Editors Note: We enjoyed the tour diaries J. Tom Hnatow wrote for us as part of These United States’ last tour, so we asked him if he wouldn’t mind doing it again as the band embark on their first ever intercontinental tour of the UK and Europe. He graciously agreed. Look for his dispatches from the road abroad over the next few weeks. Checking my pockets every ten seconds for passport, work permit, wallet, boarding…

Armageddon is once again upon us. America is on-edge, what with the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina this week, and it seems we can’t wait for the next tragedy. Well, if you don’t get an actual one, you might as well make one up. If you watch cable news, you’d think that Tropical Storm Ernesto was threatening the East Cost like a modern-day Krushchev. Here in the real world, Ernesto strolled through Florida, barely managing…

One of the deficiencies of the city’s leading opera company, Washington National Opera, is that lately they think of Mozart as early opera. The last time the WNO staged an opera from before 1775 or so was Handel’s Julius Caesar in 2000 and the same composer’s Agrippina in 1992 before that. Baroque opera is one of my major interests, and Handel is great, but there is a century of Baroque opera before Handel, too. We…

The Washington Redskins, in a hopeful sign of things to come, rang in the calendar year 2005 by playing their best, and perhaps most complete game of the season, running the Minnesota Vikings out of the stadium and nearly out of the playoffs. Riding a monstrous performance by the defense, who once again began the game missing key defensive starters and featuring players you’ve never even heard of, like Garnell Wilds, the Skins played…