Local comic author and Tucson Weekly Talking Comics contributor Eric Esquivel is in Phoenix this weekend with artist Jason Pedersen for the Phoenix Comicon and he's capturing some of the festival's moments for The Range.

Dan Gibson yesterday posted the news that New Orleans' Times-Picayune and three Alabama dailies were, well, moving away from being dailies—in print, at least—by cutting down to three days of dead-tree per week.

A lot of folks took this news—appropriately—as yet another nail in the coffin of the print media.

But not so fast.

There was other biggish media news this week: Warren Buffett, who know a thing or two about business, wants more newspapers in his portfolio—not bigger dailies, but smaller community-focused newspapers.

Buffett said he believes newspapers will do well if they remain the primary source of information about their communities.

"It's your job to make your paper indispensable to anyone who cares about what is going on in your city or town," he said.

Slideshow

Morrissey, TCC Music Hall, May 23, 2012

Click to View 10 slides

In case you missed it last night (or didn't bring your binoculars to the cheap seats), here are some photos of everyone's favorite miserable modern rock star.

While I personally find my own near-nakedness too repulsive to expose to the general public, if you have a mild exhibitionist streak, you might enjoy the Lose Your Clothes underwear party coming to Club Congress on June 16th, brought to you by Kitty Katt McKinley and his Powhaus-sequel MEOWmeow Productions. Doors at 9 pm, $3 cover (but free if you strip down to your underclothes), 21 and over.

A nice touch: there will be a complimentary clothing check.

Republicans are making a big deal over Democrat Ron Barber’s dodging of Republican Jesse Kelly’s question about whether he’d support Barack Obama in the presidential race this year during last night's CD8 debate.

Barber, who is facing Kelly in the June 12 special election triggered by Gabrielle Giffords' resignation, appeared unprepared for the question and certainly sidestepped it, saying that "My vote is my vote, Mr. Kelly, as yours is to you."

It was probably Barber’s worst moment in the debate and today, his spokeswoman, Jessica Schultz, sent out a statement that Barber did support Obama:

Ron’s point last night was that the election on June 12 isn't about president Obama, or any other national figure—it's about who is going to do the best job fighting for middle class families in southern Arizona. While Ron does not agree with the President on everything, of course Ron has supported and will support President Obama in the election. His primary focus as a member of Congress will be standing up for Southern Arizonans.

It’s easy to understand why Arizona Democrats are cautious about tying themselves too closely to Obama. Just this week, Public Policy Polling released a new survey showing that 41 percent of Arizona voters approved of Obama’s handling of the presidency, while 56 percent disapprove.

Voters in Congressional District 8, which tilts more than 6 percentage points toward the GOP, probably break down roughly the same way.

While Barber sidestepped the Obama question during last night's debate, though, Kelly has been sidestepping questions for his entire campaign. He refuses to sit down for interviews with the Arizona Daily Star or Tucson Weekly, preferring to deliver canned responses via email to questions that reporters have.

While Kelly is adept at delivering soundbites, he and his team have shown little appetite for actually discussing policy matters. In this campaign, for example, he has refused to say whether he would have voted for the budget that House Republicans voted on earlier this year.

And this week, an interview with KGUN-9 blew up in the Kelly Camp’s face after campaign spokesman John Ellinwood came unglued when Kelly was asked about seeking the endorsement of ALIPAC, a political action committee that has been linked to white supremacists, neo-Nazis and anti-Semites.

I have to give kudos to KGUN-9’s Jennifer Waddell, Forrest Carr and Marcelino Benito, who revealed the behind-the-scenes tantrum that Ellinwood threw when the question came up. (Ellinwood is certainly doing his candidate no favors with his tactics here, given that the story has now gotten way more attention thanks to his antics.)

The KGUN team also deserves credit for continuing to ask Kelly about the endorsement rather than giving up. That led to a rather astonishing exchange before yesterday’s debate, which Carr explained today on KGUN’s Web page:

There is a pressed sandwich in front of me and it is stuffed with goat cheese and crisp slices of Granny Smith apple. When bitten into, the sugary tanginess of the apples and the pungency of the cheese work culinary alchemy, creating a taste, smell and feel that is crispy, gooey, sweet and sour - all at once.

This is the magic behind what comes out of local food truck Foodie Fleet, which hit the streets in February. The menu board is brief and orders come in a plain white wrapper, but if you take a big bite and close your eyes you can almost see the flavors sparking through your nervous system.

This is a result of good planning, good ingredients and good people all coming together inside one truck. It isn’t rare to find all four members of the Foodie Fleet team – a bartender, an outdoor guide, a soon-to-be environmental lawyer and a food-truck fanatic from Portland, Ore. – all working together to make sure each item is made right and delivered quickly. In fact, of all the trucks I’ve had the pleasure of dining at, Foodie Fleet’s service is some of the best, and their enthusiasm for what they do is absolutely infectious.

“When we had the idea for this, there were no other food trucks out there in Tucson. We saw a void and we tried to come up with a simple concept,” says Michael O’Connell, who owns and operates the truck with Matt McDonnell, Jeremia Mosij and Rick Thompson. “We always thought, especially for the late-night scene, which was just Sonoran hot dogs when we had this idea, that we wanted to make high-quality food with local ingredients that people could relate to.”

They source most of their ingredients from local farms – goat cheese from Chiva Risa Farms in Bisbee; sweet potatoes from Grammy’s Garden; and many others. “There are some things we can’t get locally, but about 90 percent of our food comes from local farms,” says O’Connell.

The food is mostly pressed sandwiches, but they come with fresh-cracked rainbow peppercorns, arugula, whiskey-pear spread and other items that one doesn’t commonly find between bread. They had a quinoa burger on the menu board at a recent event, as well as Belgian waffles topped with a number of clever syrups.

Prices range from $4 to $7, and a bottle of Mexican Coca Cola will run you $2. Visit the truck’s website here, or visit them on Facebook here.

The Daily Caller ostensibly aims to be a right-wing version of the Huffington Post, so I suppose a weekly gun giveaway sort of makes sense ideologically, but what if one of these Bill of Rights-engraved pistols ends up being uses in some sinister way? Yes, I get the idea that people kill people, not guns, but this really does seem like a PR nightmare waiting to happen. We'll stick to giving away Padres tickets, I think.

For anyone who still loves newspapers (and apparently that's a smaller number of people everyday), it's hard to hear that New Orleans Times-Picayune, along with three other papers owned by Newhouse/Advance in Alabama, will be going to a three day a week print schedule (Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays), firing a bunch of employees, and moving to a digital-centric focus. What's strangest, and possibly most ominous, is that the trend is for media companies to spin off their newspapers into new companies separate from their digital product (this is the case with the Times-Picayune, along with papers owned by the Tribune Company), which seems like a preparatory move to just dump the papers entirely. Not that the state of daily newspaper reporting is great anyway, but it seems like everything is going to get cheaper, faster, and less useful.

What do a millipede, a sneezing monkey and a blue tarantula have in common?

Well, not much really. Except for the fact that they're in the latest top 10 list of new species.

The list was published for the fifth year yesterday by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. The date coincides with the birthday of Carl Linnaeus, a botanist famous for the creation of the modern system of naming and classifying living creatures.

With more and more species becoming extinct and endangered every year, it's nice to know that there are still critters out there waiting to be discovered.

To see the complete list, visit: http://species.asu.edu/Top10

• A millipede with a common name of "wandering leg sausage"

Local food truck Isabella's Ice Cream, which is a pretty sweet mix of green technology, vintage automobile and gourmet ice cream, has started packaging its ice cream for sale at several local grocery stores.

Food Conspiracy Co-op is the first to carry it, but word is it will soon be available at Maynards Market and Time Market at 444 E. University Blvd. as well. It's supremely good stuff - you can read the piece the Weekly published on the truck here - and we suggest giving it a shot if you get the chance.

In other news, Isabella's has also announced that it will be establishing a semi-permanent home for one of its trucks. The location hasn't been announced yet, but it's a great idea and further evidence of both the viability and flexibility of the food-truck business model.