title, what title?

Meine ABF beklagt sich über meine sich verschlimmernde Deutsch. Um meine Deutschkenntnisse fit zu halten, versuche ich mehr Musik auf Deutsch zu hören. Und jedes mal merke ich wieder, wie weltklassig Die Toten Hosen eigentlich ist. Es ist sehr schade, dass sie auf der internationalen Bühne nicht den Ruf genießen, den sie eigentlich verdienen. Hier ist ein sehr witziges Lied, das die Geschichte eines normalen Abends bei einer Hausparty erzählt, wie eine Live Fußball Übertragung.

No other poem describes the dismal state that the world is in right now: "TURNING and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity." from the legendary poem Second Coming by William Butler Yeats.

That the world is screwed should not be news for you. People are dying of hunger in Somalia, riots break out in London, political fringe groups in the USA set the agenda for the whole wide world  and the we-know-it-all politicans in Europe are driving the contient to bankrupcy. People are looking for safeheavens. If there is a safeheaven, speaking financially, it must be Apple Inc. You've probably read already, that it has more cash than the American government. Yet, even with Apple there is something that is not right... When I was coding for a research project back in the old days of my PHD, we were working with a modified Mobile IP stack. Not only the code itself was in development phase, but also we were modifying the code here and there to match our needs. For sometime we observed a weird phenomenon. Everything worked fine as long as there was some traffic between the clients and the server. As soon as the traffic died out, we had to restart everything from scracth. As i...

Guess I'll have to break the news That I got no mind to lose. Gonna get my Ph.D. I'm a Teenage Lobotomy! R.I.P. Dee Dee, Johhny, Joey Ramone...

I am aware of the danger, that my blog will look like a Dylan fundamentalist website, to someone who's only read the last 2 months posts. Maybe I am a Dylan fundamentalist, but as anyone who's listened to Dylan, or read good poetry, his songs act more as a medium in which one can find not the answers, but other questions that put the original question in a broader perspective. I had written about a peculiar Dylan song, which did not make it to any "studio" albums, called "The Series of Dreams" earlier [ link to the earlier post ]. To this day I am not sure, what kind of dreams Dylan is referring to. The key question is, how does one know that one is not dreaming? I am not trying to go down the Matrix path. How do we know that our perception is different when we are dreaming? Maybe, a series of dreams are not just series of dreams, but a metaphor for life itself? Or even one step further, life IS a series of dreams? Or what do our dreams say of our experi...

Alman Punk grubu Die Toten Hosen'ın futbol sevgisi has bir futbol sevgisidir. Taraftarı oldukları Fortuna Düsseldorf'un kötü günlerinde takıma kendi ceplerinden yabancı oyuncu almışlıkları vardır.Yaptıkları en güzel şarkılardan biri Almanya'nın en sevilmeyen klübü Bayern Münich'e saydırdıkları Bayerndir BNK. Kapısını çalan Uli Hoeness'e kapıyı açmayan 20 yaşında süper yetenekli bir futbolcunun hikayesini anlatan bu şarkı esasen futbolun ya da taraftarlığın hayattaki yerini felsefi olarak irdeler: Bu dünyada tutanacak, Bir şey yoktur çok fazla, Bazıları aşk derler, belki biraz haklı olarak, En sonunda Tanrı vardır, yoksa hiçbirşeye inanacak. Beşiktaş'ı ben tam da buraya konumlandırıyordum, tıpkı Fenerli, Galatasaraylı, Trabzonlu arkadaşlarım gibi: Tutunalacak çok şeyin olmadığı dünyada benden öte nedensiz sevebildiğim bir olgu olarak. Senelerdir görmezden gelmeye çalıştığım bir gelişme ise dün gelen haber ile önüme kondu. Benim gibi milyonlarca insanın b...

Let's see if the book will captivate me as much as Marilyn Monroe.

günün anlam ve önemi üzerine: http://actoker.blogspot.com/2010/03/kitlelerin-anfetamini-dogu-romada.html

Bill Clinton'un Baba Bush'u devirdiği seçim öncesi dünyanın değiştiği günler yaşanıyordu. Sovyetler Birliği yıkılmış, Irak-İran savaşı bitmiş Amerika şu günlerde yavaş yavaş el çekmek zorunda kaldığı dünya polisçiliği oyununa iyice dalmıştı. Bill Clinton'un stratejistlerinden James Carville Arkansas Little Rock'daki seçim merkezinin beyaz tahtasına artık klişeleşmiş şu sözleri yazdı: "It's the economy stupid!" Dış sorunlarla halkı oyalayan baba Bush'a karşı altın ok'un resesyona giren ekonomi oluğunu, bunu görmemenin aptallık olacağını söylemek istiyordu. Aynı dönemde Positivist Amerikan siyaset biliminin bazı önde gelenleri iktidar partilerinin seçim performansları ile seçimden hemen önceki ekonomik başarı algısı arasında bir korelasyon kuruyorlardı. Seçmenin ekonomik başarı algısını değiştirmek iktidar partisinin yapabilecekleri arasında olduğu için muhalefet partilerinin işini zorlaştıran bir durum bu. Bu açıdan CHP'nin aldığı sonuç köt...

A bright side of being a Dylan fan is his tremendous artistic output means you can always make new discoveries. Here is a song that appeared in the soundtrack of Wonder Boys, which was awarded an Oscar in 2000. Not that he cared...

Let us celebrate our modern p(r)o(ph)ets 70th birthday with the songs of two of his admirers, David Bowie and Syd Barrett. Though Syd Barret might have pulled a Dylan on Dylan. You gave your heart to every bedsit room At least a picture on my wall And you sat behind a million pair of eyes And told them how they saw Then we lost your train of thought The paintings are all your own While troubles are rising We'd rather be scared Together than alone I'm a poet, Don't you know it? And the wind you can blow it. Cause I am Mr. Dylan, the King, And I am free as a bird on the wing.

After waiting 4 Months for my defense, and another 2 months for the University to issue my Urkunde, I may declare with joy: Habemus Philosophiae Doctor! Those interested, may read the abstract on: http://opus.kobv.de/tuberlin/volltexte/2011/3000/pdf/toker_ahmet.pdf

When a great musician saw the potential of vinyl long plays in distributing music cheaply and efficiently, he remarked something in the line of "I can't imagine all the crap that will be produced and sold under the name of music." Unfortunately, I cannot recall who made this remark. But history proved he was right. However, the technological improvements that started with LPs had an effect not only on the quality of the music. Even timeless compositions such as Mahler's Sixth or Stravinsky's Agon had to suffer. Trying to get rid of the musical Whiggist in me, I sometimes imagine myself listening to the compositions as someone who lived around the time they were first composed. This Gedankenexperiment showed me that LPs and mp3s stole from us something that I call the "wow efect."  Imagine your favorite composition, or the song. Imagine you heard it for the first time, when a orchestra or the band came to your town, and you were struck by the composition ...

Our search for locating the ultimate Turkish street food , söğüş (read soe -gh -ues) in Istanbul started online after reading this post on Istanbuleats . The address given there is Kalyoncu Kulluk caddesi. Don't start typing it in your GPS software now. Cause the municipalities in Istanbul change names of the streets faster than any software. The name of the street on which Muammer Usta's sogus stand  is located has a new name now. Don't ask me what the new name is, since it's relatively hard to find your way by looking at street names around Taksim. Best way to find it is to look for the entrance of the Balık Pazarı (Fishermans Market) on Istiklal caddesi. Then walk to the end of the end of the street, asking where Asmaaltı cafe is in case you -like us- are not able to follow a straight line. Left of the cafe, there is a very modest stand, which ,according to its owner Muammer Usta, is the mother of all sogus stands. Sogus is served on paper towels. Don't ...

This one goes out to all the Japanese people who've lost loved ones to the black daemon of the ocean, who are now shivering in the cold under radioactive clouds. And those around us who will take some lessons.. "Shizukana yo ini, Hikario tomoshi, Itoshiki oshieo idaki... In the quiet of the night Let our candles always burn, Let us never lose the lessons we have learned."

Democracy is the mother of all buzzwords. From totalitarian regimes calling themselves the real democrats (German Democratic Republic, Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea) to the so called advanced democracies such as US, where the wealthy are simply rewriting rules for themselves (1), or Germany, where the state recklessly lets the police attack peaceful protesters who are protesting the construction in their own city(2), the word democracy is used to whitewash practices that are directly contrary to what the democracy supposed to mean. Add to this the dangerous Western (mostly American) international relations rhetoric, that democracy is a panacea that would magically cure all the worlds problems. Although it is not logical, and perhaps not ethical, to choose any other form of government over democracy, it is certainly not realistic to believe democracy is a solution to any problem. In my humble opinion, it is only a tool, or a mere set of practices, that lets people solve probl...

Adına yaraşır bir hareket yapmış Deli İbrahim. 40 Yaşına değin oynar derken, bir maç sonrası ikinci kez İbrahim Toraman ile didiştiği, kavgaya giriştiği için erken veda etti sol kanatta terlettiği o güzelim formaya. Yolu açık olsun, ve şu naçizane dizeler kendini bana sonradan sevdiren bu büyük Beşiktaş'lıya gelsin: Padisah Deli Ibrahim Dün gece siir gibiydin Ibrahim, Birak biz seni yine de DELI bilelim.   Barcelona, Cimbom ve Fener, Bu uc mac bize yetsin. Cünkü ben seni basini kaldirmadan, Sol kanatta kosarken sevdim. actoker - 23 Kasım 2009

Milton Babbit would have been a perfect hate figure for the Tee Party supporters in USA, had he published his famous essay "Who cares if you listen?" today. He was arguing that the lack of laymen listeners appreciation of advanced music which was -quoting Babbitt- "made by/for/to specialists," something inevitable, even welcome. He refuted the populistic call for truce between popular and specialist music "There is no such thing as 'serious' and 'popular' music." There is only 'good' and 'bad' music." with this: As a public service, let me offer those who still patiently await the revelation of the criteria of Absolute Good an alternative criterion which possesses, at least, the virtue of immediate and irrefutable applicability: "There is no such thing as 'serious' and 'popular' music. There is only music whose title begins with the letter 'X,' and music whose title does not." He wa...

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