than 124,000 roses. That's given that he is no rose gardener. Romantic though it may have seemed at the time, I still wonder what in the world he was thinking. Sadly, turned out the guy was a little cheap, and his wife came up with a creative way to get back at him - by filing a complaint with the court requiring him to pay her the agreed reward for marrying him in the first place. Now our fellow may be facing jail term for his inability to come up with the funds for the purchase.