Istanbul's blog

**Posted:** Sun Dec 10, 2006 11:45 pm

So I gets up, sleepy eyed and hung over. Stumble over to the phone but too late. The answering machine is just finishing up. The message:
"Going to see Tse Pesh house. Cough cough ...bad inhaler.cough bye."

I try calling back but a squeaky voice informs me my phone bill is 3 months in arrears and there will be no further out-calls until that is rectified.
I asked if a collect call was admissible as the cheque was in the mail? "Access denied" she snapped, paraphrasing Dos 6.2 message that the floppy disk had write protect on. I then informed her I was about to personally come down to the phone company and ram the phone up her ass.

The operator said I was evil and hung up. Now what to do but have a cuppa green tea and some estrogen meds?
Me evil? I would have to contemplate that one.
Well my friend Gus Slobomavitch, the Yankee Drummer shows up. He wants to sell me a complete Dior silk and lace wardrobe. $49.99 for the complete set. Fire engine red is not exactly my favorite color so I had to decline the steal. Gus knows my credit is good.

I replayed the phone message for Gus to decipher. He played it backwards twice and forward three times.

"Emmy said she was going to see Tepes house, Vlad the impaler"

OK who is Vlad Tepes the impaler?

Vlad Tepes - Vlad the Impaler was a prince known for executing his enemies by impalement. He was a fan of various forms of torture including disemboweling and rectal and facial impalement. Vlad the Impaler tortured thousands while he ate and drunk among the corpses. He impaled every person in the city of Amlas -- 20,000 men, women and children. Vlad often ordered people to be skinned, boiled, decapitated, blinded, strangled, hanged, burned, roasted, hacked, nailed, buried alive, stabbed, etc. He also liked to cut off noses, ears, sexual organs and limbs. But his favorite method was impalement on stakes, hence the surname "Tepes" which means "The Impaler" in the Romanian language. It is this technique he used in 1457, 1459 and 1460 against Transylvanian merchants who had ignored his trade laws. He also looked upon the poor, vagrants and beggars as thieves. Consequently, he invited all the poor and sick of Wallachia to his princely court in Tirgoviste for a great feast. After the guests ate and drank, Dracula ordered the hall boarded up and set on fire. No one survived.

Yikes! but there is more evilness.

Impalement was and is one of the most gruesome ways of dying imaginable. Vlad usually had a horse attached to each of the victim's legs and a sharpened stake was gradually forced into the body. The end of the stake was usually oiled and care was taken that the stake not be too sharp; else the victim might die too rapidly from shock. Normally the stake was inserted into the body through the buttocks and was often forced through the body until it emerged from the mouth. However, there were many instances where victims were impaled through other bodily orifices or through the abdomen or chest. Infants were sometimes impaled on the stake forced through their mothers' chests. The records indicate that victims were sometimes impaled so that they hung upside down on the stake.

Death by impalement was slow and painful. Victims sometimes endured for hours or days. Vlad often had the stakes arranged in various geometric patterns. The most common pattern was a ring of concentric circles in the outskirts of the city that was his target. The height of the spear indicated the rank of the victim. The decaying corpses were often left up for months. It was once reported that an invading Turkish army turned back in fright when it encountered thousands of rotting corpses impaled on the banks of the Danube.

In 1461 Mohammed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, a man not noted for his squeamishness, returned to Constantinople after being sickened by the sight of twenty thousand impaled corpses rotting outside of Vlad's capital of Tirgoviste. The warrior sultan turned command of the campaign against Vlad over to subordinates and returned to Constantinople.

Thousands were often impaled at a single time. Ten thousand were impaled in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu (where Vlad had once lived) in 1460. In 1459, on St. Bartholomew's Day, Vlad had thirty thousand of the merchants and boyars of the Transylvanian city of Brasov impaled. One of the most famous woodcuts of the period shows Vlad feasting amongst a forest of stakes and their grisly burdens outside Brasov while a nearby executioner cuts apart other victims.

Impalement was Vlad's favorite but by no means his only method of torture. The list of tortures employed by this cruel prince reads like an inventory of hell's tools: nails in heads, cutting off of limbs, blinding, strangulation, burning, cutting off of noses and ears, mutilation of sexual organs (especially in the case of women), scalping, skinning, exposure to the elements or to wild animals and boiling alive.

Yikes again. Was my Emmy Lou going to visit this guy or maybe just his house where he was born?
The phone company operator thought I was evil? She should read up on Vlad Tepes.

But "Istanbul, the phone impaler" sounded reasonable to Gus. "Not that evil" he assured me.