Entries from June 2007 ↓

Pinar and I spent five hours at the Foreigners Department in the Big Police Station getting my Turkish residency permit today.  This gave us plenty of time to survey the carefully designed facilities.
Below are some best practices based on our observations that other bureaucrats should incorporate to ensure their visitors enjoy the experience as much [...]

I’m always curious what brings people to Jim Gibbon.com, so the other day I looked over the complete list of search terms that eventually led someone from Google to this blog.  Below are 10 of the more interesting search strings I found.

how should i finish sex
spiritual significance of pitbulls
learn how to circumcise
is it okay to [...]

I’ve been listening to David Allen’s Getting Things Done seminar on my iPod, and it got me wondering how many of you have bought into the GTD system or at least tried it out. It’s been three years since I first read the book and, like many others, I have an on-again, off-again relationship [...]

I’ll let Slate.com set up this great piece in the New York Times about fatwas in Egypt:
The NYT goes up top with a news feature on the role of the fatwa in Egyptian daily life. Thousands of fatwas—edicts that provide guidelines for daily life in Muslim communities—are issued every month by Quran scholars, some of [...]

I’ve been spending a lot of time at the Center for Islamic Studies (ISAM) library, which is a great place to work and get to know other scholars working on Turkey, but I’ve also been spending a lot of time just getting there and back.  I’m currently staying with my in-laws on the European side [...]

Just days after I said I wanted to create photo flash cards, I ran across Ethan Schoonover’s thorough review of a program called Mental Case that looks like the end-all, deluxe flash card program for the Mac.  You can make standard flash cards for remembering vocabulary and important dates and names, but you can also [...]

Berkeley sociology professor Cihan Tugal has written a great article in the New Left Review on Turkey’s ruling party, the Justice and Development Party, that does an excellent job of explaining its wide appeal (at least initially), its pro-American policies, and the growing opposition it has recently faced. 
The article actually does much more, getting [...]