Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

One of my guides in Cappadocia was kind enough to give me some dating advice for Turkey. He is a handsome fellow in his late 20s with a gorgeous girlfriend so he speaks with some authority. “Forget about girls in the eastern portion of Turkey who haven’t been to university,” he started, “the real action begins at age 19 for girls in their first year at the university, especially those girls from western Turkey.”

“There are clubs for elite people along the Bosphorus in Istanbul,” he explained, “that I couldn’t get into by myself and maybe only with my girlfriend. Turks have to telephone ahead for a reservation but you’re an American so they will let you in regardless.” What age of woman would be interested in a 44-year-old guy (my birthday was September 28 🙁 )? “Any age woman, starting at 20, would be interested in an American. They assume that you have money.”

Dress code? He looked at my stainless steel watch. “Get a gold watch. Let them know that you are staying at a top hotel.”

Cautions? “Make sure that they are not there with their boyfriend or brother. You could get punched.”

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I’ve finished three books about exotic cities with a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious population.

The first is Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City. The publisher pushes this as essential reading for tourists who want to learn about Istanbul. About half of the text of the book is devoted to the author’s feelings and memories of childhood. He loves his mother and is fascinated by her makeup and clothing. He loves (male) Turkish writers who are captivated by the beauty and sexuality of teenage boys. He is often melancholy, even after sex (perhaps because his partner wasn’t a teenage boy?). You would be forgiven if you thought that this was a lost work of Marcel Proust. The other half of the book has some interesting information about Istanbul.

Pamuk claims that the entire city suffers from melancholy and despair because of the collapse of the Ottoman empire and subsequent decline in the city’s relative fortunes. He celebrates the contributions of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews to the city’s culture and mourns the departure of these ethnic groups (Pamuk notes that Istanbul was more than half non-Muslims at the beginning of the 20th century and nearly 100 percent Muslim at the end; he says that the Christians and Jews were encouraged to leave after their property was confiscated in the 1940s and by riots in the 1950s that destroyed their homes and shops). Stories of ships colliding in the Bosphorus are captivating (you have to sail through downtown Istanbul to get from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea).

Pamuk’s own family has suffered a decline in their fortunes, but he doesn’t seem to notice the rise of other families. The latest shopping malls are grander than any palace that the Sultans ever built. The bridges spanning the Bosphorus are engineering achievements beyond anything the Ottomans might have dreamed of. The wealth of modern day Turkish businessmen exceeds anything the Ottomans had. It is true that the Ottomans ruled an empire, but it was an empire mostly of illiterate peasants who couldn’t pay much in the way of taxes. Modern day Istanbul is at the center of a powerful growing economy of 70+ million people, nearly all of whom are better educated and better employed than their 19th Century counterparts.

Summary: an interesting book for fans of Pamuk’s other writing, not particularly instructive about Istanbul.

The next book is Justine, the first novel in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. The exact time of the novel isn’t specified, but they have cars and don’t have antibiotics, so 1920s or 1930s seems like a good guess. The city has little industry and people don’t work very hard so they spend all of their time having sex with each other, regardless of marital or economic status. Unlike with Pamuk’s book, the sex tends to be heterosexual. There is a lot of mingling among Europeans, Arabs, Copts (descendants of the ancient Egyptians who built the Pyramids), Turks, and Jews. Poverty is a common condition, one that often leads to arrangements of a sexual nature. Love is understood by all concerned to be a transitory phenomenon.

Summary: Too bad these folks did not have access to modern scientific research, such as http://www.theonion.com/content/news/study_casual_sex_only_rewarding

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado is the most educational of the three. She chronicles a century of her family’s history in a way that illuminates the general via the particular. Her family starts off in Syria in the early 20th Century. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire has enabled the local Arabs to indulge their passion for anti-Jewish violence (the Ottomans discouraged violence against taxpayers; they didn’t care what religion someone practiced as long as he or she paid taxes). The family flees to Cairo where her father grows up to enjoy a fantastic social life, mostly enjoyed after dark and with a lot of different women. The city is a paradise of neighborliness and opportunity created by the mixture of well educated and sophisticated foreigners and religious minorities. In his early 40s, Lagnado’s father marries a beautiful 20-year-old and installs her in his mother’s house where she becomes miserable from isolation and his nighttime wanderings and presumed infidelity. As an Arab nationalist government supplants the monarchy, the Arab Cairenes become increasingly hostile towards their Christian, Jewish, and foreign neighbors to the point where most of the non-Arab Muslims have to leave by the early 1960s.

Jews are allowed to leave with no more than $30 in wealth, plus a few suitcases full of clothing. Lagnado’s family of six shows up in Paris with $200 and eventually manages to make its way to the shabbier neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Their relatives end up in Israel where they trade the pleasures of the city for a life of hard labor on a dusty kibbutz farm.

Many of the events in the story are sad. Babies die. Babies are sold because a family doesn’t have enough money to feed them. Italian relatives are shipped off to German death camps, never to be heard from again. The world was a much more consequential place then. Yet Lagnado’s prose is never sad and, as you might expect from a Wall Street Journal journalist, there is little fat that could be trimmed from her language.

The 870,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab countries between 1940 and 1960 are a statistic (to paraphrase Joseph Stalin); the Lagnado’s family expulsion is a lot more instructive.

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… a lot of the 70+ million Turks may consider emigration.

Sampling of prices… Gasoline: $8.50/gallon. Diet Coke in a cafe: $6. Museum admission: $8-16. Haagen-Daz in the supermarket: $12.50/pint. Crummy Yellow Tail Shiraz from Australia in the supermarket: $32/bottle. Local table wine: $15-20/bottle. Burger (or “McTurco”), fries, Coke at McDonald’s: $6. Dinner for three at a local restaurant on a small island visited only by Turkish tourists: $175, including wine but without dessert.

Income? The per capita GDP is about $5,000 per year, compared to $44,000 in the U.S. and $35,000 in Germany. An office worker in Istanbul might earn $700 per month.

Lingering Third World inconveniences: terrible traffic due to recent rise in automobile ownership, limited and slow highway connections (where “highway” usually = two-lane road), sluggish and/or intermittent Internet (DSL line in rich neighborhood), lack of consensus as to amenities that should be provided in a public restroom (after paying your $8 admission fee to a museum and walking into the men’s room you would be lucky to find 2 out of 3: toilet paper, hand soap, hand towels or drier)

The Turks went to extraordinary lengths in the 20th century to “Turkify” what had been a polyglot country. Prices higher than London and incomes lower than Mexico may, however, cause even the most ardent Turkish nationalist to consider learning an Indo-European language and looking westward for a place to live during his income-earning years.

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Mallory and I stumbled upon a great hotel in Istanbul, right next to the Blue Mosque: Hotel Sultan Hill. The building is a converted Ottoman-era house, which means that most of the rooms have windows on two sides and therefore much better light than a typical hotel room. The rooms were small but very clean and there is a beautiful roof terrace. The price was 70 Euro for a double, 50 Euro for a single, including breakfast. www.hotelsultanhill.com.

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A report for friends and family from Istanbul. Some sights seen in the last 36 hours…

A packed American Airlines 777 coach cabin with static through the audio system connector rendering the fancy multi-channel video system unusable. A Danish novel called the Exception that got a great review in New Yorker magazine but that I can’t appreciate (all about office politics). Lines long enough for the interterminal buses and security at Heathrow that it took more than one hour to get to the gate for our next flight (connecting through Heathrow almost always involves a terminal change and going through security again; it is actually not very different in time and hassle than flying into LGA and flying out of JFK, which nobody would consider doing).

Duty-free Haribo Tropifruit at IST, Oya’s smiling face, heavy traffic, the continent of Asia underneath our wheels at the other end of the bridge, a 50-lira note disappearing in exchange for a bottle of red wine and a Diet Coke at a convenience store (i.e., the wine was nearly $40), a view of shipping in the Bosphorus from Oya’s terrace, and a delicious cooked-by-the-household-staff meal topped off by baklava made with olive oil.

Mallory wandering down from bed at 11. Breakfast of bread, tomatoes, olives, fresh basil, and olive oil. A 1-hour trip downtown to Sultanahmet through heavy traffic (this city desperately needs congestion pricing). The Blue Mosque, Haghia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, and a museum of beautifully restored mosaics from Justinian’s palace. A $40 fast food lunch at the palace. Views of the full moon rising over the city from the ferry boat taking us back up the Bosphorus. The ferry barman returning 90% of the money that I mistakenly tried to give him for a bottle of water. A girl in a tracksuit wearing headphones bringing a cigarette to her lips, the ferry waiter lighting it for her, and she cheerfully smoking it…. all right underneath a “no smoking” sign on the upper outdoor deck of the boat. A business guy in a gray suit helping us figure out which stop to get off at. Oya’s driver meeting us at the ferry dock. Another home-cooked meal.

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I decided that I needed to vote for Barack Obama for president because (a) all of my friends in Cambridge want to vote for him, and (b) he seems to make people feel good (like Reagan, but without the tax cuts). I thought that maybe it would be good to learn at least one thing about the guy before casting my vote, so I listened to Dreams from my Father as a book on tape.

What did I learn?

Obama’s main concerns through the period covered in the book seem to be black/white relations and preserving Rust Belt jobs and neighborhoods. As far as Obama is concerned, if you were to take an overdose of tanning pills and your skin turned dark, your whole world would be so dramatically changed as to become unrecognizable. No employer would want to hire you, regardless of your skills, experience, and education. White people would avoid you on the street for fear that you would mug them. You would sit down and write a book called “black like me” or something similar.

These are rather surprising preoccupations for a guy who hardly ever saw a black person in his household and who grew up in Hawaii, as far away from America’s Rust Belt as an American could possibly get.

So… if you think that the main problems afflicting America are how white people feel about black skin and how to keep high-paying blue collar jobs in the greater Chicago area, Obama is definitely your candidate.

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A Mooney pilot friend called yesterday to announce the birth of his first child, a healthy boy. It occurred to me that progress in the world of small airplanes is so slow that it is quite possible that when the child is old enough (18) to get his Commercial certificate, he will be flying a virtually identical Mooney to the ones that are being produced now, which are virtually identical to the ones produced in the 1950s. Or my friend’s 1999 Mooney could be passed down. In 2025, a 1999 plane should be younger than the average for a light piston-engined plane (the current average is more than 30 years and one FAA report predicts that the average could rise to 50 years by the year 2020).

People get nostalgic when a mechanical watch is passed down from parent to child, but as an engineer it is tough to celebrate the passing down of a 25-year-old airplane because there aren’t any better ones being produced…

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I was the proud owner of a new Robinson R44 instrument trainer helicopter… for about one hour. Then our dealer called and said that a guy in Florida wanted to pay a $15,000 premium for the machine. If we delivered it to Florida, we could pick up a replacement at the Robinson factory in Los Angeles in early February. The prospect of making a profit, however small, in any aviation-related business was so exciting that I programmed the GPS for KLNA and headed east over Interstate 10.

My Los Angeles experience started at my cousin’s house on Mulholland near the 405. His teenage son has moved on to college, so I slept in his room underneath a 5′ high poster for the movie Taxi Driver. I spent the morning at the reopened Getty Villa. “I refuse to pay for one of those concrete bunker-type structures that are the fad among modern architects,” Getty had said when unveiling the original design. What have the bureaucrats to whom he left his fortune done? Built a massive concrete bunker alongside the original Roman-style villa. The Villa itself has been repainted and looks great; the restaurant, which is in the bunker, serves delicious California cuisine; the gardens and setting are magnificent as before. My friend Ray came in from Ireland and had never seen California, so I took him on a whirlwind tour: Venice Beach, the new LA Cathedral, Olvera Street (Mexican neighborhood downtown), the Hollywood Blvd Walk of Fame, LACMA (Ray was awed by the Latin American colonial art show), La Brea Tar Pits, the Petersen Automotive Museum (coolest exhibit for aviation nerds: Chrysler turbine-powered car), and In-n-Out Burger.

The trip out of Los Angeles is remarkable for the sprawl of hideous tract housing and the number of towered airports through which one must transition. As soon as the helicopter crested the ridge at Banning, California the heat rising up from Palm Springs almost punched us in the face. We continued to E25, Wickenburg, Arizona, for lunch with Maria Langer, author of computer how-to books and operator of a single-pilot Part 135 helicopter air-taxi operation. Temperatures were over 100 degrees F (39-40C). Using advice and a chart from Maria, we pushed through Phoenix Class B airspace down I-10 to Tucson, wiped out from the heat and stopped from going farther east by a wall of thunderstorms and rain.

We had the best hot dogs in the world at El Guero Canelo, a Tucson institution, collapsed in the Hampton Inn and managed to lift at 0630 the next morning. We stopped for breakfast in Las Cruces, New Mexico, home to about 70 U.S. Navy T-34s taking off in formation for training all day every day (they have air conditioning in their turbine-powered two-seaters). We passed through downtown El Paso and continued to Ozona, Texas, nervously watching ugly-looking rain showers get closer to I-10 and more numerous. We decided not to press our luck and put the helicopter in a hangar for the night, getting a ride from Charles McCleary, the airport manager, to a motel across from “the only bar in town.” We paid $3 per person for a temporary membership in the private club that would enable us to order alcohol, then ordered a bottle of Shiraz. Ray had never been to Texas, so I ordered him a chicken-fried steak. He was shocked by the size and audacity of the dish.

Weather the next morning was truly scary, with 300′ ceilings reported at the handful of airports along the route of flight. We decided to have ourselves a nice breakfast, but the best thing we could find were grilled ham and (American) cheese sandwiches (on white bread only) at the local drug store. What do folks do in town f0r fun? The airport manager had said “watch TV”, but the motel clerk said that crystal meth and other drugs were at least as popular. The only thing scarier than the weather was another night in Ozona, so we lifted at 1:30 pm and heated east under 900′ ceilings toward College Station, Texas (KCLL), home of Texas A&M. The visibility seemed to be poor east of Junction, Texas, so we set down to introduce Ray to barbecue at Lum’s, a restaurant famous throughout Texas, apparently. Folks in Ozona told us of a contest to see how Aggies compared to University of Texas graduates. The smartest Aggie and the dumbest U. of T. graduates were put up on stage in front of a large audience, divided by an aisle into A&M And UT graduates. The first question was to to the Aggie: “What’s 3 times 3?” The smart Aggie responded “9”, whereupon the entire Aggie side of the auditorium rose to its feet chanting “Give him another chance.”

We made it to College Station around 7 pm and got picked up by the LaSalle Hotel in Bryan. The next morning, the weather for the coast was low visibility in the morning; thunderstorms in the afternoon. We decided to proceed northeast to Jackson, Mississippi where our route would suffer from low visibility and clouds, but not nearly as much rain and no thunderstorms. The trip was challenging, with the clouds pushing us down as low as 300′ above the terrain in some places and encouraging us to study the chart very carefully looking for radio and cell phone towers (the on-board GPS has a database of these, but it is designed for airplanes, which tend to fly higher, and was constantly complaining about terrain and therefore not that useful for getting warnings about the truly hazardous towers). We were flying near some small airports and Ray wondered if we should announce our location on their “common traffic advisory frequency” (CTAF). I said “sure, but I doubt that anyone else would be stupid enough to be up here.” Ray said “What about that helicopter at 3 o’clock?” It was a Blackhawk, scud-running like us to Natchitoches, Louisiana. When we got on the ground we asked the crew “Why would you guys scud-run VFR when you have all of the equipment to go IFR (fly instruments) up at a comfortable 3000 or 5000′?” They said that the helicopter had just come out of maintenance and they were trying to do the first few flights VFR until the ship had proven itself. The weather that was terrifying to us was no big deal to these Iraq veterans.

We shut down for the night in Montgomery, Alabama at a Hampton Inn. Our dining options included Subway, Waffle House, and Burger King. The next morning we flew at 3500′ over a layer of scattered clouds and poor visibility to Moultrie, Georgia (KMGR) and then at 5500′ on our leg to St. Augustine, Florida. Ray hadn’t tried going airplane-style over the weather and was (1) surprised that it was legal to fly VFR over cloud layers, and (2) impressed by the smoothness and coolness gained. We had lunch with our helicopter dealer, Andres, walked around the historic center of St. Augustine, and lifted for a trip down the coast at 500-1000′. To make sure that we avoided the restricted area around NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, we contacted Orlando Approach for VFR advisories. We could see ugly black thunderstorms and lightning off to our right for the entire trip and we heard the controllers giving vectors and holding instructions to airliners that had gone missed at Orlando.

We arrived at Lantana (KLNA) after sunset but just before complete darkness and handed over the keys to the new owner. He was so grateful that we hadn’t crashed his helicopter, he took us for dinner at the best restaurant he could think of. This being Florida, it was a sports bar in a strip mall. We slept at the Hampton Inn and caught a JetBlue flight back to Boston the next day for $160, about what it costs to take an R44 from one side of a big airport to the other.

Total time for the trip: 5 days on the calendar and about 26 in-flight hours; average speed of approximately 95 knots (the helicopter is capable of going faster, but we slowed down when the visibility was poor).

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Some things learned on a helicopter trip from California to Florida (ferrying a new Robinson R44 IFR trainer from the factory in Torrance to its new owner in Palm Beach)….

In Los Angeles, from talking to a guy on a ramp, I learned that (1) Robinson is testing out a Garmin glass cockpit for the R44, i.e., it might be possible to get an R44 instrument trainer one day without the dreaded steam gauges, and (2) that the R66 turbine-powered Robinson is being test-flown and the performance and handling are not that different from the R44 (not a surprise).

On the ramp in College Station, Texas (KCLL), we met a Blackhawk crew. They had completed two one-year tours in Iraq and were preparing for a third. They enjoyed the flying, despite the obvious risks (7000 helicopters were lost in Vietnam; 50 in Iraq so far). The Blackhawk can take a large group of soldiers and all of their gear, plus two door gunners and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Does the rotor speed droop if you just pull in collective? “Not with the new engines,” they said, “which have minimal lag”. During each tour, you get two weeks of vacation for which the Army will fly you anywhere in the world. Otherwise you are working more or less all day every day, possibly with a day off every 45 days. “When you do get that day off and relax in your 95-degree unairconditioned tent, it feels cool,” they noted. On their first tour, they were allowed off the base, but no longer. Are the streets of small-town Iraq as hostile and dangerous as the newspaper make them sound? “Worse.”

In Florida, we met a corporate pilot for a big company that has two main locations and runs an Agusta 109 as a shuttle between them. He had formerly flown the similar Sikorsky S-76. Which was better? “The Sikorsky was much smoother.” What are his working conditions? He works 18 days per month, all weekdays. The helicopter does a one-hour flight in the morning and a one-hour flight in the evening. In between, he can relax in a comfortable office. Although the operation is almost always VFR, the company uses two pilots in case of a bird strike that renders one pilot unconscious. The pay? $115,000 per year.

So far the corporate job is sounding better than the military one…

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I attended a wedding on Saturday at West Point, home of the United States Military Academy and training ground for the U.S. Army’s officer corps. The bride and many of the guests are teachers at West Point and explained how instruction is organized. Although the government strives to minimize costs, like a private or state university, they are much more interested in the outcome because they will be employing the graduates.

Class size is typically 12-14 students. About half of each class is devoted to reviewing student homework and having students work through problems collaboratively. The West Point philosophy, sometimes referred to as “the Thayer Method”, is that sitting passively in a lecture is not going to result in too much learning; the students must be active for a substantial portion of each class and the instructor must find out what they’ve actually learned by talking to the students .

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