Adele is accused of stealing a Turkish Song! Or is it a coincidence?

I've been reading lots of tweets regarding the resemblance of the Adele's "Millions Years Ago" with Turkish Singer Ahmet Kaya's "Acilara Tutunmak" (translation: holding on the pains). When you listen one after another, they definitely sound similar. Be your own judge:

By the way, as of 12/07/2015, YouTube has started blocking the song videos because of copyright issues. That makes the accusations found valid ground on YouTube end, or they are scared to be a platform that hosts this conflict. Anyways, here is the Ahmet Kaya version (you may want to skip first 50 seconds):

Honestly, I am curious what Adele has to say about this conflict. Here is a custom video that compares tune by tune:

The Red Marble at White House is Originally from Elazig, Turkey!!!

Yes, you heard it right. In 1984, Italians imported the red marble from Elazig which is also the first year it has been started extracting this unique marble for the first time. This is how it got its popularity.Besides The White House, you can also see this unique red-vein marble at The Capitol Building again in D.C., The Holy grounds for Muslims in Mecca, Burj Al Arab (the 7-star hotel in Dubai), Victoria's Secret Stores and many other well known destinations and hotels. So, why those people are using this red marble?

Well, first of all it is unique and looks prestigious. It is so unique that you can almost claim it is fake and too good to be true. And secondly, the cost is under-priced (easily one third of its actual value) since the cost of labor is cheap in East Turkey. But this doesn't change the fact that, the only red marble source in the world is from this small, rarely-heard eastern city of Turkey, Elazig. Red marble is also called "purplebrown", "cherry-colored" or "Vişne Çürüğü Mermeri" in local language. However, it is commonly known as Elazığ Cherry, Rosso Levanto or Rosso Lepanto.

This unique marble is sleeping under the mountains of Elazig. It in fact requires a very dangerous and difficult process to reach and extract those marble blocks after carefully digging. The reason I said dangerous is because of the cheap and unsecured labor is involved in this process, and countless of people get injured every year because of stucking under this heavy blocks of stones. Sad but true!

People usually prefer using this red marble with the mix of white texture as we can see at Victoria's Secret's diagonal white & red flooring or at many other examples below since the marble itself has these white veins inside. If you are passionate enough to decorate your house with these amazing marbles, you should be able to import these marbles easily. You should also check your local flooring stores like Floor & Decor (for USA), or similar. If you are lucky, you can find this red marble there for a reasonable price. Otherwise, find a Turkish friend who can help you with the connection. Those marble manufacturers are poor in marketing, and reaching end users but I am sure shipping a block of marble shouldn't cost you more than couple thousand dollars ;) In the end, it is all about showing off how elegant your house is in compare to The White House or 7-star hotels; and who cares if it costs a small fortune!!!

Source:
http://www.fka.org.tr/ContentDownload/mermer_raporu.pdf
http://www.haberler.com/elazig-in-visne-curugu-mermeri-dunya-yapilarini-3017181-haberi/
http://wowturkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=94365

The Caracal (Karakulak)

GENERAL INFORMATION

The word “Caracal” is derived from the Turkish words “kara kulak”, which means ‘black ear’. It is a slender and long-legged cat of medium size with a relatively short tail. This wild cat is distinguished from the ordinary wild cats by the presence of a long black tuff on their ear which they are famous for.  These rare creatures typically live in arid areas on their own and usually live on a diet of small rodents, particularly fond of common vole, rabbits and squirrels, though, very rarely they eat fruit. Caracals are easily adapted to live with humans, thus, at times they give an impression of being a domestic animal. Being on the verge of becoming extinct, it is highly forbidden to hunt this endangered species in Turkey.

OBSERVING CARACALS

Since Caracals are master of camouflage as well as prone to hide themselves, catching sight of a caracal is quite difficult in the wild life. Furthermore,  they are also nocturnal animals hunting primarily at night, which makes it very difficult to see them. Nevertheless, those that live in the national park of Turkey can be seen by the mountains. The best place to see a caracal in this country is in the national park of Mount Güllük in Antalya. Given the information of the last place they have been seen in the national park, sit quietly nearby this spot somewhere so that they cannot detect your scent. If you are patient enough and fortunate, you will be rewarded with a sight of these exceptional species.

Do Turks Celebrate Thanksgiving in Turkey?

It is thanksgiving time of the year. I seriously enjoy the tradition, the food (please no cranberry sauce for me), and the friendship shared at this time of the year. As a turkish-origin, whenever I join a Thanksgiving dinner, I receive the same or similar questions like:

• Do you guys eat turkey in Turkey?
• What do you call turkey in Turkey?
• Do you have electricity in Turkey?

The last one is unrelated but it was one of the challenging (!?!) questions I received about Turkey besides "Do you guys travel with Camels?" (well, the only place I've seen a camel-like animal was at a farm in Half Moon Bay, and it was a Lama).  But it is about time, and let me share this article written by Giancarlo Casale who put a respectful effort to answer the ultimate question:

How Turkey got its name after a Country?

Talking Turkey: The Story of How the Unofficial Bird of the United States Got Named After a Country


How did the turkey get its name? This seemingly harmless question popped into my head one morning as I realized that the holidays were once again upon us. After all, I thought, there's nothing more American than a turkey. Their meat saved the pilgrims from starvation during their first winter in New England. Out of gratitude, if you can call it that, we eat them for Thanksgiving dinner, and again at Christmas, and gobble them up in sandwiches all year long.

Every fourth grader can tell you that Benjamin Franklin was particularly fond of the wild turkey, and even campaigned to make it, and not the bald eagle, the national symbol. So how did such a creature end up taking its name from a medium sized country in the Middle East?

Was it just a coincidence? I wondered. The next day I mentioned my musings to my landlord, whose wife is from Brazil. "That's funny," he said, "In Portuguese the word for turkey is 'peru.' Same bird, different country." Hmm.

With my curiosity piqued, I decided to go straight to the source. That very afternoon I found myself a Turk and asked him how to say turkey in Turkish. "Turkey?" he said. "Well, we call turkeys 'hindi ,' which means, you know, from India." India? This was getting weird.

I spent the next few days finding out the word for turkey in as many languages as I could think of, and the more I found out, the weirder things got. In Arabic, for instance, the word for turkey is "Ethiopian bird," while in Greek it is "gallapoula" or "French girl." The Persians, meanwhile, call them "buchalamun" which means, appropriately enough, "chameleon."

In Italian, on the other hand, the word for turkey is "tacchino" which, my Italian relatives assured me, means nothing but the bird. "But," they added, "it reminds us of something else. In Italy we call corn, which as everybody knows comes from America, 'grano turco,' or 'Turkish grain.'" So here we were back to Turkey again! And as if things weren't already confusing enough, a further consultation with my Turkish informant revealed that the Turks call corn "misir" which is also their word for Egypt! By this point, things were clearly getting out of hand.

But I persevered nonetheless, and just as I was about to give up hope, a pattern finally seemed to emerge from this bewildering labyrinth. In French, it turns out, the word for turkey is "dinde," meaning "from India," just like in Turkish. The words in both German and Russian had similar meanings, so I was clearly on to something. The key, I reasoned, was to find out what turkeys are called in India, so I called up my high school friend's wife, who is from an old Bengali family, and popped her the question.

"Oh," she said, "We don't have turkeys in India.They come from America. Everybody knows that."

"Yes," I insisted, "but what do you call them?" "Well, we don't have them!" she said. She wasn't being very helpful. Still, I persisted: "Look, you must have a word for them. Say you were watching an American movie translated from English and the actors were all talking about turkeys. What would they say?"

Well...I suppose in that case they would just say the American word, 'turkey.' Like I said, we don't have them." So there I was, at a dead end. I began to realize only too late that I had unwittingly stumbled upon a problem whose solution lay far beyond the capacity of my own limited resources.
Obviously I needed serious professional assistance. So the next morning I scheduled an appointment with Prof. Sinasi Tekin of Harvard University, a world-renowned philologist and expert on Turkic languages. If anyone could help me, I figured it would be professor Tekin.

As I walked into his office on the following Tuesday, I knew I would not be disappointed. Prof. Tekin had a wizened, grandfatherly face, a white, bushy, knowledgeable beard, and was surrounded by stack upon stack of just the sort of hefty, authoritative books which were sure to contain a solution to my vexing Turkish mystery.

I introduced myself, sat down, and eagerly awaited a dose of Prof. Tekin's erudition.

"You see," he said, "In the Turkish countryside there is a kind of bird, which is called a Çulluk. It looks like a turkey but it is much smaller, and its meat is very delicious. Long before the discovery of America, English merchants had already discovered the delicious Çulluk, and began exporting it back to England, where it became very popular, and was known as a 'Turkey bird' or simply a 'turkey.' Then, when the English came to America, they mistook the birds here for Çulluks, and so they began calling them 'turkey" also. But other peoples weren't so easily fooled. They knew that these new birds came from America, and so they called them things like 'India birds,' 'Peruvian birds,' or 'Ethiopian birds.' You see, 'India,' 'Peru' and 'Ethiopia' were all common names for the New World in the early centuries, both because people had a hazier understanding of geography, and because it took a while for the name 'America' to catch on.

woodcock vs turkey

"Anyway, since that time Americans have begun exporting their birds everywhere, and even in Turkey people have started eating them, and have forgotten all about their delicious çulluk. This is a shame, because çulluk meat is really much, much tastier."

Prof. Tekin seemed genuinely sad as he explained all this to me. I did my best to comfort him, and tried to express my regret at hearing of the unfairly cruel fate of the delicious çulluk.
Deep down, however, I was ecstatic. I finally had a solution to this holiday problem, and knew I would be able once again to enjoy the main course of my traditional Thanksgiving dinner without reservation.

Editor's note:
Çulluk: woodcock
Reference Link