The Vero Centre – a Turkey-New Zealand connection in a globalised world

I have to tell you I'm not a big reader of Forbes magazine, nor do I visit their website much. Occasionally I want to check whether Bill Gates is still the richest man in the world or if not, which Mexican, Indian or Russian oligarch has temporarily knocked him off his perch. Maybe someone I know has sneaked into the Top 500 and I can seek to renew an old friendship. Apart from that, I guess my income has never really put me in the bracket for readership or invitations to join the club.

Two NZ poets with a message for the world
 - Glover and Tuwhare

My recent visit was the result of following a link from a New Zealand news site I use to keep up with what's going on down there in the land of my fathers - and also, I confess, because I had been stung by a barb from a friend who suggested I needed to broaden the scope of my reading.

The news item was summarising an analysis of the New Zealand economy by a bright young man calling himself Jesse Colombo (his real name?). The essence of his argument is that NZ's economy has all the hallmarks of a bubble and is likely to burst before too much longer. Commentators in the Land of the Long White Cloud have been quick to make light of Mr Colombo's assessment, but interestingly, they don't seem to disagree with any of his evidence - merely the conclusions he draws.

I used to take a more serious interest in economic conditions in NZ, but since I have been living in Istanbul, my main concern has been the depreciating exchange rate of my Turkish Liras when I have to travel or send money back downunder. This is indeed one of Colombo's points: that the Kiwi dollar is overvalued, not only against the TL, but against all the major world currencies.

Other indicators he discusses are:

• The financial sector has replaced farming as the largest contributor to the economy;
• Home mortgages represent an uncomfortably high percentage of bank portfolios. Most of these have floating interest rates – fine while rates are low, but Colombo predicts that they will rise, and soon;
• NZ has one of the most over-valued property markets in the world;
• The ratio of household debt to GDP is even worse than the United States;
• Government debt, which fell steadily through the 1990s and early 2000s, has nearly tripled in the last five years.

Well, it’s many years since I had a mortgage in New Zealand. On the other hand I do try to visit once a year, and I too have long considered the $NZ absurdly over-valued. Not many years ago there was parity with the Turkish Lira – now I need nearly 2 TL to buy 1 $Kiwi.  And although I love my hometown Auckland, I cannot understand how an average house there can possibly be worth the current selling price of $NZ 700,000.

Auckland is not quite the one-horse, one-street town I remember from my youth. These days the CBD is making efforts to extend at least a block east and west of Queen St, and on my last two visits I have strolled up Shortland St (no connection to the long-running TV soap) to a café in the Vero Centre, a 40-floor tower block its website informs me is ‘New Zealand's premier business address.’ This year, with a little time to kill while waiting for the friends I had arranged to meet, I wandered around the lobby with its ‘distinct South Pacific feel . . . a showcase of New Zealand art’.

Probably I should have trod a little more carefully. Centrepiece in the lobby is a 6-7 metre high structure resembling a tyre-less bicycle wheel, the work of one Andrew Drummond, an exponent, so I’m told, of performance art. Well, the wheel does indeed perform, rotating slowly on its axis – or at least it did until I edged alongside it to get a photograph of something on the wall. It was only later that I noticed a line drawn on the floor and a sign advising visitors not to step inside the demarcated zone. I felt grateful that I hadn’t set off an alarm attracting security guards to throw me out into what I understand has aspirations to become Auckland's version of Wall Street.

What I wanted to photograph was a quotation among many by well-known local and international personages covering one of the lobby walls. There it was, in raised brass lettering, Times New Roman font – the much-quoted words of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey, addressed to the mothers of the young lads from the British Empire who had left their mortal remains on the killing fields of Gallipoli so many years ago. I was touched, I can tell you – not merely once again by the magnanimous words of the victorious commander who harboured no resentment against those who had invaded his homeland; but that some influential people in my own country have recognized this significant gesture of goodwill.

On the wall nearby were the words of John Clarke, aka Fred Dagg, reminding us that ‘We [New Zealanders] don’t know how lucky we are.’ Some clearly need reminding, particularly those who were ungratefully throwing eggs and stones at the Prime Minister a few days ago. Clarke was a local comedian popular in the mid-70s for satirizing NZ politicians and way-of-life at a time when the country had been cast off by Mother England and was struggling to find a new place in the real world of post-oil shock economics. From an earlier and arguably more traumatic time came lines from one of the country’s most-quoted poets, Denis Glover:

Tom’s hand was strong to the plough

Elizabeth’s lips were red,

And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle

The magpies said.

The refrain is much loved by schoolteachers of English literature as encapsulating a fine example of onomatopoeia. You’d have to say, though, that, by accident or design, the quotation selection panel chose the least significant lines from the poem for their display. I don’t want to read too much into the fact that Vero Insurance is owned by the Suncorp Group, ‘one of the largest financial and insurance operations in Australasia’, having swallowed most of New Zealand’s historical insurance companies.  I will suppress the cynical response that rose within me when I read, in the lobby near the lifts, a list of the building’s tenants, at least twenty-one of which are involved in banking, insurance and finance, and a further nine are law firms.

Wikipedia, however, tells me Suncorp’s Chairman and CEO are two gentlemen with the interesting names of Dr Ziggy Switkowski, and Patrick Snowball. I haven’t got around to checking out Mr Snowball, but Dr Ziggy seems to be a fascinating character, an unusual combination of businessman and nuclear physicist – having been awarded the ‘Advance Australia[1] Award’ in 1995 for ‘outstanding achievement in industry and commerce’.

Prior to his association with Suncorp, Switkowski had been CEO of Optus and later, Telstra, overseeing the full privatization of the telecommunications giant. He apparently generated some controversy in Australia when a Commonwealth Government inquiry, of which he was the chairman, recommended that Australia increase its exports of uranium and also work to develop its own nuclear power industry.

In 2011 he also became a director of Lynas Corporation, a company involved in the mining, in Western Australia, of what are known in the trade as ‘rare earths’. Without getting into too much scientific detail, rare earths are chemical elements with scary names like Dysprosium, Ytterbium and Thulium that are essential ingredients in key modern technologies such as colorants for glasses and enamels, self-cleaning ovens, lasers, PET scan detectors, nuclear batteries and ultra-powerful permanent magnets.

China has long been the world’s major producer and exporter of rare earths, but has recently looked to scale down its operations for economic and environmental reasons. Well, when China starts having environmental concerns about an industry, it is surely time for others to take notice. Despite the fact that Lynas mines its rare earths in Western Australia, it seems they have chosen to set up their processing plant in Malaysia, citing cost benefits. What that generally means, in corporate-speak, is that local labour can be employed for wages far below those acceptable in the home country, in a market where health, safety and environmental protection conditions are considerably less demanding. Local politicians in Pahang province and environmental groups have apparently been protesting against the plant since 2008, and concerns were even raised in an article in the New York Times – in spite of which, LAMP (an innocuous-sounding acronym for the controversial rare earth plant) entered production in 2013.

Denis Glover published his poem ‘The Magpies’ in 1941, when the Second World War was helping to pull New Zealand out of the disastrous economic depression of the 1930s. Glover had a reputation as something of a radical inclining towards anarchic left-wing political views. Apart from the catchy avian sound effects, ‘Magpies’ tells of a young couple, Tom and Elizabeth, who, having worked for years to carve a farm out of the unforgiving bush, lost everything to the bank that foreclosed on their mortgage, though was subsequently unable to find another purchaser willing to take it on. Elizabeth died and Tom went a little ‘light in the head’. . . and the last word belonged to the magpies, whose ‘quardle oodle ardle wardle doodling’ is probably as fitting a comment on today’s financial system as it was 70-odd years ago.

---

[1] The word ‘fair’ omitted, you’ll notice.

Edward Snowden and Abdullah Gül - Influencing the world!

Amidst the doom, gloom and despondency that seems to fill a large part of the news media's daily output, it is  occasionally reassuring to see some glimmer of hope for a positive future. I was delighted to see that Time magazine has included Edward Snowden among its 'Pioneers' in its latest list of the World's 100 Most Influential People. Also on the list is Abdullah Gül, President of Turkey - though sad to say, not Julian Assange, whom the world seems to have forgotten about. I assume he is still holed out in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Time magazine and Rafael Correa - brothers-in-arms in the fight for freedom!?

Edward Snowden

By Daniel Domscheit-Berg

The renegade in exile

Edward Snowden’s story is one of choices. He is said to be a computer genius, but he has chosen to do what is right rather than what will enrich him, and he has chosen to do what is right rather than what is lawful. Showing a sense of great responsibility, he has exposed a global system of surveillance whose sheer dimensions are unfathomable.

This system threatens the very foundation of individual freedom throughout the world. And it threatens the basis upon which our democracies are built. Cynically, it does so by undermining and exploiting the very tools of communication and sharing that are meant to enable, engage and enrich us.

Snowden has given us a window of opportunity in which to make an informed, self-determined choice about this system. Our responsibility is to make sure it will not be the last choice we make. We must not waste time—for his sake, for ours and for the sake of our children. Our future is at stake.

(Domscheit-Berg, a German technology activist, is a former spokesman for WikiLeaks)

Beauty and the Beast – An Ottoman fairy tale

‘How much more interesting is this place than Dubai?’ The words were spoken by a tourist holding the door for his wife and teen-aged daughter as they boarded a taxi near the waterfront at Eminönü. Dilek and I had just descended from the terrace of Rustem Pasha Mosque, and the sentence wafted to my ear on a gentle breeze as we strolled towards the Marmaray Metro station for a train that would take us under the Bosporus back to the Asian side of the city.

I didn't hear the reply our anonymous tourist received from his female companions. Possibly stony silence was the best response to an insensitive male unable to comprehend the joys of seven-star hotels and 24/7 duty-free shopping. Certainly Istanbul has no kilometre-high mega-skyscrapers, artificial islands in the shape of the world's major landmasses, fully enclosed climate-controlled football stadiums or multi-million dollar tennis tournaments featuring Federer, Djokovic, Nadal and their globetrotting ATP buddies.

Sinan the architect and Princess Mihrimah

What Istanbul does have is a recorded history of more than two thousand years, evidence of human settlement going back a further 6,500, and a geography that is home to locations featuring in the myths, legends and folk tales of at least four major civilisations. What Istanbul does have is religious and secular structures dating from centuries when the 600-year Ottoman Empire was the major Mediterranean power and terror of Europe. What Istanbul does have is columns, mosaics, statuary and churches from the days when, as Constantinople, it was capital city of the Eastern Roman Empire – first in the latter years of its pagan existence, and later in its Graeco-Christian embodiment. I could go on, but you get the picture. Istanbul is a real place – a multi-cultural city whose geo-political significance stretches back into the dim mists of time immemorial.

Dubai, on the other hand, as Wikipedia informs us, receives no mention in anyone’s records until 1095 CE, and ‘the earliest recorded settlement in the region dates from 1799. Dubai was formally established on June 9, 1833, by Sheikh Maktoum bin Butti Al-Maktoum when he persuaded around 800 members of his tribe of the Bani Yas, living in what was then the Second Saudi State, to follow him to the Dubai Creek by the Abu Falasa clan of the Bani Yas. It remained under the tribe's control when the United Kingdom agreed to protect the Sheikhdom in 1898 (from what, I can't help wondering) and joined the nascent United Arab Emirates upon independence in 1971 as the country's second emirate.’

Maşallah! as Turks say. Good for them! And you have to appreciate what those Bani Yas tribesmen have achieved in the intervening 43 years. As for me, however, I willingly pay a little more for my annual airfares to and from New Zealand to avoid stopping over there. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that those United Arab Emirates represent just about everything that is wrong with the modern (or post-modern) world. And I think that’s what our anonymous English tourist was getting at, whether or not his wife and daughter agreed with him.

But let us retrace our steps just a little. Dilek and I were descending the stairs from the elevated terrace of Rustem Pasha Mosque to the Levantine chaos of Hasırcılar Street – and I want to tell you why.

In fact we were rewarding ourselves for a successful journey to the outer reaches of European Istanbul. Our building has been declared an earthquake risk, and we have had to find alternative accommodation for a year or two while it is demolished and rebuilt. In such a case, the government, God bless them, will pay some compensation for expenses and inconvenience incurred. To lodge your claim however, you must make your way to the one and only office authorised to process it – situated in Küçükçekmece, a little-known and less-visited location some 50-plus km from our new abode. The expedition did at least give us the opportunity to make use of Istanbul’s much-vaunted public transport system, and we rode four Metro lines before taking a 20TL taxi ride for the last stage.

Our reward, then, for finding the office, lodging our claim and getting back to civilisation, was a delicious lunch and a wander around the ancient streets of old Istanbul. Eminönü stands near the mouth of the Golden Horn, a deep inlet of the Bosporus which divides the old city from the ‘newer’ European enclave of Galata/Pera, and provided a second watery defence for the triangular Seraglio Point, site of the Roman, Byzantine and later, Ottoman, capitals. In Ottoman times, Eminönü was the commercial port of the city, and the Egyptian, or Spice Bazaar (built in the 1660s), a bustling outlet for the riches of the Orient.

A modern visitor to the Egyptian Bazaar may emerge from its western gate, lured by the irresistible aroma of freshly roasted beans emanating from the premises of Mehmet Efendi, purveyors of coffee to discerning Istanbul residents since 1871. From here you may force your way (politeness will get you nowhere) through the teaming throngs in Wicker-workers’ Street to a shopping experience unlikely to be met with in any air-conditioned Dubai commercial fantasyland. You may sample the indescribable gourmet delicacies of Namlı Pastırmacısı; purchase balloons, paper hats and other party essentials in wholesale quantities; or pass through a time warp to ironsmith workshops selling knives, axes, billhooks, scythes, forks, ploughshares and other agricultural implements from a bygone age.

After a hundred metres of this you may need a breath of fresh air. Keep an eye out for a dingy timeworn stone staircase on your right. Lay aside Western fears of muggers and rapists lying in wait, ascend two flights through the gloom and you will find yourself in one of the less-frequented gems of Imperial Ottoman Istanbul – the mosque of Rustem Pasha, Grand Vizier of Suleiman the Magnificent, husband of the Sultan’s beloved daughter, the Princess Mihrimah, and one of the richest men in the richest city in the richest and most powerful empire of 16^th century Europe, possibly the world.

Rich he may have become, but Rustem was born a simple swine-herding OpukoviĆ in the Croatian town of Skradin. His path to unimaginable wealth and power began when he was whisked away from family and hearth in the grip of the devshirme system, whereby likely young lads from remote regions of the empire were brought to the capital to be educated and trained as future civil and military leaders. Fabulously rich he may have been, but Rustem, it seems, was no fine figure of handsome Ottoman manhood. He did, however, have the major advantage of being held in high esteem by Suleiman, Sovereign of the House of Osman, Sultan of Sultans, Khan of Khans, Emperor of Rome and Successor of the Prophet. In consequence, this ‘squat ugly man’ won the hand of the Sultan’s seventeen-year-old daughter, gaining at the same time, and in true Turkish fashion, the support of her mother, the legendary Roxelana (Hürrem Sultan).

Suleiman, contemporary of English Tudor monarchs Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, is generally considered to have reigned over the Ottoman Empire at the peak of its power and influence. His death, on a military expedition to Hungary in 1566, began the slow decline that concluded, some 350 years later, with defeat and dissolution at the end of the First World War. Many reasons have been offered for this decline – but few focus on the role played by our man Rustem.

One of the strengths (and weaknesses) of Ottoman sultans was the system of royal succession. The imperial harem housed a bevy of fair women at the beck and call of the padishah. The first male offspring produced therein was the natural successor to the throne (Shehzade), and any subsequent boy children born would be quietly strangled, when the time came, to ensure a calm and peaceful transfer of power.

Suleiman, the tenth Ottoman Sultan, was the first to break with tradition and honour his favourite concubine Hürrem (Roxelana) by making her his one and only official wife. Inconveniently, however, one of her harem sisters, Mahidevran (also known as Gülbahar) had already given birth to the senior heir, Mustafa. Needless to say, the favoured royal wife was having none of that, and contrived, with the aid of her son-in-law Rustem, to have the young Mustafa done away with, allegedly by five hitmen whose tongues, as a precaution, had been slit and their eardrums broken so that they would hear, and subsequently speak, no evil.

The way was thereby cleared for Hürrem Sultan’s eldest son Selim to ascend the throne on the death of Suleiman. Sadly for the great empire, he was not half the man his father had been. Sometimes referred to as ‘the Sot’, Selim II, it seems, was a little too partial to drink, and not much inclined to military exploits or affairs of state. Apart from the unflattering epithet, he is best known for presiding over the Ottoman naval defeat at Lepanto, considered by some historians as the turning point in their hitherto successful advance into Europe.

No blame, it seems, was ascribed to Rustem Pasha during his lifetime for his hand in the fateful conspiracy. According to Wikipedia, when he died in 1561 ‘his personal property included 815 lands in Rumelia and Anatolia, 476 mills, 1,700 slaves, 2,900 war horses, 1,106 camels and 800 Qur'ans’. One thing he not have, however, was the love of his wife Mihrimah. Legend has it that the royal princess was beloved of the illustrious architect Sinan. Although thirty years her senior, Sinan outlived Mihrimah and immortalized his vain love for her, if the tales are true, in the construction of two beautiful mosques, one near the city walls at the gate of Edirnekapı and the other on the Asian shore of the Bosporus at Üsküdar.

'Mihrimah' means 'sun and moon' in Persian, a language that made a significant contribution to Ottoman Turkish; and the royal princess is said to have been born on 21 March, the spring equinox. The stories, which I have so far been unable to verify personally, say that Sinan constructed the two mosques in such a way that, as the sun sets behind the single minaret of the one at Edirnekapi, Mihrimah's birthday will be celebrated by the moon rising between the two minarets of the other at Uskudar - a touching and very Turkish tale, given that the great architect carried his unconsummated love to his grave at the age of 98.

Find your way to the Rustem Pasha Mosque

If by chance you ever find yourself in the vicinity of the New Mosque (1660) and the Egyptian Spice Bazaar in district of Eminönü, and you feel you can brave the jostling multitudes in Hasırcılar Street, do climb that stairway and pay a visit to the mosque of that erstwhile Grand Vizier. The building is sheathed inside and out with spectacular glazed tiles from the workshops of Iznik, famed for the colour and beauty of their ceramics. A particular secret guarded by those Iznik craftsmen was production of the colour red, which features prominently in the Rustem Pasha tiles. There are many larger mosques in the Islamic world - probably one or two in Dubai for all I know - but few more beautiful and historically interesting.

The Magic of Forty-two – Konya and Keyrings, Carpets, Christmas and Yellow Canaries

I worked at a boarding school in New Zealand years ago, and one of my more cynical teaching colleagues told me, one day, when I was complaining about the difficulty of gaining access to some room, I forget exactly where . . .  ‘Locks are to keep the teachers out,’ he said. It’s a variation on the theme: ‘Keys are for honest people’.

Well, I guess, at least by that definition, I am an honest person, because I always seem to have bunches of them. The drawers in my desk are full of keys whose purpose I have long since forgotten but am afraid to throw out because I am sure that, a week after I do, I will remember what crucial lock they would have opened.

These days I try to be more systematic, and as an aid to memory, I am attracted to gizmos that will allow me, at a glance, to identify the purpose of a particular bunch of keys. One of the things I love about the Turkish language is that it has a word for these things. ‘Anahtar’ is Turkish for ‘key’ and ‘anahtarlık’ is one of those decorative thingos to which you attach a bunch of keys, allowing you to immediately understand that they are yours, and that they open the doors at your workplace, or home, the car, or whatever. ‘Keyring’ doesn’t really do justice to the concept, does it?

Incidentally, the Turkish language is full of these marvellous words, which you don’t really appreciate the lack of until you return to English and find that you just can’t say what you wanted to say any more. ‘Kaçıncı?’ is another one. It means ‘How manyth?’ As in ‘JFK, ABD’nin kaçıncı cumhurbaşkanıydı?’ ‘JFK was the how manyth president of the USA?’ In case you were wondering, he was the 35^th, which for some reason, Americans seem to find important. A residual hankering after dynastic imperial grandeur perhaps.

As usual, I am digressing. What I wanted to tell you was that, as a result of moving to rental accommodation in consequence of our house being in line for demolition for the purposes of urban renewal, I acquired another bunch of keys. Scanning the display of key whatsits in our local locksmith’s, I was attracted to a bronze doodah in the shape of the numeral ‘42’. What could I do? I had to buy it – and of course I intend to tell you why.

Pretty much everyone knows that a cult developed around the number 42 after it featured in a memorable episode in Douglas Adams’s ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. Adams, along with Spike Milligan, was, of course, one of the two great geniuses of the 20^th century. In this particular episode, a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings built ‘Deep Thought’, the second greatest computer in the universe of time and space. They then tasked it with producing the ultimate ANSWER, to Life, the Universe and Everything. Well, it was a tricky question, requiring a good deal of deep thought, but the mega-computer finally came up with the answer (after 7.5 million years of calculation) which was . . . forty-two.

Another thing I love about living in Turkey is that my shoe size, which for the previous 30 years I had thought was 8, in fact turned out to be 42 – a much more emotionally satisfying number, at least for a male of the species. ‘42 also happens to be the year in the 19^th century when two ships, the ‘Jane Gifford’ and the ‘Duchess of Argyle’, arrived under sail in the embryonic British colony of Auckland, New Zealand, disgorging immigrants from the old country, among whom were George and Eliza Scott, my paternal great-great-great grandparents.

All very interesting, you say, but what about that key doohickey? What do Turks care about your shoe size, ancestry, even Douglas Adams, great as he was? And you are absolutely right – they don’t give a dingo’s kidney. Something that is very important to them, however, is the fact that their country is divided into 81 administrative districts, known as ‘İl’. For a long time the list was alphabetical, beginning with Adana as number 1 and progressing to Zonguldak at number 67. Sad to say, the best-devised human systems are prone to decay, and there are now a further fourteen ils, no’s 68 to 81, upsetting the satisfying logic of the original list.

An important aspect of this system is that the number plates of cars in Turkey all begin with the digits of the il in which they were registered. Residents of other cities can immediately recognize and resent a driver from Istanbul by his or her distinctive ‘34’ number plate. Another beauty of the system is that it allows Istanbul drivers to immediately identify an out-of-towner and add an extra personal touch to their abuse of his (or her) driving incompetence. 

But getting back to my key whatchamacallit, ‘42’ is in fact the il number of Konya, an Anatolian city located exactly where it should be, right there between 41 Kocaeli and 43 Kütahya. Which reminds be of another episode from ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide’ featuring an extra-terrestrial being known as Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged – but I refuse to be diverted!

One of the reasons it is difficult for those of us from the ‘New World’ to understand what goes on in the ‘Old’ is that it is just so damn old! Konya itself is believed to have been inhabited since at least 3000 BCE, although excavations at a nearby site known as Catal Höyük have revealed a Neolithic proto-city dating back to 7,500 BCE. Konya (or Iconium) was incorporated into the Hittite Empire around 1500 BCE, and subsequently taken over successively by Phrygians, Cimmerians and Persians before Alexander the Great came hurtling through on his mission of world domination in 333 BCE. Kings of Pergamum ruled Iconium during the Hellenistic period until it passed into the hands of the Roman Empire in 133 BCE. It gets a mention in the New Testament Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 14, where Paul and Barnabas are said to have stirred up some trouble among the locals with their preaching. A certain Tertius of Iconium was, they say, the original scribe who recorded Paul’s Epistle to the Romans for posterity. After the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, the city came under repeated attack by the Muslim Arabs in the 7^th – 9^th centuries and was razed on more than one occasion.

Seljuk Turks began seizing control of Anatolia after defeating the Byzantine Graeco-Roman army at Manzikert in 1071 CE. The resulting Seljuk Empire or Sultanate ruled much of Anatolia as far as the Mediterranean Sea and almost to the Aegean. Around 1100 CE the Sultan Kılıçarslan established his capital at Konya. Defeating him and his Islamic Empire was one of the main objects of the First Crusade launched by Pope Urban II in 1096 – although, perhaps ironically, it was the Mongols under Genghis Khan who finally put an end to the Seljuks.

One of Konya’s contributions to Western civilization was a particularly fine type of hand-woven carpet, of which the 13^th century explorer Marco Polo is reputed to have said they were the most beautiful in the world. Certainly they were much sought after by the wealthiest European families, and featured in the art of several painters, most notably Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543).

Konya is also the place where the iconic Turkish folk philosopher, Nasrettin Hodja breathed his last, and where Ahmet Davutoğlu, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the current government, his first. These days, however, the city is probably most renowned as the last resting place of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, founder of the Mevlana sect of Islam. Rumi, as he is known in the West, was a 13^th century Sufi mystic whose followers are sometimes called Whirling Dervishes, and who was, according to Wikipedia, ‘the most popular poet in America in 2007’. As everywhere in Turkey, when you visit Konya, there are special meals that should be eaten: okra soup and etli ekmek, for example – the latter a kind of elongated pizza featuring the meat of local lamb.

Well, enough of Konya. Though you might wonder whether it acquired the number 42 purely because of its place in an alphabetical sequence, or if there were mystical mathematical forces at work. For sure there’s something going on with that ‘42’ business. Experts in number theory tell me that it is, in fact, a primary pseudo-perfect number, which may be significant, given that such numbers apparently satisfy the Egyptian fraction equation, whatever that may be. We in New Zealand remember 1642 as the year a Dutch mariner by the name of Abel Janszoon Tasman got himself lost in the South Pacific Ocean and stumbled upon our South Island in the false impression that it was part of South America. Apparently the local Maoris killed and ate a few of his sailors, which perhaps deterred his countrymen from returning – that and the fact that they would have been unlikely to find it by following his directions.

A century earlier, in 1542, our Scottish ancestors crowned a new queen, Mary I, who, I gather, was only six days old at the time, which may have been a bad move in view of how things subsequently turned out for Bonnie Scotland. 1742 was the birth year of Henry Dundas, 1^st Viscount Melville, sometimes referred to as ‘The Uncrowned King of Scotland’. In spite (or possibly because) of his opposition to the abolition of slavery, Dundas gained some popularity in the land of his birth, helping to establish the New Town of Edinburgh and commemorated by a 46 metre neo-classical column in the main square. According to his Wikipedia entry, Dundas was the last person to be impeached in the United Kingdom for misappropriation of public money – though it seems he was acquitted, whether from innocence, good luck or a good lawyer is not made clear.

The original Tweety Bird, 1942

And what of more recent times? Well, the following have nothing to do with Scotland, Konya or Douglas Adams, but I can tell you, for instance, that, in 1942, the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Trinidad was severely damaged by a salvo of its own torpedoes and soon after scuttled by her own crew. 1942 was also the year when Bing Crosby recorded ‘White Christmas’, that schmaltzy Irving Berlin song said to be the biggest-selling single of all time. ‘Der Bingo’, as he is referred to in the Andrews Sisters’ song ‘Rum and Coca Cola’, nudged out the Pope and the favourite baseball player of the day in 1948 to top the poll for ‘most admired man alive’ – one assumes the poll was conducted in the USA. His own family seem to have been less admiring – eldest son Gary having published a book in which he portrayed his father as ‘cruel, cold, remote and both physically and psychologically abusive.’ The Wikipedia entry reports that two of Bingo’s other sons committed suicide.

To end on a happier note, 1942 saw the first appearance of Tweety Pie, the yellow canary bird featured in Warner Bros Looney Toons cartoons. Tweety (or Sweety), another icon of US culture, is indelibly etched in the childhood memories of generations of kids with his most famous line, ‘I tawt I taw a puddy tat!’

So there you have it . . . Do numbers have a special significance or life of their own? Undoubtedly many people believe they do. Most of us, if pressed, will admit to having a number we consider to be personally ‘lucky’. Results of a poll published the other day in The Guardian announced that seven is the world’s favourite number. Well, seven is a factor of 42, but I’m sticking with the larger multiple. It seems to me to encapsulate much of the true meaning of life – if we only knew what the question was!

Social Networks are not always about Democracy

I don't read Time Magazine much these days. My subscription ran out and they forgot to remind me, so after I shudder to think how many years, I no longer have that venerable weekly delivered to my letterbox. Fortunately, I assume from gratitude for my long years of loyalty, they send me regularly a brief summary of what's going on in the world (according to them at least). 

That was then - this is now

I had seen this one reported in our local Turkish daily, but you may like to check the English version:

Report: U.S. Officials Created a ‘Cuban Twitter’ to Overthrow Castro

Washington covertly made ZunZuneo, Cuban slang for a hummingbird's tweet, to woo mobile users with news stories. Once the platform's audience would balloon, the supposed—and failed—goal was to flood it with “content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize ‘smart mobs'

Fifty-three years after the C.I.A. failed to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government with a group of armed Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, the U.S. government is still trying to dislodge the Caribbean island’s communist regime, according to a new report.

The Associated Press, citing documents and people involved in the project, reports the U.S. government has been working covert backchannels with aid agencies funneling money through front companies for years to create a social media platform designed to “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.” Read more