Tying it all together...

I live in a hotel in Ankara (the Sheraton, to be precise), and I am here for the summer teaching the heir to the NurOl Holding fortune. Ankara is a boring city: I don't have any friends here, the night life sucks, and well, Sheraton people are not really Sean people.

It was once said to me, and having not headed the advice, I repeat it again here:
"I've been to Ankara, so you don't have to."

To pass the time, I've started watching action movies broadcast on an Arabic-language channel. The movies are nearly always in English, with Arabic subtitles, so this isn't a challenge or a way to get smarter... it's just action movies.

The Al-Arabia News Agency aired the most amazing commercial last night, between a movie with Jackie Chan (something to do with water that dehydrates a person to death) and a spy flick that turns into a bank-robbery.

Honestly, I paid more attention to the commercial:

Two Arab men, garbed in white thobes, walk into a very ritzy restaurant. The place looks like it's on top of the Sheraton Hotel. They sit and the waiter comes over. One of them orders a grilled chicken from the menu, which sets off a British narrator and a series of video and still images (each item on the list was given a few seconds on-screen)...

'Chicks are fed on a diet of soya, which is imported on ships like these, which emit 30,000 tons of CO2, causing glacial ice to melt, and driving these Islanders from their homes into refugee camps, where some of them get an education in terrorism. Some of those terrorists go on to show how well-rounded an education they received (there is a scene of a suicide bomber, blowing himself up in a busy, city street, which looks distinctly like New York), which causes these men to go to war (image of American troops), raising uncertainties about the global oil supply, so that these ships can't travel, leaving these chicks without soya.'

Cutting back to the restaurant, and the two men are staring at the waiter with open menus.

'I'm sorry sir, but there's no chicken today.'

It's a commercial about being informed, up-to-date on the news, etc. In a very Marxist way, though, it answers a question that long ago led me to really admire 'true organic' farmers.

The question:

"Why the hell can't I just grow chicken feed on a field next to the coop?"