SLICK CHICK

SLICK CHICK: The Wild Story Of The USAF's First Top Secret Supersonic Spy Plane
Not A Pound For Air To Ground

Other posts about Kapustin Yar:

• English Electric Canberra
• Russian Missile Launch

Post about aerial photography: Lucky 666

Slick Chick

Graveyard: - Netflix Series

Graveyard: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Woman cop gets promoted to head up a special unit dedicated to investigating murders of women. Seems to be a small but on-going problem in Turkey. Half a million people die in Turkey every year. Honor killings of women may reach 500 in a year, so one of every one thousand deaths is an honor killing.

Turkish society is split between the way of Western Civilization and the old way as practiced by the Mohammedans. Anyway, it means our girl has a tough row to hoe but so far (we've watched one episode) she's doing okay.

This whole investigating-honor-killings is an unpopular experiment. As such, it's very existence is fraught with risk. Our girl gets her promotion, but for office space her group gets a corner of the archives in the basement, a space otherwise known as 'the graveyard'. It's where all the dead cases come to rest. Her crew consists of:

• the archivist, a guy who has been there forever and is due to retire in a couple of years,
• a macho cop who assaulted a couple of other cops,
• a forensic specialist who insists of giving a long explanation of the historical significance of each bit of technology he uses, and
• a tall, thin, tattooed, tough chick who has mastered computer hacking.

The hacker is not actual police, she and our lead girl already know each other. Macho cop gets a scene in every episode where is berating a suspect during interrogation. I can see someone getting this worked up occassionally, but this guy delivers his deranged copper persona on demand.

There first suspect, Ahmet, is the victim's brother. They locate him fighting in a cage match. He was convicted of killing his sister. Turns out it was actually the father, and his son just took the fall for it.

Next suspect is big, macho blow-hard. Our girl arrests him on live TV while he is being interviewed. Turns out that while he is a scumbag, he didn't kill the girl.

Last, and guilty, suspect is the husband of woman who our murder victim befriended. They have no evidence against him so they have to let him go. They give him a ride to his house, but standing in front of his house is Ahmet. The cops have told the suspect who this guy is, so he is very reluctant to get out of the car, Eventually he does. But Ahmet does not know who this guy is or even that he is a suspect. Never-the-less, the killer freaks out, gets back in the car and tells our girl he wants to change his statement.

In episode two we have a fancy new phone that uses a biometric fingerprint scanner, so not only do you need someone's fingerprint, it needs to be from a live finger. In this case, the phone belonged to our murder victim. In order to unlock it, the cornner applied shock paddles to the corpse and gave it a jolt. Evidently this animated the finger long enough that they were able to unlock the phone. There is a curious bit of technology in every episode.

Season 1 has (4) two-hour episodes.

Season 2 has 8 episodes, which is basically the same as Season 1, they've just cut the two-hour episodes into two parts that are one-hour long each.

F-4 Phantom

Turkish Air Force Phantom

No camouflage here, he wants you to know he's coming for you.

Mechanical Meditation

California Bob found this quite fun:
Car Dismantler Powerhand VRS (Vehicle Recycling System)
Powerhand

Powerhand is based in Scotland.

Uniberp replies with a link to a TikTok video:

This guy gets metal the old fashioned way, he chops up electronics with an ax.

Sometimes he does a live stream, which I have found mesmerizing for a few minutes until I start to feel vicarious exhaustion and hopelessness.

I enjoyed watching these guys digging a road in Turkey:

Caterpillar D7g Bulldozer And Excavator Removes Giant Block Rock~Dev Kaya Çıkartma Operasyonu
GREYDER MEHMET
These guys are pulling a bulldozer out of the mud.
Amazing Expertly Technique Skills SHANTUI BULLDOZER Falling Into The Water Help Heavy Crean Success
Construction Cambodia
I am amazed by how thin those cables are. They don't look to be more than 3/4 of an inch thick and they are lifting that multi-ton bulldozer. It is Cambodia, so maybe they are working a little closer to the edge. Shoot, we probably have guys here doing the same kind of sketchy looking things. A 30 ton load will break a 3/4" steel cable. This bulldozer, a Shantui DH17, weighs about 9 tons, so they should be okay. A 3 to 1 ration is not the normal safety factor of 10 to 1, but at least they are not on the hairy edge.

Ani

The most controversial place I've ever been
Tom Thornton

Ani, on the border between Turkey and Armenia.

Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, Turkey

Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, Turkey

Russia has 22 nuclear power plants under construction around the world. This is just one of them. How many nuclear power plants are we building?

Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, Turkey

It is not near any major population centers, which is good from a safety stand point, but it means they are going to building some very long high tension lines to deliver the power this plant will produce.

Who Were We Running From? | Official Trailer | Netflix

Mother and teenage daughter live in expensive hotel rooms. They stay for a while and then something happens and they pack a bag and run off to the next hotel. The 'something' tends to be the mother being offended by one of the staff, so she offs them with her handy little knife. Mom has obviously gone round the bend, but mother and daughter are, so far, totally devoted to each other. Daughter seems to unaware of her mother's murders. So far they have managed to stay one step ahead of the police, but this can't last, can it? It's a very strange show.

10 Days of a Good Man - Official Trailer

Wait a minute, didn't we just watch this movie? Same title, same lead actor, but hey, it's not the same movie. Oh, the title of the other one was 10 Days of a Bad Man, we just watched it two weeks ago. I think this one comes first and Bad Man comes second.

An old friend's cleaning lady's son has disappeared, and the friend asks our man to look for him. He looks, but what he finds is human trafficking, forced prostitution and slave labor, not at all the little angel his mother claims. Turns out his mother isn't the only one looking for him. Evidently he's screwed over some other people, including The Boss (see the other movie), so if he can find this guy, several people will reward him handsomely.

There are also the twins. Albino offspring of some rich dude who are into exploring the limits of pain, pleasure and horror.  Freaks of the first water.

A side note: our man has an old Philip Marlowe detective movie (The Long Goodbye) playing on his TV at home, actually it's paused. The catch phrase is "nothing says goodbye like a bullet". Marlowe is played by Elliot Gould, who we just saw as the voice of experience in season 2 of the Lincoln Lawyer.

Update February 2026 replaced missing video.

10 Days of a Bad Man | Official Trailer | Netflix

Middle aged man's much younger wife dies in childbirth. He takes her body back to her village and buries her next to her mother. Her father objects which leads to violence. The father and the girl's rapist suffer and our guy walks away. He's driving home and he becomes distracted by his wife's appearance in the passenger seat of his car. Is it because he is distraught or because he's high on drugs? We don't know. In any case he forgets what he is doing and the car flips over and our man is injured.

The movie opens with the car wreck, so we don't know what happened before that, but we do find out eventually. Now our guy is dreaming about his wife, dreams that are facilitated by the pain pills he is taking because of the injuries he received in the car wreck.

A couple of guys drive up from Istanbul, pick him up from the hospital and take him back to town for a meeting with the Boss. The Boss is not too happy about having his car wrecked or the hospital bills our guy has run up, but offers to let him work it off. He can start by finding a guy. So now he has a mission, money to work with, a nice house to stay in, a couple of thugs and a lovely young woman to help him.

Our guy is kind of a Hercule Poirot or a Sherlock Holmes. He's a quiet thinker who lets his minions do the leg work while he schmoozes with a variety of curious folks. He's not a James Bond type of guy.

Near the end there is a big shootout between two groups of thugs and our guy goes upstairs to confront The Boss. He's been popping pills left right and center for the last few hours and when he walks into The Boss's office, the patterns in the Persian carpet on the floor start moving, it's quite the scene.

A little later they show us a view of two people sitting in the front of his car when he flips it. The two are kissing, her hair, the draw strings for his hood, and anything loose in the car can be seen flying around while the car is rolling over. Through it all they don't break their kiss. Of course, she's not really there and this is all just in his mind. Kudos to the special effects folks for arranging that shot.

The Club Part 2 - Netflix Series

The Club Part 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

We watched part 1 a little over a year ago, so we're familiar with all the characters and all the intrigue. This season we have the addition of a dastardly villain who is aiming to force out the Greek businessmen and buy up all their property cheap. He also has a hand in instigating the Istanbul Riots:

The Istanbul riots were a series of state-sponsored anti-Greek mob attacks directed primarily at Istanbul's Greek minority on 6–7 September 1955. The pogrom was orchestrated by the governing Democrat Party in Turkey with the cooperation of various security organizations. The events were triggered by news that the Greeks had bombed the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Greece, - the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born in 1881. The bomb was planted by a Turkish usher at the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed. The Turkish press was silent about the arrest, instead, it insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb. 

Mustafa appeared in another show - Midnight at Pera Palace.

Pera Palace

Midnight at Pera Palace ❖ Netflix ❖ Hazal Kaya ❖ ENGLISH 2022
North America TEN - Closed Captions
We started watching this mini-series the other night. I'm not too sure about the show, it's got all the right elements, but it's a little goofy. It hasn't gone completely stupid yet, so it might be okay. We shall see.

But! The setting is beyond cool. The Pera Palace is a real hotel in Istanbul, it's been there over a hundred years and needless to say there's a little history there. Agatha Christie wrote Murder On The Orient Express while she was there. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, soldier, revolutionary and founder of the modern Turkish state shows up in the dining room.

From Wikipedia:

Pera Palace Electric Elevator

Establishment work began in 1892 and the grand opening ball was held in 1895.

. . . 

The hotel was the first building in the Ottoman Empire to be powered by electricity, other than the imperial palaces. It was also the only address in the city to provide hot running water for its guests and was home to the first electric elevator in Constantinople. It was also the second electric elevator in Europe.

 

Not Hagia Sophia

New Mosque
180 piece jigsaw puzzle

Just 200 miles south of Constanța Casino. None of the news about Europe's natural gas supplies makes any sense, so I'm avoiding the news. I can't figure out what they hope to accomplish other than to get their name in paper and if that's it, well count me out. Last thing I need is more noise from another blathering jackass. So today we have a picture of a mosque built in the 17th Century.

The Club - Turkish Drama

The Club | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
This is a story about some of the people who work in a nightclub in Istanbul in the mid 1950s. In particular it is about Matilda, a jewish woman, and her daughter. It is also about a young jewish man who has abandoned the respectable career path chosen by his parents to become a nightclub singer.

It's pretty great. There is all the backstage intrigue in the nightclub, plus we have numerous conflicts between parent and child. I think just about all the major characters are on one side of one of these conflicts or the other. All this is done over a background of conflict between jews and muslims.

In 1942 Turkey imposed a ruinous tax on non-muslims. Matilda's father paid the tax, but that was not enough so he was sent to a labor camp along with her brother. Her mother had died some years before so Matilda was now essentially an orphan. Now she shoots someone dead and gets sent to prison. The story starts with her being released from prison in a general amnesty.

The singer has a dream of producing the most fabulous nightclub show in the world and he sells his idea to the nightclub owner, who has his own problems with his parents. Matilda eventually becomes his 'dresser' as she comes from a solid middle class background and understands western behavior and clothes.

The street scenes in front of the nightclub look like something from New York or L.A., almost too perfect to be believed. I think the main point is that it doesn't look like most of the rest of town where everything else happens.

Turk

Turkish Air Force F-16

I like the English identification on one side and the Turkish on the other. In case you are wondering, the figure on the left wing is a falcon's head.

Hagia Sophia

Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey
221 piece jigsaw puzzle

This puzzle was considerable harder than others I have played recently. I think the number of pieces was too high for my small screen. Usually, I can kind of see where pieces go, but that didn't happen here. Once I got about halfway through I was reduced to just trying pieces in random places to see if they would click, and it was often places that did not look like they belonged.

The pieces in this puzzle are also randomly rotated. It does make it more difficult, but not as much as you might think. Color matching plays a bigger role.

Some of the pictures used in these jigsaw puzzles are impressive, and this one certainly is. I don't think I've ever seen it from this angle, and I've spent some time looking at Istanbul.

Treasury Gate, Dolmabahce Palace, Istanbul

Treasury Gate, Dolmabahce Palace, Istanbul

The palace, located on the European coast of the Bosporus strait, served as the main administrative center of the Ottoman Empire from 1856 to 1887 and from 1909 to 1922.

The construction cost 35 tonnes of gold . . . This sum corresponded to approximately a quarter of the yearly tax revenue. Actually, the construction was financed through debasement, by massive issue of paper money, as well as by foreign loans. The huge expenses placed an enormous burden on the state purse and contributed to the deteriorating financial situation of the Ottoman Empire, which eventually defaulted on its public debt in October 1875, with the subsequent establishment in 1881 of financial control over the "sick man of Europe" by the European powers. - extract from Wikipedia

"massive issue of paper money'. Where have we heard that before? Oh, right the 2 or 3 trillion dollar stimulus package Congress approved. I really wonder how long it will take us before we start looking like Venezuela. I would like to think that we'll stop before we elected a ruthless dictator, but maybe not. I suppose it depends on how many voters are impoverished. 

753

U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Hamilton WMSL-753 transits Istanbul strait towards Black Sea- April 27, 2021
Cavit Ege Tulça
I thought the U.S. Coast Guard was supposed to protect the U.S. coast. Looks like I am wrong again.

The Legend-class national security cutter USCGC Hamilton (WMSL 753) pulls into Batumi, Sakartvelo (the official name of Georgia)

Supposedly, we are sending warships to the Black Sea to counter Russia's massive military buildup along the border with the Ukraine. I wasn't surprised by Russia doing that, I mean Ukraine declared war on them. It was kind of weird though, the declaration wasn't accompanied by any fanfare, it was done kind of quietly. Then Russia pulls back their forces claiming it was just part of a regularly scheduled military exercise.

Black Sea. Batumi at lower right, Istanbul at lower left and
Sevastopol (Russia's big naval base)  near the center.

One theory I heard is that the Biden's are pushing on Russia so they will keep using Ukraine's pipelines to ship natural gas to Europe because Ukraine gets paid for the use of their pipelines. I can't imagine they get paid very much, but maybe because it goes on 24 hours a day for years on end, it ends up being a pretty penny, and since the pipeline is already built, it's all gravy.

Hard to imagine that they are willing to go to war with Russia over this. I suspect the U.S. is just claiming Russia is the bad guy and is using this imaginary conflict to gain some political power points on the home court.

I haven't seen any evidence of Russia getting ready to attack Europe, but I've been wrong before and I am liable to be wrong again.

USCG Cutter Hamilton 753 carries a two inch gun on the bow and a CIWS (Close In Weapons System) on the aft portion of the superstructure.

Video via The Drive. Photo via Defense Blog.

Fatma

Fatma | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
A great little Turkish series about a mousy little woman who gets pushed over the edge by life. Her autistic son is hit by a car and dies. Her husband abandons her. He gets our of jail but instead of coming home he disappears. Later she finds out that everyone knew where her husband was but nobody would tell her. Seems he collected the blood money for their son and ran off. Her landlord is harassing her with weird phone calls. She reacts like everyone wants to, but most of us don't. Her rampage goes undetected for a long time because she is so withdrawn she is almost invisible. Nobody expects the cleaning lady to be a violent homicidal maniac.

Turkish Rifles

Girsan Regard 9mm Pistol

Tam reviews this gun on RECOIL: 

Girsan Regard: A Turkish Riff on a Beretta 92 That Looks Like it Came Straight off the Set of Narcos by Tamara Keel

Ah yes, Latin American drug kingpins seem to have a fondness for blinged up weapons and apparently so do I.

Anyway, I'm reading her review and I come across this little bit:

Neither is bringing in outside designs a new thing for the Turkish firearms industry, either. That fine tradition goes back before even the 19th century, when the Ottomans were such a large customer of Mauser Werke that the Germans built an onion-domed residence in Oberndorf to help the Turkish delegation feel at home.

A little Google turns up this photo:

Mavi Boncuk [blue bead]

From an account of the Armenian Genocide:

The “Türkenbau” in Oberndorf:

Erected as a residence for the acceptance commissions of the Ottoman Empire in 1888.

The building was demolished in 1961 because it had been hit by a bomb in the Second World War. 

The “Türkenbau”, a house in an oriental style with a dome topped by a Turkish crescent moon, was erected specially for the head of the commission. Wilhelm Mauser and his development engineer Fidel Feederle were awarded the very highest orders from the hand of the Sultan. Mauser reciprocated with "twenty luxury rifles with magnificent engraving and gold and silver inlays, splendidly packaged in walnut cases lined with red velvet".

During 1890's German gun makers were doing big business with Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

 Obendorf is kind of an interesting town: they make guns.

Note Heckler & Koch has a big enough presence to rate their own placemark. If you look closely (you may have to zoom in) you will notice that some of the buildings are blurred out. Germany mostly doesn't allow Google Streetview.

Harun

Kocatepe Mosque

We've been watching Behzat Ç., a Turkish detective series on Netflix. Every episode they have a murder, sometimes several, to solve, and some social issue is often illustrated, all fairly typical for TV series about homicide detectives. This show has a different feel than Law & Order. Basically we have a crew of four guys running around Ankara collaring killers. They have a support crew of three back in the office, but that's it. There are a couple hundred murders a year in Ankara and these guys handle them all, and that's all they do, day after day, year after year. If there are no murders to solve, they hang out together drinking beer. Naturally, Behzat, being the Captain of this crew, gets crossways with the higher ups on a regular basis, but because he has such a phenomenal success rate in solving cases, intermediaries get him excused.

Behzat has his style, his own modus operandi. It's not very sophisticated, it's more like 'grab the bull by the horns' confrontational style, but when you realize that he's been dealing with killers for 20 years, you can see his point. Most murders are committed by people who just lose their shit, and getting slapped around a bit might get them to realize just how the deep the doo-doo they are standing in is.

Behzat and his crew are basically garbage men. They cruise around the city picking up the human refuse and carting it off to the pokey. It's not a glamorous job, but it needs to be done, and somebody needs to do it. It's not a huge job, so this small crew is all the city needs.

Harun is Behzat's sidekick. He is a big lumbering oaf. At first I thought he was just young and inexperienced, but as the series winds along I've come to realize he really isn't too bright, but he has found his niche with the murder crew. He interrogation technique is crude (he basically models Behzat), lots of yelling and cursing, but he gets results, and that's what counts.