In our previous match, Dotsun Moon pulls off something of an upset, bouncing The Horrors. DM moves on to face the winner of our next match.

Snake Rattle Rattle Snake: Denver-based band reflects the influence of New Order, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Can, LCD Soundsystem – Hayley Helmericks frequently reminds us of early Grace Slick - propulsive rhythms, mesmerizing grooves. LISTEN Full story »

My colleague Michael Sheehan recent offered a tip of the cap to a local staging of Frost/Nixon, which starred our old friend Stuart O’Steen. If anything, Mike was understated in his praise of the show and O’Steen’s performance. Anytime the big-city Denver Post says nice things about a community theater production up in the hinterlands of Longmont you know something special is afoot.

After the show, as we waited for a chance to congratulate the cast, my companions and I found ourselves discussing a topic that has come to intrigue me a great deal: the curious rehabilitation of Richard Nixon. Full story »

Here’s a bit of a surprise–moldy applesauce going into baby food and school lunches. MSNBC fills us in:

A Washington state fruit processor that supplies the nation’s schools and a baby food maker is under scrutiny by federal health regulators for repackaging applesauce contaminated with several kinds of potentially dangerous, multi-colored molds, msnbc.com has learned.

Repackaging? What the hell is that?

Food and Drug Administration officials this week posted a warning letter to Snokist Growers of Yakima, Wash., saying the company cannot ensure the safety of moldy applesauce and fruit puree that has been reconditioned for human consumption.

Wait–I thought it was just repackaged. What is this? Full story »

In the second match of round 1, The Lost Patrol comfortably defeats The Postelles by a 78%-22% margin. TLP moves on to round 2, where they will face Baron Bane.

Our third match features two bands that are alike in some ways and very different in others.

The Horrors: UK neo-Post-Punkers – minimalist, edgy – sounds range from sharp and edgy to brooding and melodic. LISTEN Full story »

This author is of the opinion that Iran isn’t developing nuclear weapons. But those who believe otherwise might find themselves distracted by what students at Georgetown University are learning. At the Washington Post, William Wan reports:

Led by their hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.

The result of their effort? The largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps. … designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal [which, they're learning] could be many times larger than the well-established estimates of arms-control experts. … China’s nuclear warheads could number as many as 3,000. Full story »

War may be hell, but it produces terrific literature, and “When We Walked Above the Clouds” by H. Lee Barnes is a cracker of a book.

In the mid sixties, the author was adrift and jobless in West Texas, a kid far too bright and talented to be in the circumstances he was in and too damaged and young to have figured a way out of it. To beat the draft, he enlisted in the army, and during training signed up for Special Forces, eventually ending up in Viet Nam in a mountainous outpost named Tra Bong.

Barnes tells this story straightforwardly, in pristine, laconic prose free of emotion or literary embellishments. I loved the late Hunter S. Thompson for his savage humor. But I also read him for his clean sentences—words used in a way that harnessed their full power and created a rhythm that held the reader locked in paragraph to paragraph, page to page. Barnes is not the good doctor, but he’s excellent. There is some awful good writing in here–clean and powerful.

And it is a heck of story. The camp he spent the war in, Tra Bong, was a shithole. Full story »

Twitter.com/LeeCamp

At the Washington Post’s the Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler writes:

In these grim economic times, the cost of maintaining and upgrading the United States’ aging nuclear arsenal of 5,000 warheads is certainly a ripe topic for discussion. The U.S. government has never officially disclosed the exact cost, and whether one should include environmental clean-up costs, missile defense and other programs related to nuclear weapons is a legitimate topic of debate.

But the Obama administration objects to the figure of $700 billion that it ostensibly plans to spend on nuclear weapons over the next decade. The arms control group the Ploughshares Fund arrived at the figure, which has been cited by the media and Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.). Kessler writes: Full story »