Casino in Kurdistan

I know there is a way to hide the link behind a word. I'll figure that out soon. Until then, here is an exciting story about Kurdistan. (Which I visited earlier this summer. I'm still trying to find the time to write that up.)

http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2007/9/investkurdistan292.htm

Baby Girl

Sunday afternoon my wife and I had a baby girl. 9 pounds 4 ounces. 21 inches. This is our third child.

When our first was born everything that had contact with him scared me. Wind, loud noises, germs, etc.

Now the only thing that scares me are the two oldest children. They want so much to hold and tickle and poke and prod and hug and love the newborn. I feel like George watching Lenny play with a rabbit. For the next six months, my number one job is to protect the baby from her siblings.

Movies and Books of the past week

3:10 to Yuma
David Mamet pointed out that in an awful lot of action movies there is a moment about 3/4 through the picture that a character tells a sad story about a dog he once had (or an ex-girlfriend, or that his dad beat him, or his wife and his child died of tuberculosis.) Usually its handled clumsily and it stops the movie dead. Every once in a while it is glorious like the story in Jaws about the USS Indianapolis.

There are two "I once had a dog" speeches in 3:10 to Yuma and they are both written clumsily, but the way Russel Crowe and Christian Bale explain them, without any ego, they worked.

Russell Crowe reminds me of Paul Newman, especially everything Paul Newman has done since Slapshot.

I also saw College with Buster Keaton. I watched this with Eli. He likes Buster Keaton. Not as much as Charlie Chaplin though.

I also saw Modern Times with Charlie Chaplin - Eli went crazy over this. I've never seen him laugh as much as he did in the first fifteen minutes.

The only book I read was volume five of The Walking Dead, a graphic novel about zombies. It is top notch.

Movies I saw in Eastern Turkey

Movies I saw in Eastern Turkey
It was so flipping hot in Turkey that every midday I would either go back to my hotel room for a nap or go see a movie.The movies I saw were Ocean's 13, Breach, The Hitcher, Shooter, Zodiac and Bug. I would have seen Shrek 3 and Pirates of the Caribean 3 but they were in Turkish. The Hills Have Eyes part 2 didn't come out till the weekend after I went home.

At the end of the movies, they shut off the projector without showing the end credits. I didn't get to see the ending of Zodiac where it tells what happened to all of the characters.

Ocean's 13 came out in Turkey the same weekend it came out in the United States.

In the city of Batman, the movie theater would only show a film if there were three audience members. So every day that week I'd go to the theater to see Breach and every day they would turn me away. Finally they showed pity on me. I'm glad they did. It was a good movie.

I wanted to go to a movie in Northern Iraq but all of the theaters had closed down a long time ago. Everybody has satellite and/or pirated DVDs.

You could buy a disc that contained five movies. Usually they followed a theme, such as a Steven Spielberg disc with the movies: Saving Private Ryan, 1941, Jaws, Jaws 2 and Jaws 3. My favorite disc I found, and I wish I'd have bought it contained both Tristam Shandy and some third rate horrible slasher film called The Pumpkin Slayer or something like that.

Batman in Eastern Turkey - Day 1

I wore a beard because I thought I'd look like the locals. That was a mistake. Nobody wears a beard in Northern Iraq or Eastern Turkey. As a matter of fact they are some of the most clean shaven people I'd ever been around. I felt like I was a hippie on BYU campus. (By the way, most people thought I was Italian.) I wanted to just blend in but I knew that wouldn't happen on my first day when a six year old boy started following me around.

At first I was scared. My first thought was, is this some child who is part of an Islamic extremist group and who was going to point me out to his older and more dangerous buddies? I'm not proud of the thought, I'm not normally a xenophobic person, but I'd never been in so exotic a place as Batman. I'd felt like I'd stepped into that town of Kathleen Turner's rich lover in Jewel of the Nile. I wasn't my normal self.

So I said, "Hi," to the kid.

He looked at me shyly and kept walking. Then I noticed he was carrying a bathroom scale in his left hand.

After walking along side me for ten minutes he said, "How are you?"

I felt relieved that he spoke English. "Wow, you speak English?" I said. "How are you?"

He didn't say anything. He didn't act like he understood me. After about a hundred more yards I stopped and shrugged waiting for him to do something, anything.

He smiled and put the bathroom scale at my feet.

I understood. He wanted to weigh me in exchange for money. So I stepped on the scale, noticed that I was still fat and then gave him a lira.

He said something in Turkish and ran off. I don't know what he said, probably something about obesity being a killer and that I have a hundred percent chance of getting arthritis in my knees and that I should meet with a nutritionist as soon as I go back to Italy. But I don't know, I don't speak Turkish. I didn't even want be weighed. I was just being polite.

Well, not yet

My son finished his second day of school today. When I asked him if he made any friends, he paused in thought, and said, "Well, not yet."

My heart broke at the honesty of it. When anyone asks me an equivalent question such as, "So meeting lots of people?" I give a half-true yes when what I really mean is that I talked to one guy who also likes John Carpenter's The Thing and if I see him from now on, perhaps in the hall, I'll say hi, but we aren't bosom buddies or anything.

When someone asks me how my dissertation is doing, I answer pretty good, when what I really mean is that it is kind of shoddy but presentable, I suppose. It certainly won't set the academic world on fire, but maybe the grader won't be bored while reading it.

I've been lying my entire life. When things are going badly or just not great, I always say that they are.

The fact that Eli didn't just give a half-hearted, 'Yeah I've made some friends,' but gave a truthful and hopeful (doesn't the phrase not yet, just, I don't know, make you want to cry?)

I worry more about how he will get along with other children at school than anything else. Not because intellectually I think that is the most important thing in his life, but because of my gut feelings.

I guess the only thing I can do is prepare a loving home for him to come home to.

Eli enters the classroom

We dropped Eli off at the school at the same moment that the kindergarten bus parked. Eli recognized some kids from the orientation. He waved to a little Mexican boy, who very excited to see him, waved back. Eli's first school chum?

We walked him into the classroom where he promptly forgot about us and sat at the table, not even looking our way. He didn't say goodbye. He didn't notice us walking away.

I couldn't have been more thrilled.

This is so much fun. Right now, at 1:40 he has about forty more minutes to go.