My Life and Thoughts

Dear readers! I’m taking a few moments from my busy schedule as a relatively obscure supervillain to respond to your kind and interesting comments to the post from 12/10.  To Evan of Duck Beater: I, too, find beards to be a more useful conceptual category than bells. In fact my original pitch to the New Yorker was for a piece about "Giant Russian Beards."  The many fine Web resources on this subject include: "The Russian Beard! What a History!!!"; the detailed note on beards in Pavel Florensky’s Essay in Orthodox Theodicy; and, for Russian readers, the beard sites Borodka.ru and Borodatyh.net.  As for the image of Gen.-Lt. A. I. Kosich (below), it’s from the Russian Wikipedia entry for beard.

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Remember my 6-month-old, still-not-published piece on large Russian bells? So it’s actually about the once-recent (now several months old) restitution of some historic and very large Russian church bells, for many years in the possession of a famous American university, back to the seat of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate—conditional upon the aforementioned university’s receipt of an equivalent set of bells, and by equivalent I mean not only did they have to be fully as large as the originals, but also they had to be personally blessed by Patriarch Alexiy II, the colorful personality who drew international media attention last year for his characterization of homosexuality as a "distortion of the human personality like kleptomania."

A few days ago I got an email from my editor, notifying me of the recent death of Alexiy II, with the following comment:"Good news for gays, maybe; hard to gauge its significance for bells other than the insertion of the word ‘late’ before his first appearance in your piece." Well, I’ve been thinking about this statement and, while I concur that the death of one Russian patriarch doesn’t have any immediately calculable significance in terms of the content of anything I wrote about large Russian bells, I still do hope that they publish the piece before too many more of the involved parties have time to die—because if there’s one thing that’s really distracting in a sexy, super-topical piece about large church bells, it’s having to slog through a bunch of five-syllable Russian names with "late" before them.

I leave you, dear readers, with these amazing photographs of the late Alexei "enjoying close relations with the Kremlin," which look like they might have been taken by AFP / AP photographers who were working overtime as private detectives in the service of Mrs. Putin.

Last week I got an email from my father, who was working on a letter to the editors of the New York Times about their editorial, “Democracy’s Close Call in Turkey.”  He had written a 250-word draft, but letters are supposed to be only 150 words… and who did he ask to help him reduce the word count?  Me, his graphomaniac daughter!  This was a wonderful change for me, since usually I am the one sending enormous files to my long-suffering editors. 

First I read the editorial, which was about the Turkish Constitutional Court’s ruling last week not to ban the Islamist AKP party—an event reported in a sane and balanced fashion by the LA Times.  The New York Times, on the other hand, described the court case as “the culmination of an epic battle” between a “powerful coterie of judges and generals” and the “broadly popular” Erdoğan, who apparently isn’t actually an Islamist, because his “supporters say that his past as a political Islamist is firmly behind him.”  That was the news coverage.  In the editorial, they got to express their genius even more freely:

The court ruling is a victory for Turkey, for democracy and for the politics of moderation in the volatile Near and Middle East. That makes it a victory for the United States as well.

Had it gone the other way, Turkey’s chances of joining the European Union would have been demolished and the clearly expressed will of Turkish voters outrageously thwarted.

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Having recently learned that two independent Google searchers arrived at my blog via the search phrase “elif enima,” I decided to try this search myself… and discovered that My Life and Thoughts is the very first hit!  w00t!  In the spirit of good sportsmanship, though, I would like to cite some of the runners-up in the competitive “elif enima” informational sector:

Unal, E
Unal E (Elif) …. Management of enema tip-induced rectourethral fistula with gluteus maximus flap: report of a case. [My paper] O Krand, E Unal.

Islam Will Replace Collapsing American Empire – alt.religion.islam …
Jul 23, 2008 …. Up your ass mohammad – Elif air ab tizak! …. As the old Arab proverb goes, “My enema’s enema is my friend”….

Atlas Shrugs: Turkey’s Re-Islamization
When its hands, feet and chest are pressed Elif recites various sura from the Koran in … Accessories to Elif doll, such as a toy laptop, teach toddler to …

Well, I wish Elif Unal the best of luck with what sounds like a fascinating program of research.  And I am grateful to learn the old Arab proverb, “My enema’s enema is my friend.”  It must be a very severe rectourethral fistula indeed, if even your enema needs its own enema.  But I was most interested by the item about the Elif doll (cf. Barbie is out, Elif is in) on Atlas Shrugs, a blog about Islam in Turkey.  (Where, you might be wondering, do enemas enter (so to speak) into this subject?  Check out the 110 posts tagged Kofi Annan a.k.a. Coffee Enema, e.g.: “The UN and more specifically Kofi Enema is a Jihadi tool.”)

Patient readers! In explanation for the long silence, let me tell you that I have been researching and writing a really time-consuming article, the precise subject of which should remain a wonderful surprise to those of you to whom I am not always personally unburdening myself about it, but, it involves the Russian Orthodox church. This is how I found my way to the Interfax Religion site: a resource which I cannot recommend warmly enough to my dear readers.  It is, unlike my blog, updated many times a day, with important stories such as, “Three Bronze Angels to Carry the First Monument to Enema in Zheleznovodsk“:

Stavropol, June 16, Interfax – The monument to one of the most wide-spread medical treatments will open in health resort town of Zheleznovodsk.

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