Stormig

Hooray?

I know there must be a pan-pipe and harp rendering of "En Aranjuez con tu amor"... But I can't find it online. Can anyone? Please?

x=4^9

I don't see any oblique eyes on the right side of the picture.

Oh dear.

I once took control of someone's account and dumped all his dirty laundry for the world wide web to see. Will Interpol spank me?

What's the prize?

It is possible to disagree... Mommism tips social balance. Let's put it this way. Let's say Jessica earns 10 units a month. She pays 2 units for shared rent or possibly 4 or 5 if solo, 2 for food, etc. Let's say Monica doesn't leave mommy's bosom and earns 6 units, yet neither pays rent, nor for food, all prepared by mommy, and she gets to put fuel in her car (also possibly afforded by daddy) and she also gets to take a trip to Mexico while Jessica can only dream of going to a Mexican restaurant. Something is wrong. It's not about fairness or other. It would make sense if Monica contributed to her family's expenses so she could forget about that trip to Mexico while Jessica can at least dream of it and possibly accomplish it by saving up, but usually I think this is likely not the case, and what Monica earns is her pocket money. What does that say about the affairs of consumerism? I'm not sure, but I don't think I have seen anyone mention girls who wouldn't want to get married. Are they going to live with their parents for the rest of their lives because of what gossipers would say ("She wants to have sex, the nasty -----!")? Gimme a break. BTW - here's a strange marriage: http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1084023

Has - albeit only on paper and only in token form.

I'm not sure the Church of England is supported by the state. I think all churches rely on donations from congregations, something that troubles the Church of England some. If you want to visit their cathedrals, more often than not you have to pay an entrance fee like you would to a museum. Not so with the Catholics, who boast greater numbers of followers and greater donations! I think that all churches and religious orders should be treated as NGO's/non-profits and provided help/benefits thus on that basis. All priests should be licenced personally, not by affiliation of church. Only then can you provide equality. Otherwise Armenia would not be very different from the so-called secular Republic of Turkey, where Muslim clerics are actually employees of the state!

Happy birthday, Vavushka!

So by not posting anything about Armenian culture, he ridicules it? That's an odd one. I'd even say fanatic. If the dude posts garbage, that's that. I hadn't cared to notice. Now please leave the thread alone. I may still have use for it as reference and I don't want it closed down because of snot and chest-thumping.

No problem, you can take turns. Oh wait, I get your meaning. Yeah, I sure as hell would need your help. Lighten up, you two, I was just replying in kind.

HRANT DINK: Requiem to a Lesser Turkey Dogu Ergil It is a true pity that we have lost a lightening rod against fanaticism of all kinds and a true patriot who believed and preached that without love of the citizen; love of the country is a guise for discrimination and ideological tyranny. Who was Hrant Dink? He was one of those rare Armenians (now numbering around 60.000) whose family survived the Ottoman mass deportation of 1915. Although he was born in Malatya in 1954, he grew up in an Armenian orphanage in Istanbul, graduated from the Zoology Department of the Faculty of Sciences, Istanbul University. However, he found his way into public recognition after he has founded the Turkish-Armenian daily, AGOS in 1996. As the chief editor and prime columnist he aimed at three things: 1) to open up the introverted Armenian community to the wider public for he believed that direct contact and open channels of knowledge would help eradicate prejudices; 2) to promote the idea that there are other ethnic-cultural groups in Turkey other than the Turks and Muslims and they can very well blend into the nation cleansed of stereotypes and biases; 3) to defend Armenians against majority fanaticism in Turkey and to defend Turks/Turkey against fanaticism and hypocrisy of foreigners and Diaspora Armenians. He has succeeded in all three accounts. He was a Turk against Armenian extremism and he was an Armenian against Turkish extremism. He was Turkey in its complexity. But fanatics do not live on reason. They live and nourish on hatred. They need to hate in order to survive. It is this hatred of life and humanity that took the life of this honorable democrat and patriot. Hrant, did not leave his country despite all pressures and injustices. He preferred to talk from within, among people who he identified with. Yet he was given a prison sentence of 6 months due to the notorious Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code that punishes “insulting Turkishness”. All the other writers and intellectuals indicted in lieu of this article was acquitted. However his case was carried to the High Court of Appeals where his sentence was endorsed in spite of the pleas of the Chief Prosecutor who insisted that there was no crime committed. There was yet another court case lingering on dating back to 2002 when he gave a lecture in Urfa and had said, “ I am not a Turk but an Armenian of Turkey”. He was accused f insulting and denigrating Turkishness! His answer to such accusations was as follows: “In my opinion to denigrate the people one lives together on ethnic or religious grounds is pure racism, and there is no excuse for that…If I am not cleared of these indictments I will leave my country because anyone condemned for such a crime does not deserve the right to live with the people he derides”. How noble isn’t it? But believe or not this statement led to another court case on the grounds of “trying to influence an ongoing trial”. Despite his moderate stance, officials and ultra-nationalist were barely tolerating him although they tried to intimidate him frequently. However, he was so sincere in his humanitarian quest and his self-acquired mission of digging out the truth that had been buried deep in the public sub-conscience concerning the social history of his country, he carried on. While he wanted to create awareness among Turks about the feelings and suffering of Armenians following WW1, he tried to convince Diaspora Armenians to reframe the same events with concepts other than ‘genocide’. He wanted to this to humanize the issue and snatch it away from the ideological extremism and hateful political opportunism of the extremists on both sides. He was like a two-way lightening rod, over-charged by both sides. The straw that broke the back of the camel was an editorial published in AGOS on the 6th of February 2004. According to the editorial, the famed adopted (or God) daughter of M.K. Ataturk, the founder and hero of Turkey, Ms. Sabiha Gokcen was originally an Armenian. Indeed Hrant had found and interviewed the relatives of late Ms. Gokcen now living in Armenia. According to the information obtained she was taken from an Armenian orphanage and raised by Ataturk to be an accomplished military bomber pilot. She was a national icon and symbol of modern Turkish women besides being the daughter of Ataturk. The news shook Turkey. The most potent protest among others came from the military. The press release that originated from the office of the Chief of General Staff was as follows: “What ever the reason of opening up such a symbol to public debate is a crime against national unity and social peace.” Awkward, but Hrant thought that the revelation would serve the opposite end: it would bring the Turks and the Armenians together a little closer. After all one of Turkey’s national icons was originally an Armenian and has been honored to be the Goddaughter of the nation’s revered hero. So these historical, cultural differences really do not matter if we can find the commonalities that unite us. Well, he was wrong. Icons and heroes could only be Turkish in Turkey. I will conclude this humble requiem in words by the statement of the History Foundation after Hrant’s assassination: “It is not the lifeless body of Hrant Dink that lies before AGOS, it is Turkey’s hopes…Turkey will find it harder to solve its problems without Hrant Dink; it will be a lesser Turkey.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-tur...menian_4378.jsp Hrant Dink and Armenians in Turkey Hratch Tchilingirian 23 - 2 - 2007 The assassination of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink on 19 January 2007 and its aftermath highlighted both change and resistance to change in Turkish society. To understand how far Turkey has travelled in the past generation, Hratch Tchilingirian examines the role of Hrant Dink himself in the context of the Armenian community of which he was voice, critic, and emblem. On 18 October 1994 a press conference called by the then Patriarch of the Armenian Church, Karekin Kazanjian, was held at the Armenian patriarchate in Kumkapi, Istanbul. It was organised to correct what the church saw as misinformation amounting to a slander campaign against the Armenian church in particular and the Armenian community in Turkey in general. The "highlight" of this campaign was an attempt by the patriarchate to voice protest against false, even lethal, accusations in Turkish media and political circles that Armenian clergymen were supporting Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) terrorists in their secessionist struggle against the Turkish state. A photograph allegedly depicting an Armenian priest in the company of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, widely distributed on posters, was a key instrument of these accusations. Indeed, shouted slogans such as Apo, Ermeni pici ("Apo [Öcalan's nickname], Armenian bastard") were at the time commonly heard during nationalist demonstrations and street protests. The patriarchate's communiqué on the matter categorically denied the existence of any ties between the Armenian community in Turkey and any terrorist organisation, and explained that the priest in the relevant photo was not a cleric of the Armenian church. The document went on to condemn such anti-Armenian insinuations in both print and broadcast media, expressing the serious concern that such false rumours, assumptions and misrepresentations were endangering the Armenian community in Turkey and making the lives of individual Armenians difficult. Hratch Tchilingirian is associate director of the Eurasia Research Programme at the Judge Business School, Cambridge University The press conference - attended by some seventy Turkish and foreign journalists - was a tense affair. Several journalists harassed the patriarch with presumptuous questions laced with innuendo about contentious issues, including the PKK and the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (Asala) - a small, Lebanon-based terrorist group that had killed thirty-four Turks (mainly diplomats) between 1975 and 1983, mainly in western Europe. (Asala had no presence, links or any type of backing among Armenians in Turkey, and minimal support even among diaspora Armenians). As the interrogators became increasingly belligerent, a tall figure forced himself into the heart of the journalistic melèe. "As a member of the patriarchate's press office, I would like to answer that question", Hrant Dink announced. He continued: "Respectable representatives of the press, we are trying to shake off from our shoulders a discomfort which causes pressure. It is for this reason that we are trying to voice our protest against a false claim. Apart from that, all your questions have been answered many times before. The Armenians of Turkey are not terrorists and they have never provided aid to terrorism, from whichever direction that may come. From now on too, this is the way it is going to be. Armenians will never support terrorism. As citizens of this country, we would like to live in peace and tranquility. This is the message of this press conference. ... The Armenians, all Armenians in the world, especially Armenians in Turkey, at this moment have only one preoccupation: peace, peace, and peace" (see Marmara [istanbul], 19 October 1994). This was the moment Hrant Dink fully entered public life. The occasion, the pressure, the times themselves were such that he chose - publicly, confidently and courageously - to address the "discomforts" and "burdens" put upon his community by the state and a highly politicised media. It was the moment Hrant Dink openly began to deal with the dilemma of being simultaneously a citizen of one country, Turkey, while being part of another nation, Armenia. A time of silence It was never going to be easy, for the challenge was at once institutional, legal, and political. The Armenian community, like that of other minorities in Turkey, experienced shame, humiliation, harassment and intimidation across the long decades from the 1950s to the 1990s without being able to speak up in its defence - and in a very different atmosphere to later controversies over Article 301 and even minimal debate about the genocide of 1915. The Armenian community in Turkey in this period was characterised by its reclusive existence and collective silence. The defining institutions of the Armenian community in Turkey were and are the church and the school. Both faced (and face) perennial problems that kept Hrant Dink and his colleagues awake at night. The interference and heavy-handedness of the Turkish government in the Armenian community's process of electing a patriarch (in 1990, and again in 1998) were among the arduous legal problems enmeshing this key Armenian body. On the second occasion Hrant wrote: "We are sad ... The (Armenian) community is deeply hurt by the uncertainty created by the escalation of the senseless crisis about the election of an acting patriarch. These are trying days ... We are observing with shame" (see "Uzgunuz", Agos, 21 August 1998). The situation with the Armenian schools was (and is) no better. Hrant wrote many columns about the state of Armenian schools in Turkey, and took special interest in their administration. While criticising his own community for its shortcomings, he also berated the Turkish government for imposing numerous administrative restrictions on minority (and not only Armenian) schools. Hrant passionately recorded the constant indignities experienced by Armenian educators. In August 1998 he wrote: "If I am not mistaken, it was three years ago ... One of the vice-directors of the ministry of national education's Istanbul office - who was later convicted of corruption and bribe-taking - said the following to the "vice-principals" he appointed (whom the minority schools call "Turkish vice-principals"): "You are our eyes and ears ... You are to inform us of even the minutest mistakes that these people make." He said this in the presence of the minority school principals, with total disregard for their dignity and common courtesy. "... And what was I fantasising all these years ... With my 45-year-old brain, I was thinking: 'would, one day, a minister of national education start the ceremony for the new school year in a minority school?' Sweet thoughts ... My naïveté ... Sorry ..." (see "Kinkel ve Valilik", Agos, 21 August 1998 - translated excerpts posted on www.groong.com). A voice of dignity Hrant Dink and his colleagues were symbols as well as agents of change in relation to the Armenian community in Turkey. They were determined to express the indignation and resentment they experienced as citizens of the Republic of Turkey. If society and the political system did not allow them to voice their fears, concerns, and hopes for their community and for Turkey, the silence surrounding them - they believed - must be made audible. Hrant Dink was from 1996 the editor-in-chief and a columnist of the Armenian-language weekly newspaper Agos in Istanbul. The paper aims to provide a voice for the Armenian community in Turkey and to further dialogue between Turks and Armenians On 19 January 2007, Hrant Dink was assassinated outside Agos's offices in Istanbul Also by Hrant Dink in openDemocracy: "The water finds its crack: an Armenian in Turkey" (13 December 2005) "Orhan Pamuk's epic journey" (16 October 2006) "A pigeon-like unease of spirit" (22 January 2007) It was to a large extent this combination - of the hunger to speak and the desire to address the "existential" problems surrounding the Armenian church and educational establishments - that sparked the creation of the bilingual weekly newspaper Agos in April 1996. The five colleagues who founded Agos were: Diran Bakar, a lawyer; Luiz Bakar, also a lawyer and (since 1994) the spokesperson of the patriarchate; Harutiun Sesetian, a businessman; Anna Turay, a public-relations professional; and Hrant Dink, who at the time owned a bookshop. The founding members - as is the case with any equivalent innovative project - were to have their differences in subsequent years. But at its heart, Agos (and Hrant in particular) remained consistent in the effort to open channels of communication and dialogue between the reclusive - and at times isolated - Armenian community and Turkish society. Hrant defined one of the newspaper's purposes as "(trying) to identify and explain our problems to the government and to Turkish society", while acknowledging that "because of this, we sometimes have problems" (Armenian International Magazine, 11/3, March 2000). His core belief was that prejudices could be overcome by education and dialogue. The target of this education and dialogue was not just misunderstanding and prejudice in Turkish society, but the Armenian community itself. Hrant's critical discourse about the Armenian community, and especially the Armenian patriarchate, was unpopular, costing him supporters and even friends. In June 2001, for example, on the occasion of the 1,700th anniversary of Armenian Christianity, he wrote: "The Armenian church has suffered divisions throughout history and it is evident that it has not learned from its own history. The 'one nation - one church' rule, which has been repeated almost everywhere during these last years, is nothing but a slogan void of content" (see "Spiritual Chess", Agos, 1 June 2004 - translated from Turkish by Anahit Dagci). At the same time, many found his passion, genuine concern and sincerity disarming. Most people in the Armenian community saw Agos as a courageous publication where issues related to Armenian identity and community were discussed with refreshing openness, reason and a genuine desire to build bridges across large divides - whether within Turkey, with Armenia or with the diaspora. In the course of this work, Hrant came to a profound realisation: that the resolution of the problems of the Armenian community in Turkey was intimately related to the progress of tolerance, democracy and freedom in Turkey. Armenians, here and there Dogu Ergil observed after Hrant's death that he had "aimed to promote the idea that there are other ethnic-cultural groups in Turkey than Turks and Muslims, and (that) they can very well blend into the nation cleansed of stereotypes and biases". Hrant wanted, said Ergil, to "defend Armenians against majority fanaticism in Turkey and to defend Turks/Turkey against the fanaticism and hypocrisy of foreigners and diaspora Armenians" (see "Hrant Dink: Requiem to a Lesser Turkey", EU Turkey Civic Commission, 25 January 2007). In recent years, the "Armenian issue" - as the problem of the genocide is referred to in Turkey - had indeed become a central theme in Hrant's public discourse. The centrality of the "Armenian issue", in fact, has come to cast a shadow over the other problems of the Armenian community in Turkey: ownership of property, community foundations, education of clergy, school administration, and church elections among them. (Why, for example, should the affairs of minorities in Turkey still be "administered" by Turkey's council of ministers, interior ministry, the security and intelligence agencies, and the foreign ministry?). Also in openDemocracy on Hrant Dink and Turkey: Üstün Bilgen-Reinart, "Hrant Dink: forging an Armenian identity in Turkey" (7 February 2006) Anthony Barnett, Isabel Hilton, "Hrant Dink: an openDemocracy tribute" (19 January 2007) Fatma Müge Göçek, "Hrant Dink (1954-2007): in memoriam" (22 January 2007) Gunes Murat Tezcur, "Hrant Dink: the murder of freedom" (23 February 2007) Vicken Cheterian, "The pigeon sacrificed: Hrant Dink, and a broken dialogue" (23 January 2006) Elif Shafak, Rakel Dink, "Hrant Dink's funeral" (25 January 2007) Peter Balakian, "Hrant Dink's assassination and genocide's legacy" (29 January 2007) If the central, heated question of genocide came to dominate discussion of Armenians and Turkey, it is one that Hrant Dink and a considerable segment of the Armenian diaspora could not agree on. On the eve of the 24 April commemorations in 2002, for example, he addressed members of the Armenian diaspora in France in an interview with L'Express newspaper. "Do not seek Armenian identity among the 1915 graves", he advised. "I am ready to discuss all issues with you ... I am proud to be a Turkish Armenian. I want to represent, with my newspaper, the rebirth of this society. Armenia will never be safe unless Turkey achieves democratisation. I believe Turkey may be a chance for that young state which is on the brink of drowning. Tomorrow, thanks to Turkey, Armenia will get the chance to become neighbors with the European Union. Turkey is Armenia's only chance" (Turkish Daily News, 23 April 2002). More than the semantics of the issue, Hrant's approach to the issue of 1915 and Turkey-Armenia relations focused on the substance of reconciliation. "I know what happened to my grandparents", he told AFP. "It does not matter what you called it: genocide, massacres or deportation" (Agence France Presse, 8 October 2000). Hrant strongly believed - to the dismay of many in the diaspora - that the more essential thing was to influence Turkish public opinion. "The winning of the empathy and compassion of the Turkish population is far more important than the adoption of Armenian resolutions in hundreds of parliaments elsewhere". Hrant spent considerable time and energy in seeking to persuade the diaspora that there is a new dynamic and a new openness in Turkey, involving an unprecedented interest in and discussion of Armenian issues. He said that "this process has been developing very slowly, just like the democratisation of Turkey", in a way that encouraged him to believe that "the taboo (of 1915) too will be broken". Yet anyone who is familiar with "breaking taboos" in Turkey knows the extreme dangers involved in such a process. Hrant himself was well aware of the possible consequences: "We never deny our own history. But Armenians (in Turkey) are unable to discuss it for fear it will harm the community's existence" (see Ayla Jean Yackley, "Turks confront dark chapter of Armenian massacres", Reuters, 26 April 2005). In his response to this predicament, Hrant displayed one of his largest virtues: courage. As he wrote in openDemocracy in 2005: "Where fear is dominant, it produces symptoms of resistance to change at all levels of society. The more some people yearn and work for openness and enlightenment, the more others who are afraid of such changes struggle to keep society closed. In Turkey, the legal cases against Hrant Dink, Orhan Pamuk, Ragip Zarakolu or Murat Belge are examples of how the breaking of every taboo causes panic in the end. This is especially true of the Armenian issue: the greatest of all taboos in Turkey, one that was present at the creation of the state and which represents the principal "other" of Turkish national identity" ("The water finds its crack: an Armenian in Turkey", 13 December 2005). Hrant Dink "was Turkey in its complexity", wrote Dogu Ergil. "He was a Turk against Armenian extremism and an Armenian against Turkish extremism." The day of Hrant Dink's funeral was the evidence of how far Turkey had travelled since that press conference at Istanbul's Patriarchate in 1994. More than twelve years on, the Ermeni pic epithet hurled by nationalists was overtaken by the cries of Hepimiz Ermeniz ("We are all Armenians!") in the throats of tens of thousands of Turks. Hrant himself, in his life as much as his death, had played an enormous role in bringing about that change. He opened the door to a future that Armenians and Turks must find together.

Speaking of monuments, I hope you both get the Eiffel Tower up yours.

Is inserting subtitles a pain in the arse?

No wonder called Microsoft.

Holy cow, that file does show the pigeon I had mentioned earlier! http://hyeforum.com/index.php?s=&showt...st&p=188443 Starting at minute 7:24 and lasting a good fifteen seconds!

Indeed, that worked fine.

Arrested? Try "charged"...

That's it. I want tulips on my ankle.

I've tried by saving in other formats - wav, wmv, vob... This time it's Windows Media Player that conks out. And of course I haven't been able to download the whole of the file.

Would I then be able to upload that format on youtube - or convert back to flv, for example? I haven't done any of that sort of stuff, so I have too many questions in my head.

Here's what I had to do - I sought the corresponding file from the Temporary Internet Files and I saved it in .flv format so as to be able to open it with Riva FLV Player. I also downloaded Subtitle Workshop but then got stuck.