by Steve Shipside
3 April 2008
NASA may have wasted gazillions putting golfers on the moon but out of that we still somehow ended up with Teflon and the modern marvel of unstuck Turkey Twizzlers for tea. The Net was originally intended to survive a nuclear holocaust and the web was created to help disseminate the science of particle physics but despite such wantonly dull origins together they have conspired to bring us the immeasurable joys of Flash animation, YouTube and 24-hour hot girl-on-girl action.
The brainchildren of boffins may be born dull but it doesn’t take long for the limitless ingenuity of wasters to pervert them into paragons of pointlessness.
Dull scientists may still whine that HTML was created to share neutron anecdotes but it only reached its full potential with the realisation that you could spend hours watching YouTube clips of pets falling off things and fat kids pretending to be Jedi knights. Any office worker will tell you that this is the best waste of time since ooh, Stick Cricket, or Tetris. With such awesome success, however, comes a price and YouTube has now been caught in the crossfire of the age-old enmity between Turkey and Greece.
It’s not clear how it started. There’s some evidence to suggest the flashpoint may have been unflattering critiques of each other’s previous Eurovision entries. What is sure is that some Greek geek uploaded a Flash animation of Kemal Ataturk complete with subtitles that questioned his sexuality.
To which dozens of Turks replied with more videos suggesting that the ancient Greeks invented homosexuality and have enthusiastically embraced it ever since. Quite a few of these videos seem to come with comments about what the Turks would like to do to the Greeks, which suggest the Turkish youth have at best a somewhat confused attitude to sodomy. Greeks then duly reply with references to the Armenian question.
Actually, that’s not true; they mostly replied with unfavourable comparisons of the relative butchness of Turkish men and, say, Graham Norton. Whatever, boys will be boys.
The thing is that you’re not allowed to have a pop at the father of the nation in Turkey. It’s a crime to criticize Mustafa Kemal Ataboy, or indeed anything Turkish (watch what you say about that kebab/Twizzler/Fry’s confectionery).
The media promptly found some indignant judge to demand a ban and before you know it there’s a national block on YouTube. Imagine that. All those Turkish blokes trying to fill those dull office hours and suddenly there are no more videos of pets and small children tripping over their feet. The horror.
Of course, Greek geekdom is delighted. "Ha ha," chorus the little Hellenic harpies. "We have limitless three minute videos of Japanese schoolgirl karaoke and you don’t." Which at least has more of a ring to it than, say, "remember Smyrna".
On reflection, however, you’ve got to think that the gross national product of Turkey is likely to be the winner with a major productivity boost in the offing. I even suspect Turkish industrialists are behind the whole Atagate scandal. Beware of Greeks bearing crap video, yes, but equally think twice before you call the Turk backlash a turkey.
