The Strange Case of Mahir Cagri

Mart writes "Mahir Cagri, from Izmir, Turkey, was projected to instant fame when news about his homepage spread among internet users . Entitled Welcome to my homepage!!!!! I kiss you!!!! the page contains pictures of Mahir and describes his lifestyle in broken English: "I like to take foto-camera (amimals , towns , nice nude models andpeoples)....." Mahir's homepage has received over a million hits. It has been featured in Salon magazine, and is covered in this week's edition of The Onion under the headline "Turkish man Kiss You." Sadly the homepage wasn't real. Mahir claims that his home page had been pirated and that his worlwide fame, or infamy is undeserved. "

Comments

I saw this one a week ago.

[pyrite504]

Once again, I am surprised by the total wackiness of the Web. It flew around my office like wildfire, and we all are still saying "I kiss you" to everyone we know. It is just another example of how something that could be considered totally useless in the physical world brings happiness and craziness in the digital realm. Let the man have his 15 of fame, and let him deal with it as he sees fit. I laughed my ass off. So did a lot of other people who were having a bad day.

Re:I saw this one a week ago.

[Wah]

dunno, if I should share this, but well, try not to LOL

So he a got a million hits?

[Hasdi Hashim]

Thanks to Hemos, he'll get a billion more. What a cheap way to get publicity.

Is it just me or this story is unappropriate for slashdot?

HASDI

First post? First post??!!

And to add insult to injury

[jht]

Not only was his website supposedly hacked - now it looks like it's been slashdotted, too!

I saw it earlier this week - I guess I just don't get what the fuss was all about. Maybe I'm just an Old Fart, but I've seen a lot more interesting candidates for net.phenom. Oh well. To own their each.

- -Josh Turiel

Re:And to add insult to injury

[Jburkholder]

I dunno, we thought it was funny. He listed his favorite things and included 'sex'. Not 'sex with beautiful, exotic women in romantic surroundings' but simply 'sex'. I guess that conjures up images of the various interpretations available. Plus the stuff about being a globe-trotting playboy in cheap Turkish suits seemed kinda funny. I guess I wasn't laughing so much at his ethnicity, as I was the improbability that some woman would see that page and contact him to go stay with him in Turkey.

Re:And to add insult to injury

[Hard_Code]

"...as I was the improbability that some woman would see that page and contact him to go stay with him in Turkey."

Well, actually many women from all over flooded him with requests.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Mahir...

[Tet]

... can be found at this site:

http://www.go2net.com/int ernet/useless/useless/mahir.html

The Amusing Forigner Concept

[Skyshadow]

This is an interesting incarnation of the Amusing Forigner Concept, which was (so far as I can tell) perfected in the late 1980s with the rush of shows like Perfect Strangers and the appearance of that one Russian guy (Yankof Smirnof, or something like that) on Night Court.

Pretty simply: There's something we in the US find amusing about forign concepts -- in the enlightened United States, the concept of a man kissing us as we access his web site to be a hoot rather than a cultural insight of any kind. Those crazy backwards forigners!

Obviously, the more you can drag it out the better -- that's where the broken english, etc. come in. Interestingly, this concept can also be applied to sub-groups within the United States. For proof, look at Fargo, Raising Arizona, the Dukes of Hazzard or any episode of the X-Files involving the midwest or Texas (note: the Texans deserve it, IMHO).

I feel that this will only be the first of a slew of web sites dedicated to cashing in on this interesting concept. In fact, I'm working on my own "Stupid Midwesterner" web site as we speak (well, as I type). Oh yeaa, doncha know. We here in Wisconsin are enjoyin' this whole Microsoft kit-and-kibootle. Look for it to start hauling in the hits -- I'm looking for a high-paying banner ad agreement as we speak. Maybe I could even do the MP3 web site thing; "To see more of the wacky Wisconsinite's site, click on the first three banners and get the first word of the second paragraph of each site that pop up in the new annoying windows...".

----

Re:The Amusing Forigner Concept

[Enoch Root]

I hate to break it to you, but that's not an exclusive American concept. I know the Canadians, the British and the French, among others, make a habit of making fun of American antics and poking fun at their culture. (Or "culture", as they would put it, I guess!)

I'm sure there's many others, but the point is: everybody pokes fun at everybody else. The Americans are the butts of foreigner jokes because they're so present on the international scene. Foreigners just don't do it often in Americans' faces.

So, in good humour, here's a little joke on Americans:

An American tourist comes into a Montreal library and goes to the counter:

"HELLO MISS," he says out loud, "I'D LIKE A HOTDOG AND A COKE!"

"Sir," whispers the librarian, "this is a library!"

"Oh," answers the American, whispering. "I'd like a hotdog and a coke..."

"The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."

Oh no-not at Slashdot!

[TurkishGeek]

Great. After days of generating terrible publicity for our country for at least two weeks, the unknown idiot who has defaced the poor guy's Web page (The page is NOT created by Mahir. He put a personal Web page at an ISP in Bulgaria, and some idiot was amused with his physical appearance, and came up with the piece of crap that has been filling up mailboxes worldwide in the last two weeks.) finally made it to Slashdot.

Get over it, people. This is a bad joke. The guy is an ordinary teacher, and did not prepare the page himself. Still it is a fascinating example of how the Internet has changed the world.

Mahir is on the front pages of Turkish papers, and has been mentioned in a couple of other papers too, most notably Sweden's Aftonbladet and UK's The Observer. CNN has asked him for an interview, and he demanded $50,000.

Re:Oh no-not at Slashdot!

[TurkishGeek]

It doesn't get you a commendation from the Ministry of Education in Turkey either. I'm not sure if he's still a teacher, but he used to be one, at least.

He won't probably need the teacher salary anymore; he's already a celebrity, and the Turkish TV channels and media are as idiotic as their counterparts everywhere(well, OK, probably not more than British tabloid press); therefore one TV channel or another will give him huge piles of cash to show up on TV. Ask any Turk you know if he/she knows who Reha Muhtar is.(He's roughly the equivalent of Jerry Springer, only purporting to be slightly more serious)

Translation of Mahir's name..

[TurkishGeek]

By the way, it is also hilarious that Mahir Cagri translates to "Skillful Invitation" in Turkish, don't you think? (It is a perfect translation, and the guy's name is real).

Where's his banner ad? :)

[deusx]

My only question is: Why hasn't this guy slapped up a few money making banner ads? :)

(Yes, yes, I know, if he made a page like that, he prolly doesn't know what a banner ad is or how to make money from them...)

Having been bombarded by this guy from...

[Hobbes_]

female friends, here is the low down they have sent me....

Basically the original page was set up as a practical joke by one of his friends. The details are metioned on Salon some time back.

Another friend sent him a joke email saying she thought he was a stud and he replied back in a serious manner which would suggest it wasn't a joke.

Personally I think you should check out the Brandon and Rick never get laid it's much more funnier. Or if you want to make a bit of cash, check out the 10K for a wife page.

Okay, this is scary...

[Pollux]

Through some freak incidents, one lone, single man in the country of Turkey suddenly is becomming known throughout the world!

Doesn't anyone understand what in the world is going on? I mean, it's like someone just started spinning a globe, and stopped it with his finger, and that finger landed on TURKEY, of all countries!!!

...and the rest, they say, is history. Bada bing, bada bang, bada boom, this guy's famous. All because someone decided to "tinker" with his web page.

And what next? Well, let's use the all-popular dancing baby AVI as an example. A cute little AVI file, distribued by E-Mail, suddenly became a symbol of the ever growing internet and is received fame as far as appearing on T-Shirts and dancing with Calista Flockhart on Ally McBeal!

So, what's in store for this guy? I'm thinking something along the lines of his own TV show titled "Me Kiss!" and receiving a place in the Oxford dictionary with his picture next to the phrase "Me Kiss," meaning "A kind greeting, originating from Turkey."

Don't worry..

[Duke of URL]

[humor]If you can't get your kiss, you can see the man dance here!
That man can groove like nobody. Get down! Man, thats one funky beat.

He's got a fan club you should join too gnarphlager![/humor]

See also that fake "Madonna interview"

[Paul Crowley]

Remember the "doubly-translated Madonna interview" that appeared here a few weeks ago, and turned out to have been made up by Gary Trudeau?
--

Retraction bad?

[Mr O]

I personally don't think its sad that the website was a hoax. It seems to me that the addition of Mahir's retraction is one of the best parts of the sites. It makes the whole thing. The fact that these unexpected turn of events for some random man lead to such acceptance and willingness to do good for the world is simply wonderful.

How the Internet changed the world

[cybaea]

CNN has asked him for an interview, and he demanded $50,000

Hm, Mahir suddenly sounds like a clever guy. :-) Does anybody have a link to the real Mahir's page handy -- I couldn't find it?

Maybe there is a (very!) weak /. point in here about how to get rich and famous on the internet? But (a) I think we would all rather take a different path (somebody already did a journaling filesystem for Linux, so I guess I have to think of somehting else now) and (b) there are probably better ways to introduce it. Or maybe TurkishGeek is on to something:

Still it is a fascinating example of how the Internet has changed the world.

(Come on, everybody, we've got this thread so let's make the most of it:) How did the Internet change the world? I seem to remember a guy in England who put a shark up on his roof and got instant fame and interviews. How is that different from the fame of Mahir? People have always done stunts for publicity or otherwise. It is not clear to me that anything except the speed of communication has changed.

Not every stupid web page gets a million hits. What does this show, except that people are as silly as ever and still follow the herd, wherever it leads?

Re:How the Internet changed the world

[TurkishGeek]

I also agree we all have other stuff to think about now (Transmeta is finally telling the world what they have under the covers, for one thing!), but thanks for opening this up.

Not every stupid web page gets a million hits. >What does this show, except that people are as >silly as ever and still follow the herd, >wherever it leads?

From what I have seen, this Web page was first and foremost a craze in Turkey before it spread out to the world. I can't be sure, I work and live in the States. But the type of guy portrayed in the Web page spoof (loser that can't get laid no matter what he does) is also a very funny thing in Turkey, and it is most likely that it's the same person who defaced Mahir's original site who started this. It just grew like wildfire after then. The fact that the English is extremely broken in a very hilarious way, and the desperate invitation to the opposite sex, which is a very foreign thing to Westerners because of the more relaxed, and natural state of male-female relationships there; made the page even funnier for people abroad, and hence we have Mahir even on Slashdot.

Is the page funny enough to warrant even temporary interest of more than one million people? Probably not.

I and many of my friends have been very angry at the guy who defaced Mahir's original page and started this stupidity. But I have been equally pleased that Mahir, no matter how stupid he may seem to you guys (because of a plea for sex he did not do in the first place), have given things a positive turn and changed the incredibly popular page to mention the tragedy in Chechnya at the bottom. It's a pity that his English is bad, and he can not convey his ideas properly. I hope his point gets taken, and everybody who hits Mahir's page in hope of seeing the hilarious, horny Turk reads the fine print and notices the word "Chechnya". Taking a hint from the effectiveness of air power over Kosovo, Russian forces are bombing the daylights out of innocent people there, just because the Chechens beat their miserable ground forces a couple of years ago.

Kudos to real Mahir for at least making a fair effort to get the message across; and coping with the incredible insult to his personality caused by the defaced Web site. Had the same thing happened to an American, he would have contacted FPI to track down the guy, start a lawsuit against him, and filling up the page with banner ads to make a quick buck of the situation. Now I hope Mahir doesn't screw up, influenced by the hordes of people from all over the world reported to be contacting him with various schemes to profit off the incident.

Just my 2 cents.

Re:Don't Mess With Texas

[Wyatt Earp]

Your threating us with Edie Brickell?

Thats almost as bad as a Canadian threating to silence Celine Dion.

You can keep all those sports teams too.

I think we should spin off Texas and replace it with Guam...to keep the flag at 50 stars.

The Concept of Maganda

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me tell you that the page took the Turkish online community by storm more that the rest of the world. This really does not have to do with the amuzing foreigner concept, at least outside the US. It's a part of Turkish elite nastiness, if you want to know it. The kind of Turkish people that would have access to the web do have a slight mocking attitude and contempt towards simple, villager types from the East. There's even a term for it: maganda. Mahir would be typical. That's the sociological tidbit for today.

I hate to piss on the party...

[DoktorMel]

But did anyone bother to read Mahir Cagri's entire response?

Don't get me wrong. I found the faked Mahir page hilarious. However, the real Mahir

a) Speaks somewhat better English.
b) Seems like quite the insightful character.
c) Has the good sense to question what this kind of thing says about _our_ cultural values.

Personally, I'm not afraid to say that should I ever visit Turkey, I'm going to email Mahir and take him up on the offer to guide me around. He seems like a decent person who's had all kinds of weirdness dumped on him in the last week. Show him the respect of taking the time to read what he's said.

Re:I hate to piss on the party...

[Hard_Code]

I read his response.

And he also mentions that he has multiple degrees from several colleges. Unless he is outright lying (why would he have reason to do that now?), he seems like a very intelligent guy. Americans sometimes fall into the trap of assuming that anybody who doesn't know English must be an idiot (hell, /Americans/ don't even know English, let alone a second or third language). I lived in Turkey quite a while, and I have to tell you Turkish people are the nicest people on earth. They, and many other people of foreign countries, are very hospitable and welcoming (as opposed to your typical American New Yorker or Texan).

Turkey is a great country and has some really amazing archeological sites, and a great tourist industry.

you missed the biggie...

[Wah]

...id software. You might have heard of them. Games like Doom, Quake. Sometimes people play these games on "computers", over the "Internet", course, I'm from Texas so I'm obviously too stupid to comprehend anything outside the oil and cattle industry.

Jealousy is a dangerous thing, just because your state didn't have the balls to be it's own Nation doesn't mean you have to whine about it. ;-)

I think the San Antonio Spurs are a basketball team, they might have recently spanked some hoodlum coach-choking yankees recently for some type of world championship, but I've learned to be distrustful of the media...

Re:you missed the biggie...

[dillon_rinker]

John Carmack is from Kansas City...tarnation, I guess y'all had to import the talent to make that thar comp'ny.

What the hell!?

[Rabbins]

I am not sure how much of this is a hoax, and how much is real... but how many of you read the supposed letter from Mahir?

OK, so the first 3/4 is cute, and the amateur english from the website continues, but what the hell is all the PC (polically correct, not personal computer... geeks) crap!?

It was obviously written by someone completely different than whomever wrote the first 3/4. It just did not fit in at all. The English and grammar are completely different.

Just struck me as really odd.

Re:Don't Mess With Texas

[screeching weasel]

To quote Hank Hill...
"Why do you want to go to Dallas? There ain't nothing there but crackheads and debutantes. And that's just the football team!"

:)

Yeah, I'm from Wisconsin too. Pbpbpbbbttt.

Re:The Amusing Foreigner Concept

[Just Some Guy]

A fellow in Arkansas was sitting on his porch one day when he noticed a hillbilly walking along with a herd of pigs. "Hey, stranger," he asked, "where you going with those hogs?"

"Takin' 'em to market, up Springfield way."

Thanks for the joke! I live in the Springfield in question (Missouri, just north of AR) and hadn't heard that yet. Thanks!

P.S. No, I don't know if we're the Springfield from "The Simpsons".

Re:Tributes to Mahir

[ice-e-fresh]

Let's try it with some formatting this time :)

The Original: http://members.xoom.com/_XOOM/primall/mahir/index. html

The Tribute: http://216.169.122.124/rayn/turkstud.shtml

Mahir-Mania: http://members.xoom.com/mahirdance/getdown.html

Lone Star

[Rabbins]

Texans really do have the stubbor pride that can only be rivaled by New York and New Jersey (nahhh...).

I lived with a Texan for a couple years in college (in Michigan), and the nonstop argument he had with about the entire school population over "Who was a better running back?" Emmit Smight or Barry Sanders, drove me bonkers.

Not sure how this became a Texas vs. Wisconsin thing... but I will say the beer (Macro AND Micro), is about 500 times better in Wisconsin.

Lone Star: The National Beer of the Republic of Texas

HA!

Your right about the beer.

[Wah]

Texans drink sh*t beer (in Texas). I *loved* Lone Star in high school, but it does compare favorable,IMHO, to most schwag beers (MillCooBudLitDryIce).

Course, now I live in Fort Collins, CO with one of the highest concentrations of mircobrews in the country. I'm within walkin' distance to more than 100 different beers X-).

Fukin' hampsters never made me *think*

[ArtLung]

Original (Fake) Mahir rocks. True Mahir rocks.

Mahir made me laugh. Maybe I'm the ugly American - but Mahir "I like sex" made me laugh.

The real Mahir is even cooler. Seriously - the mans' life was turned nuts (cup runneth over email accounts, phone ringing off the hook) - and what did he do? He put up a *new* page - explaining what happened.

He also took his little moment in the spotlight to make me *think* about what's really important in the world. He urges me to become aware of what's happening in Chechnya and other suffering.

An old teacher of mine would have said Mahir's a good egg.

Seriously - how many of these ultra-forwarded sites (think dancing baby, hampsterdance) *do* anything with their instant noteriety -- other than try to hawk merchandise. Mahir's actually *doing* what Miss America's only talk about -- promoting world peace.

Mahir - I KISS YOU!!!

- Joe

Re:Escape Wisconsin

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

Similarly, in Albuquerque, it's quite common to see a "Don't mess with Texas" bumper sticker altered to say "mess with Texas." New Mexico has lots of anti-Texan resentment. Although nobody's been able to explain it, here's a list of factors which definitely apply:

• that damned annoying drawl
• thinking they invented spicy food (the hottest tex-mex can't hold a candle to your average New Mexican cuisine, which is much closer to authentic Mexican - spicy and yet still tastes good, not just spicy for the machismo factor or for covering up bad cooking)
• thinking that New Mexico is another country (come on! it's just one state over!)
• that damned 'Don't mess with Texas' thing...

A Nebraskan, a Texan, and a New Mexican find a lamp with a genie inside. In keeping with a polite manner, they decide to split the genie three ways, each getting one wish. The Nebraskan wished for his home state to always have rich and plentiful soil, and the Genie granted it. The Texan wished for his home state to be surrounded by a large impenetrable brick wall, so that nobody who hated the state could get in and soil it, and the Genie granted it. The New Mexican first asked some questions...

"The wall is tall, yes?"

"Taller than the tallest building in the state, master," replied the genie.

"And nothing can get in or out?"

"Nothing, master."

"I wish for you to fill it with water."
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.