Klára's website - Homepage

Holy guacamole! I just found out Klara, an old friend of mine, is climbing Mt. Everest. As we speak.

The truth finally revealed via Google's new news archive service: Prince William NOT circumcised. (For some reason, this blog often turns up when people do searches to try and find out.)

YouTube - Jumeirah Beach Hotel

"Look out the window!" she shrieks. As if there's anything else to look at in a glass elevator.

CTV.ca | Lebanese army imposes curfew on Beirut

I'm supposed to go to Lebanon Sunday for an advertising awards festival. It's been on again off again whether we're actually going to go -- strangely I'll be disappointed either way, but surely more so if I don't. Right now I read there's a curfew in Beirut.

If you're wondering why I don't post more pics of Dubai on Flickr it's only because the maid threw away my camera. That's the only thing I can imagine that happened. It disappeared suddenly along with a pair of Dr. Scholl's sandals. I think I must have shoved them into a plastic bag which she mistook for rubbish. At least I didn't have any pictures on it.

There was an earlier post where I had the wrong link. I meant to say: "I finally put my first pics of Dubai on my Flickr page."

I just discovered my account of a visit to an archaeological site in Northern Syria in October 2005 is online. Looking back, I'm a bit disappointed nothing more came of that little caper. The excavation director, Peter Akkermans, has a fascinating theory about how life in pre-historic times was totally transformed, in some places, by a little-known climatic blip called the 8.2 kyr B.P. Cooling Event, discovered only in the 1990s via drilling into arctic ice caps. Akkermans also discovered the earliest traces of stored milk at Tell Sabi Abyad.

The article I wrote for Syria Today could have been a lot better. I had a lot of stuff going on at the time, and I was hoping to sell the article to a much more mainstream publication, but these plans came to naught, as so many do.

The song Superstar has a history that pre-dates The Carpenters. That is new information.

The photo on the front of the new Slate piece on Dubai was taken from my helipad.

"You'll have to see my helipad," I said.

He laughed. I gave him a second look.

"No, really," I said. "I have a helipad."