Doo doo da doo-doo.

I don’t know what posessed me to look it up, but I’m gratified to know you can find just about anything on YouTube these days. And Wikipedia has more information about “Mah Na Mah Na” than you probably want to know.

Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential, was in Beirut to film an episode of his documentary series No Reservations when the new conflict broke out. Now safely home, Bourdain has written an article for Salon.com about his experiences.

If you don’t have a Salon subscription, this is well worth sitting through a Day Pass advertisement to read.

Watching Beirut die

From where I’m sitting, poolside, I can see the airport burning — the last of the jet fuel cooking off like a dying can of sterno. There’s a large, black plume of smoke coming from the south of the city — just over the rise, where the most recent airstrikes have been targeting the Shiite neighborhoods and what are, presumably, Hezbollah-associated structures. My camera crew and I missed it the first time they hit the airport. Slept right through it. Woke up in our snug hotel sheets to the news that we wouldn’t be making television in Beirut (not the show we came to do anyway), and that we wouldn’t be getting out of here anytime soon.

Any hopes of runway repair followed by a flight out disappeared two nights ago, when we watched from the balcony of my hotel room as missiles, fired from offshore, twinkled brightly for a few long seconds in the air, then dropped in lazy parabolic arcs onto the fuel tanks.

[...]

Everything had begun so beautifully. Our fixer, Lena, was bursting with enthusiasm when she met us at the airport. After months of preproduction, finally we were here! Finally, the American television crew had arrived — to show the world how beautiful her country was, how lovingly restored, how hip and forward thinking in the years since the bloody civil war.

[...]

Then, in the blink of an eye, everything went sideways: Relaxed smiles froze and disappeared. Suddenly, there was the sound of automatic weapons firing randomly in the air from a nearby neighborhood. And fireworks. Then cars — a few of them — teenage kids, women and adults, some leaning out the windows and waving Hezbollah flags and flashing the “V” for victory sign, celebrating what we were told, after a few quick cellphone calls, was the grabbing of two Israeli soldiers. Our fixer, a Sunni; Ali, a Shiite; and “Marwan,” a Christian, who’d just minutes ago been pointing proudly at the mural — all three looked down in embarrassment, a look of sorrow, shame and then resignation on their faces. Someone muttered “assholes” bitterly. They knew — right away — what was going to happen next.

Just after writing a post this afternoon, the site went down. When it came back, the new post was missing — even though I had just seen it on the front page.

What the fuck? Brand new web host, brand new blogging software… same old problems?

Oni Press just came up in random conversation with a friend last night, so it’s convenient that I found this coverage of the Oni Press Spotlight panel at SDCC. Three announcements interest me:

• My pal Jim Massey is writing a new book called Maintenance, about two maintenance guys who work at a laboratory full of mad scientists.
• They’re doing a series of My Name is Earl tie-in comics, which is one of the rare tie-ins that actually sounds worthwhile.
• Oni also announced they just inked a deal with Stephen Colbert to do a comic book version of a Colbert Report running gag: Stephen Colbert’s Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure.

Great comics… or the GREATEST comics?

Here’s the music video for Brian Posehn’s metal spoof “Metal by Numbers,” off of his new concert album Live in: Nerd Rage. Which I own. And it is awesome.

Well, the song itself sucks, but that’s kind of the point.

If the audio and video are out of sync, like they were for me, clicking pause and play again seems to fix it.

Cookie cookie cookie!

My non-blog pages still aren’t operational, and neither is my old banner image. But as you can see, I’ve added a Flickr-based cameraphone blog on the right. And if you like to keep up with the site via RSS, make sure you update your reader with the new RSS link. The old one won’t work anymore.

Did you know there’s an official Narbonic cocktail? I didn’t until a few days ago.

imjustdrinking.com is a wiki site dedicated to webcomics-based cocktail recipes. Yes, there’s a web site for literally everything these days.

The Narbonic Tonic is a pretty basic drink: gin, tonic, and just enough grenadine to turn it pink (and make it sweeter). There are a couple of other Narbonic recipes, too, but I like this one for its simplicity.

Except, you know, I’m back now.

After my last post, I checked out of the hotel (the internet connection went down again almost immediately after I hit Publish) and left to hike through the black lava flows of Sunset Crater National Park northeast of Flagstaff. I’ve had better ideas than walking across heat-absorbing black rocks and soil in a July afternoon in Arizona. Glad I had some water with me. The scenery was all right… not as many hilltop vistas as I expected.

The meteor crater turned out to be pretty far out of my way, so instead I drove to Sedona. If I’d known something about Sedona ahead of time, I’d have skipped the national park and just hiked around there all day. No wondering where the best hikes and scenery are in Sedona — they’re easily found right off the only road through town, and you can park anywhere for $5.

Unfortunately, it was already about 5pm by the time I got there, so it was too late to do much exploring. Those dark clouds overhead looked pretty ominous, anyway. So I just stopped at a cafe for dinner and headed home, promising to come back some weekend.

A lot of people seem to come back from Experiencing the Outdoors refreshed and centered, whereas I mostly come back hot, tired, and cranky, so spending a couple of days wandering around buttes and lava flows isn’t as much of a mental-reboot for me as it is for others. Still, at least it got me out of my apartment for a few days.

And it’s probably better than San Diego Comic-Con would’ve been — from what I understand, this year was even MORE crowded than last year, with most panels standing-room only. For reference, my first SDCC in 2000 drew about 50,000, and last year drew 100,000.

Given how intolerably crowded last year was, I’m not sure how it’s even physically possible to pack more people into the convention center. At some point, the mass of bodies will form its own gravitational field and collapse on itself, forming a stinky nerd black hole that will destroy San Diego.

For the first time since 1999, I am not in San Diego for Nerdi Gras (aka Comic-Con). I hemmed and hawed over the decision right up until the last minute, but finances and con burnout swayed me in the end. I’ll miss seeing my Internet pals — no Tim & Chelsea time this year?! — not to mention guests like Brian Posehn and Phil Foglio and Keith Knight and the entire cast of Veronica Mars… but I’ll manage.

I still had the vacations days off from work, though, and a friend pointed out that I could probably use some time away from Tucson as a mental reboot. So instead I am writing this from what might be the world’s most perfect hotel, the Radisson Woodlands in Flagstaff, AZ.

Downstairs is the best sushi restaurant in town (two years running, according to the posted signs), which is next to the hotel bar, which in turn is just a few steps from a pool and large whirlpool. The room has wireless internet and curtains that actually block out the morning sun and let you sleep in. There’s a breakfast menu you can hang from the door the night before, and in the morning a cute waitress will deliver an omelette, bacon, and hash browns to you while you’re groggy, unshaven, and wearing nothing but yesterday’s blue jeans.

I sprung the extra $30 for a top-floor “parlor suite” room… and all of this is STILL cheaper than one night at the subpar hotel I had reserved in San Diego. The only downside is the hotel’s internet connection was down last night, but that’s life.

Did I mention the temperature outside is a summer-perfect 83 degrees, about 20 degrees cooler than Tucson?

I visited Lowell Observatory last night, which was a short drive away. One telescope was traned on Jupiter and four of its visible moons, the other on the M11 star cluster. As for today, I’ll have to decide on my plans shortly… maybe a hike in the mountains, or a visit to a meteor crater to the west that NASA used to train astronauts.

If the hotel wasn’t already sold out tonight, I would probably stay here again. Instead, I might drive back to Tucson late tonight to avoid Saturday’s sun and heat. My poor Corolla’s A/C is powerless against it.

You’re on mikebarklage.com.2.0.

For those of you who may have been confused my blank blog the last couple of weeks, here’s what happened: three times in the span of five days, AffordableHost’s servers went apeshit and wiped out my site. Their most recent data backup, all three times, went back only as far as 6/25. Every post and comment since then was lost.

After the second crash, I tried reconstructing my most recent blog entries, only to have them wiped out once more. That was the last straw. I decided to re-activate an account on DreamHost that I never got around to using and began moving my site over.

Not only is this a new web host, but it’s new blog software as well. I exported my data from MovableType to WordPress, which is PHP-based and apparently has stronger spam controls. This way I won’t have to spend a few minutes each day culling spam comments from older posts.

Since it’s new software, I’m not yet familiar with the code, which is why this site doesn’t look like the old site yet. At the moment, I’m still using the default WordPress header, the other parts of my site aren’t active yet, and I don’t have the cameraphone blog running. By the time you read this, perhaps I’ll have figured out how those work.

And in conclusion, this is what I’d like to do to AffordableHost:

Thank you for reading.