If you’re driving down Broadway between 3:30 and 4:30 p.m. today, you may be surprised by what you see: Kurdish residents are planning to protest outside the Estes Kefauver Federal Building in opposition to recent military action by the Turkish government within Northern Iraq. It’s at least the second time that local Kurds have protested action by Turkey since last October.

Here’s a little background on why:

• More than 8,000 Kurds live in Nashville, which many of them have come to call “Little Kurdistan.” (Shhhh. Don’t tell  Metro Council member Eric Crafton.)
• Why Nashville? The answers vary, but here are a few: a similar climate to their native land, affordable housing and consistent job growth and, more recently, because the Nashville Kurdish community is known as one of the most vibrant in the U.S.
• Did you know that Nashville is home to the first Kurdish mosque in North America, the Salahadeen Center? (I didn’t.)
• Nashville is also home to what may the the country’s first Kurdish youth gang, although this represents a tiny fraction of the local Kurdish community (one that the large majority of local Kurds are devastated to see emerge).
• Kurds were outraged when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was executed, because still-pending charges against him for crimes against Kurds, including genocide, were summarily dropped when he was put to death.

For a people without a country of their own, I’m glad that local Kurds at least have a community here to call home. I hope someday those who want to do so are able to return to an autonomous Kurdistan in the Middle East, but until then, I hope our Kurdish neighbors continue to make themselves comfortable right where they are.

HotelChatter.com snapped a lovely photo of West End Summit (above), which is expected to contain an InterContinental Hotel someday, as it exists here in early 2008.

The developer dug a giant hole and…here we are. Local office workers have started calling it the “West End Avenue Pond” since it seems to be in a permanent state of being filled with green brackish water. We’re expecting some kind of mutant superfrogs to start jumping out in the spring and the urban mosquitoes will find a new heaven.

The timing wasn’t too hot, apparently. While Nashville’s hotel business is booming, developers aren’t happy to just build a hotel these days. You’ve got to also have condos going for over half a million apiece and an adjoining office tower to rent out to commercial tenants.

I’m not so sure about the “mutant superfrogs,” but I do hope the originally planned structures do emerge from the giant hole in the ground that now stands in their place. It may take a recovery from the national economy before that happens, though. The WES Web site also features a refreshable camera recording images of the construction site if you’d like to take a closer look. The camera appears to be positioned on developer Alex Palmer’s nearby property that contains Nashville’s Hotel Indigo.

I am pleased, at long last, to report that BobClement.com is officially blank. The wide-open directory of the former campaign Web site that lingered for months is finally history. The directory has been replaced with an empty HTML page, which seems like a fine solution to me.

While we’re on the subject of mayoral candidate Web sites, Karl Dean now has a simple, clean site interface to reflect his new status as Nashville’s mayor.