Atomic Hits - The Top 10 New Order Songs Of All Time!

New Order is an English rock band that was formed in 1980 by vocalist and guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook, and drummer Stephen Morris. The band came together after the breakup of Joy Division, following the tragic suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis. Later that same year, they were joined by Gillian Gilbert, who played keyboards.

Just in time for the Spooky Holiday Season comes the Atomic CURE Playlist

 Written By Ken Hulsey

If you've been in my orbit online for a while, you probably already know that I'm passionate about crafting playlists. There's just something incredibly fulfilling about diving deep into music, drawing from my extensive listening history, and combining it all into something special. Over the years, I've created playlists that have really resonated with many of you.

FLASHBACK Music Friday - Featuring Kate Bush, The Cars, The English Beat, A Flock of Seagulls, and a-ha

Hey there, Music Lovers! It’s that time again—welcome to the most exhilarating video music showcase around! Every week, I carve out some moments from my busy schedule to dive into the numbers that truly matter, bringing you the hottest tracks dominating the airwaves. These are the songs you can’t help but play on repeat!

(FLASHBACK) Music Friday - Featuring Band of Skulls, Seal, The B-52's, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, and 'Til Tuesday

Written by Ken Hulsey

Well, howdy Rock' n' Rollers, it's time once again for the fastest growing video music showcase anywhere! Each week, I take time out of my busy life to sit down and dig deep into the raw numbers to give you the top songs in the land. The tracks that you, the listener, just can't get enough of! This week, we have a wild selection of retro hits that are sure to get you up and moving! So turn up your speakers and get ready to blow the roof off your cave and send all the square neighbors runnin' to their mommas!

(FLASHBACK) Music Friday - Featuring The Go-Go's, The J. Geils Band, Def Leppard, INXS and New Order

 Written By: Ken Hulsey

🎉 Exciting news, music lovers! The Flashback Music Friday feature has officially become an absolute sensation! Each week, our audience for this vibrant and entertaining music video showcase keeps growing, and I can’t express enough how thrilled I am to see so many of you enjoying the carefully curated music videos and Spotify playlists. 

(FLASHBACK) Music Friday - Featuring Stevie Nicks, The Who, Thomas Dolby, Pat Benatar and Power Station

 Written By Ken Hulsey

Another week is here, and my Flashback Music Friday feature is ready for an encore performance! It seems that my last post, along with my Spotify playlist "Vital Vinyl," was a huge hit with all of you, so who am I to deny my readers what they want? If you want the classics, then you shall have the classics. Today, I’ve curated some real gems. All five of these hits were on heavy rotation on either MTV or FM radio back in the day. If you managed to get through the '80s without hearing these songs or seeing these videos, then it must have been an Amish life for ye. Perhaps you were marooned on a tropical island or living in a cave in the Himalayas with a Yeti and a goat? Unless you were living the good life away from the rest of us, this will be a great trip down memory lane.

(FLASHBACK) Music Friday - Featuring Heart, The Pretenders, Cocteau Twins, The Primitives, and Level 42

Written By Ken Hulsey

It's Friday once more! You know what that means—time for my weekly music feature. Last week, I teased an upcoming "Flashback" piece to go along with my new Spotify playlist, "Vital Vinyl," which is a fantastic mix of tunes from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Honestly, the new releases today weren’t exactly sparking my interest, so I thought a little trip down memory lane was exactly what the doctor ordered.

Tales of the Unexplained - The Albuquerque Mystery Lights

During my teenage years in Albuquerque I experienced several strange things. As a rational person I can explain most of them away. There is one however that still puzzles me to this day.

In August of 1980 my best friend, myself and members of our respective families witnessed a large glowing green orb in the night sky directly over Albuquerque. It hovered there, motionless, for well over an hour before it disappeared.

On this particular evening it was warm but not to hot so my buddy and I were hanging out on my patio. My mother was washing the dishes in the kitchen and my buddy’s dad was outside watering his garden. It was a typical late summer night.

I don’t know which one of us noticed it first but something in night sky grabbed our attention. There was an extremely large bright light hovering over the city. My friend and I got up from the table and walked out to the cinder-block wall at the edge of my backyard. As it were, my house sat up on a hill that overlooked an elementary school below. From this vantage point we could see over the whole city. This was one of the perks of living in the NE Heights.

Our first thoughts were that the object was a helicopter, though are minds soon changed because the object simply didn’t behave like a helicopter … and it didn’t make any noise. Generally, any aircraft flying over the city made some sort of sound that you could discern even from a long distance. The Rio Grande valley that Albuquerque sits in had great acoustics and sound would travel through the thin air and reverb off the Sandia Mountains.

My friend’s dad, who was doing his watering, a few feet away inquired what we were up to. We pointed out the light to him and he was perplexed by it. He had mentioned that in all his years living in the Southwest he hadn’t seen a star that bright. He was intrigued, but not enough to stay out with us once his watering was done.

My mother had come outside and noticed all of us talking and joined the group. Like my friend’s dad, my mother was interested in the phenomena, even speculated a bit about it, but ultimately returned to the house.

We just stared at the thing for awhile before I remembered that my dad had a pair of his army binoculars in the garage. I raced to retrieve them.

Once I was able to locate the object and focus on it, I quickly realized that what were looking at was no chopper, or planet for that matter. What I observed was not one single light, but a honeycomb of multiple smaller lights. I handed the specs over to my friend to see if he was seeing what I was seeing.  His expletive laden response was all I needed.

We pondered on what it was we were looking at for some time, but in true ADD teenager fashion, we soon grew bored of looking an object that just sat there and did nothing (even it may have come from another universe) and retreated to our respective homes.

After about a good solid hour of early 80s television I decided to venture back outside to see if anything was happening with our celestial visitor. To my surprise the object was gone.

Of course, the thing had to zip off while I wasn’t looking!

As you can imagine, we weren’t the only people to notice a giant green light in the sky over Albuquerque that night. According to the media, the police, the local TV stations, the Albuquerque Journal (our hometown newspaper) and even the Air Force at nearby Kirtland AFB received calls regarding the phenomena.

As is the case in most of these kinds of incidents someone with an advanced education stepped up to the plate to explain what everyone was getting all worked up about.

The official answer: the planet Jupiter.

A lot of people bought that explanation, but my buddy and I weren’t having it.

As it were, our theories, or at least our belief that the lights weren’t Jupiter would be proven right a few days later.

Our strange green illuminated object would return, though this time it was over different part of town. When next we spotted it, the lights were hovering over Kirtland AFB to the south. This, of course, makes you believe some real X-Files stuff was going on because it’s directly over a military facility.

Just like last time it hung out there for a good hour or so, my buddy and I got bored, then it was gone.

There was no media buzz about the phenomena this time, which was weird. At least nothing was said about it publicly anyway.

After that night, we never saw the object(s) again.

Yet, the story doesn’t end there.

Recently I was doing a little research and stumbled on several reports of green glowing UFOs that were spotted in the skies over New Mexico dating as far back as the late 1940s.

Check this out:

Why Mysterious Green Fireballs Worried the U.S. Government in 1948

On February 29, 1949, the Los Alamos, New Mexico Skyliner newspaper ran a piece on what it referred to, in typical newspaper parlance, as “flying saucers”—and a possible conspiracy around them:

“Los Alamos now has flying green lights. These will ‘o wisps seen generally about 2 a.m., have alerted the local constabulary and their presence is being talked about in Santa Fe bars. But local wheels deny any official knowledge of the sky phenomena. Each one passes the buck to another.”

The story ended with, “Have you seen a green light lately?”

In fact, a great many had, and would continue to do so—enough to prompt TIME magazine, in November 1951, to publish a piece on the phenomenon called “Great Balls of Fire.” What makes the multiple sightings of “flying green lights” in New Mexico in 1948 and onward such a significant chapter in UFO history is exactly that—there were multiple sightings.

That was unnerving enough. But most alarming—particularly to the United States government—was that the sightings were concentrated around the Los Alamos and Sandia atomic-weapons laboratories. And other highly sensitive military installations, including radar stations and fighter-interceptor bases, weren’t far away. That meant the sightings were reported by typically cool-headed pilots, weather observers, scientists, intelligence officers and other defense personnel, and led many to suspect the fireballs were Soviet spy devices.

Cold War spy craft…or extraterrestrial probes?

This potential explanation could not have occurred to those on the ground in New Mexico in 1948. After interviewing more than a hundred witnesses, Dr. LaPaz went on to advise the military and the Atomic Energy Commission of his opinion that the fireballs were likely either top-secret “unconventional defensive devices” being tested by the U.S.—or Soviet spying devices.

When Edward J. Ruppelt, director of the U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book UFO investigations, visited the Los Alamos National Laboratory in early 1952 to interview scientists and technicians, he noted that they became particularly animated when the idea of interplanetary vehicles was suggested.

“They had been doing a lot of thinking about this, they said, and they had a theory,” wrote Ruppelt in The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1953). They thought the fireballs were actually extraterrestrial probes “projected into our atmosphere from a ‘spaceship’ hovering several hundred miles above the Earth.”

Officially, government investigators concluded that the green fireballs were some kind of never-before-seen natural phenomenon. Interest in, and investigation into, the fireballs dropped off at the outbreak of the Korean War.

“Writing these off as natural phenomena did not solve the problem,” says UFO researcher Jan Aldrich, who believes the green fireballs were related to aerial phenomena spotted in Fort Hood, Texas, in 1949. “It just pushed it under the table.”

You can read the rest of the article here - Why Mysterious Green Fireballs Worried the U.S. Government in 1948.

And even weirder yet, here are some reports from August 1980. These would seem to back up the assumption that these objects are indeed spying on our military, in this case Kirtland Air Force Base just south of Albuquerque. It should be noted that my best friend's brother, who worked for the US government as a photographer documenting top secret tests at the base, told us that he witnessed some sort of laser weapon being used that could blow up boulders. Of course, he could have just been trying to impress us, but I never knew him to make up tall tales, so I always took the report to be a factual one. Oh, and before I forget, it was always rumored that there was a large stockpile of nuclear warheads stored in the adjacent Sandia Mountains.

I can see why you would want to keep the fact that an arsenal of nukes was being stored in the outskirts of a city of some five hundred thousand people under wraps.

Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico

8 August 1980

2350 MST

Three Security Policemen on duty in Charlie Sector, East Side of Manzano Weapons Storage Area, observed a very bright light that traveled with great speed and stopped suddenly in the sky over Coyote Canyon. They at first thought the object was a helicopter, but after observing the object perform unusual aerial maneuvers, they felt it could not be a helicopter. The light was observed to land in the Coyote Canyon area. Sometime later they observed the light take off again and proceed straight up at a high speed until it was no longer visible.

9 August, 1980

0020 MST

A Sandia Security Guard was driving east on the Coyote Canyon access road on a routine building check of an alarmed structure. As he approached the structure, he observed a bright light near the ground behind the structure. He also observed an object that he at first thought was a helicopter. As he came closer, he observed that it was not a helicopter, but a round disk shaped object. When he attempted to radio for backup, he found that his radio was not functioning. He approached the object on foot armed with a shotgun, and the object thereupon took off in a vertical direction at high speed.

22 August, 1980

Three other unnamed Security Guards observed a light over Coyote Canyon that behaved in a similar manner as the one seen on 8 August. Coyote Canyon is part of a large restricted test range used by the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, Sandia Laboratories

The truth is out there my people!

Check Out:

Tales of the Unexplained - The Rougarou Roams The Bayous of Louisiana

Tales of the Unexplained - The Texas Big Bird Of 1976

Anime Classics - Venus Wars (1989)

Venus Wars is a true classic in Japanese Animation. Both the story and animation are truly before their time. The film is in the upper level of the genre. Japanese Anime first really gained popularity in the United States with the release in the mid 1980's of an Americanized version the Macross Series known to most as Robotech. This was the beginning of an underground fan base that began to gobble up all titles that crossed the Pacific. Titles were scarce at first but soon the overwhelming demand led to more titles being released in America. I first learned of Venus Wars from an 1998 issue of Newtype Magazine I purchased at a local comic shop. I wasn't until 1994 when the Sci-Fi Channel ran the movie during their annual Japanese Animation Marathon that I first saw the film. I was amazed at what I saw. The film to this day remains one of my favorite movies of all time.

In the year 2003, a collision with the giant comet has transformed the surface of the planet Venus. In the year 2089, Venus has been colonized and divided into two continents, Ishtar and Aphrodia. Susan Sommers, a bubbly reporter from Earth, travels to Venus hoping to get a scoop on the military tensions that have arisen between the two nations. She arrives in the Aphrodian capital of Io shortly before the city is invaded by the forces of Ishtar, led by General Donner.

Meanwhile, a brutal, Rollerball-esque racing game is being held in a local stadium. One team, the Killer Commandos, is led by hotshot Hiro Seno. The game is disrupted by the invasion and the team quickly evacuates. Hiro's teammate Will picks up Sue on the way and takes her to the garage where the rest of the team is lying low. The invasion of Io is completed in one day, and the politicians, police, and press submit to Ishtar's authority. The city is put under martial law and a curfew imposed. Many of Io's citizens, including Hiro's girlfriend Maggy, try to pretend that nothing has changed since the invasion, but Donner's iron grip on the city is too tight to ignore.

Hiro visits his teammate Jack, who's staying in his uncle's high rise apartment. However, the police see them as trespassers and lead an unprovoked assault against Hiro. He makes a daring escape from their custody, but not unscathed; his leg is pierced by a bullet and he barely makes it to Maggy's home before he collapses. She tends to his wounds, and Hiro shares a few secrets about his past. A photograph of Maggy's father's spurs memories of the farm where he was raised; Hiro reveals that many of the terra-forming farms funded by the Aphrodian government were frauds simply meant to secure land away from Ishtar. That their crops continually kept failing since the plants couldn't endure the constantly changing weather conditions of the planet (despite convincing claims from so-called government sources)! He bitterly notes on how only the politicians made any money out of this situation, that all governments are corrupt, and expresses his frustration and anger at the state of the world. His words trouble Maggy; so much so, that she bursts into tears and collapses into his arms in a crying fit! Hiro comforts her, leading to both sharing an embrace and a passionate kiss. The moment is ruined when her father returns from work; Hiro is ushered into a back room and overhears the ensuing conversation. Maggy's father is a bureaucrat, and he's pulling strings to have the two of them evacuated out of Io as he did with her brother and mother. Maggy is horrified at the thought of abandoning her friends and defiantly stands up for them against her livid father (who views them as just self-centered adrenaline junkies), before he furiously shouts her into silence as Hiro secretly storms out.

Meanwhile, Miranda of the Killer Commandos discovers that their manager, Gary, has been secretly smuggling arms into the city. Raiding his cache, she reveals her plan to demolish the Ishtar tanks that are parked in the old stadium. Gary says that the Commandos would be fools to try such a suicidal mission, but Hiro likes the idea and inspires his teammates. The Killer Commandos lead an assault against the tanks, but underestimate the strength of Ishtar's military. Jack and Gary are killed in the melee, and Hiro nearly shares their fate. At the last minute, however, the team is saved by the Aphrodian Freedom Force, which had also been planning to attack the stadium that night.

Sue and the Killer Commandos are forcibly recruited by Lt. Kurtz, who thinks that their skills as monobikers would be useful in his Bloodhound Squadron. Tensions run high among the Killer Commandos and the team is divided; Will and Sue think that it's important to fight for Aphrodia's freedom, but Hiro and Miranda want nothing to do with war. Will is called out on a mission and Sue begs him to take her along. He instead convinces her to wire her camera to his monobike so he can film their attack. But to Sue's horror, Will disappears in battle. Sue steals a buggy to search for him on the battlefield, only to stumble upon the terrible truth of his death.

Upset over Will's fate, Hiro and the Commandos demand to be freed from the Freedom Force's custody. Lt. Kurtz and Hiro quickly strike up an animosity, and Kurtz challenges Hiro to a race across a ravine in their monobikes. Despite having a ten second head start, Hiro is taken out by Kurtz. Nevertheless, Kurtz is impressed by Hiro's raw talent, and makes him a deal: he will release the Killer Commandos on the condition that Hiro joins the Bloodhound Squadron. Hiro grudgingly accepts his offer, and says goodbye to Miranda and his friends.

Back in Io, General Donner is visited by Sue, who requests an interview with him for the Independent Press on Earth. Once alone with him, Sue pulls a gun and threatens to kill him in order to avenge Will and all the other innocent people who have died in the war. She fails to release the safety however, and is quickly disarmed and arrested. Displaying his sadism Gerhard accosts Sue, snatches away her firearm, then discharges her pistol inches from the side of her head, before putting it to her skull and pulling the trigger, cruelly revealing he's used up all the bullets.

Kurtz leads the Bloodhound Squadron in a surprise and intense strike on Io. Kurtz is disabled, but Hiro manages, through sheer luck and skill, to corner Donner's tank and destroy it by getting Gerhard to fire on him (raging that he shall not be beaten by children), with his shots missing Hiro and striking a runway that collapses ontop of (a screeching with frustration) Gerhard in his tank. With their leader dead, the Ishtar forces are quickly disbanded and Aphrodia is freed from their control. Kurtz and Hiro end their animosity and Kurtz gives Hiro his monobike as a sign of goodwill. While driving through the streets, Hiro encounters the recently released Sue, who's being evacuated to Earth. She thanks him for all of his help, and he tells her to come back and visit Venus again.

Following Sue's tip, Hiro makes the long trek to a refugee camp; there, he and Maggy are happily reunited (thanks to her Siamese cat Andrew). Back on Earth, Sue has given a world exclusive on the Venus Wars. She plans to spend her vacation on Venus so she can rejoin her friends.

Venus Wars (1989)

Aka: Uinasu senki (1989)

Directed By: Yoshikazu Yushiko

Written By: Yuichi Sasamoto and Yoshikazu Yashiko

Cast:

Anna Alba as Maggy

Bradley Cole as Will

Jocelyn Cunningham as Miranda

William Dufries as Kurtz

Ben Fairman as Hiro

Dencia Fairman as Sue

Peter Marinker as Donner

Michael Morris as Rob

Bob Sessions as Gary

Runtime: 102 Minutes

Color: Color

Sound: Dolby