I could see the earphones. That's why I don't have a tiny music box, I'm too uptight to make a fool of myself in front of strangers; for all I know, I'd start singing out loud on the tram.But I thought I'd have some fun, so before she saw me I started dancing, nothing fancy, just a little shake and jive to match her motions. She finally noticed me … saw that I was rocking and asked:
“What are you doing?”
“I'm dancing.”
“To what?”
“To the music.”
“But what music? You don't have an iPod.”
I said: “Hey, I'm new age, my dentist installed a 3G chip in my tooth, it sends all the latest tunes straight to my head. It's a Turkcell service. Like downloading ringtones, but I get the whole song.”
“Really?” she said. “Absolutely,” I said, “just listen.” She leaned toward me. I put my mouth to her ear and started singing the first song that came to mind: “On top of Old Smokey, all covered with snow, I lost my one true love, for a courtin' too slow. …”
She pulled her face away, furrowed her eyebrows and looked at me. “That's not a new song; that's an old song,” she said. “And you're just singing it; it's not playing.”
I fished my mobile phone from my jeans pocket and started looking for the Turkcell customer service number. “I thought I was getting ripped off … TL 17 a month for the premium music package, and all I've been getting is ‘Puff the Magic Dragon,' ‘Jingle Bells,' ‘Old McDonald Had a Farm'… stupid songs I can hum myself without paying for the privilege… Oh, here comes a new one: Diane is so gullible, she'll believe anything. …”
Have you ever seen a 50-year-old woman blush? Yes, she realized right away that she had indeed leaned in to listen to my 3G dental implant. You might say this is too childish, but the trouble is that I haven't seen my younger sister, Sarah, for eight years -- she was always the gullible one upon whom I exercised my habit for tall tales.
I once told her that architects originally designed the Empire State Building to be planted with the pointy end in the ground -- the Manhattan schist is strong enough to hold such a building firm even in high winds. The architects wanted to use all that saved area at ground level for public space: benches and swings and flowers. That was the dawn of market research, so they tested the concept and discovered that people felt threatened sitting under so much steel and masonry. See, if people were only more trusting, psychologically brave, the New York skyline would look much different. My sister believed that story.
Here we are, 40 years after men first landed on the moon. In 1970, I told her that the government had gone deep into debt on the space program that to defray the expense, they had auctioned off marketing rights to the face of the moon to Coca-Cola for $732 million. The soda pop company was going to paint the lunar surface red, then spell out the famous Coca-Cola logo in solar-powered white lights.
They had it all figured out, then some spoilsport asked what the moon would look like after the solar panels died. It would look red, and it didn't take a genius to understand that a lot of gullible earthlings might believe that the Communists had won the space race. Coca-Cola proposed a reusable space vehicle to maintain the logo lights, but the feds nixed the idea as too expensive, even with corporate sponsorship. How many people today realize that Coca-Cola invented the space shuttle?
Coca-Cola never did pay a cent for moon rights, but if Muhtar Kent is listening, this might be an idea whose time has come. And if that doesn't work, he may be persuaded to lead another campaign, one to light the moon with a red and white symbol that would make a lot of Turks happy. The Crescent and Star Centennial Challenge 2023.
