Congressman Ron Barber faces off against his challenger in next week's Democratic primary, state Rep. Matt Heinz, on the set of Arizona Illustrated. Sparks don't really fly until the final few minutes, when the Heinz criticizes Barber's vote in support of a bill that would allow the Department of Homeland Security to waive environmental laws within 100 miles of the border.

More on the race here.

Check out this tapas menu at the new Tapas Fusion restaurant at 2970 N. Campbell Ave. The lunch menu is no slouch, either.

Plenty of Spanish, Peruvian and other flavors to keep things interesting, and although we haven't seen the portions, the prices seem pretty fair.

Call 647-2418 for reservations or more information.

• David Mendez
• Seen at Beowulf Alley's front door on Aug. 20

Looks as if Downtown Tucson's Beowulf Alley Theatre Company will be closing its doors for a few weeks, at least. My call to the folks at BATC went unanswered as of this writing, so I'll follow back with them and get that news up ASAP.

If you’ve ever been to a local event where there were big, extraordinary puppets, and you thought to yourself, “Who the hell took that much time to make big, extraordinary puppets?”, the answer is Puppets Amongus.

The puppet troupe has been invited to showcase its stuff at the World Puppet Carnival (yes, there is such a thing) next month in Almaty, Kazakhstan. But in order to do so, they need to raise the dough it will cost to get them there—which means this week we get treated to a preview of the show they’ll be performing there.

Puppets Amongus will be performing its Day of the Dead-themed show, El Sueño de Frida—a tribute to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera—at the event, with musical accompaniment from Jimmy Carr, who will also perform with his band The Awkward Moments. The Silver Thread Trio rounds out the bill. If you’re debating whether to bring the kiddies along, here’s a note from the puppet masters: “This show is most appropriate for mature audiences due to artistic, puppet romance scenes. However, many children do enjoy the show, depending on parental discretion.”

The benefit for Puppets Amongus takes place at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 25, at the Rogue Theatre, 300 E. University Blvd., Suite 150. Tickets are $20 and available in advance by calling 628-1309. For more info, call 444-5538, or send an email to [email protected].

Oh man, that laugh.

From the Associated Press:

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Phyllis Diller, the housewife turned humorist who aimed some of her sharpest barbs at herself, punctuating her jokes with her trademark cackle, died Monday morning in her Los Angeles home at age 95.

"She died peacefully in her sleep and with a smile on her face," her longtime manager, Milton Suchin, told The Associated Press.

She was a staple of nightclubs and television from the 1950s — when female comics were rare indeed — until her retirement in 2002. Diller built her stand-up act around the persona of the corner-cutting housewife ("I bury a lot of my ironing in the back yard") with bizarre looks, a wardrobe to match (by "Omar of Omaha") and a husband named "Fang."

"I was one of those life-of-the-party types," Diller told The Associated Press in 1965. "You'll find them in every bridge club, at every country club. People invited me to parties only because they knew I would supply some laughs. They still do."

The Loft brings you some chilling cinema based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft tonight with a double feature of Whisperer in the Darkness and The Call of Cthulhu. Both movies were created by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

Salon reviews Whisperer in the Darkness:

Nicely paced and decently acted — there’s no question that the more naturalistic demands of the talkie pose some challenges—“Whisperer in Darkness” has a chiller-diller conclusion and some moments of real terror. (Along with its not especially terrifying, but potentially delicious, mind-reading seafood villains from space.)

More details from the Loft here.

People who know a lot more about coffee than I do say the newish Exo Roast Co. has the best espresso in town. That's no small distinction, either, being that we have a number of excellent coffee roasters across the city.

The roaster and coffee shop, located at 403 N. Sixth Ave., imports green coffee from around the world and roasts it in small batches. Many people have called this business model the "third-wave" of American coffee. I think Folgers was the first wave and Starbucks was the second.

In any event, local coffee nuts are raving about what Exo Roast Co. is cranking out. It's located in the same historic building that will soon house Tap + Bottle, too, so you'll soon be able to conveniently shop for liquor and caffeine while supporting local merchants.

The Southern Arizona Arts and Cultural Alliance's annual Salsa/Tequila Challenge takes place this Saturday, Aug. 25, at La Encantada.

The Salsa Culinary Challenge starts at 5 p.m., and nearly 20 restaurants have signed up. Tickets are $20, which includes massive samplings and performances by Ballet Folklorico La Paloma and Tesoro. Beer costs extra, but will be available.

The Tequila Challenge starts at 6 p.m. Tons of local restaurants—from newcomers like Elliott's on Congress to old dogs like Acacia—will try to wow the crowd with the delicious and unique tequila cocktails they conjure up. Tickets are $70, which include samples of the cocktails and paired small plates by the participating restaurants; tastings of various tequilas; live music; and the salsa-tasting event.

Sounds like a blast, and, hey, all the money made goes to SAACA and the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona. Find more information and tickets over yonder.

As regular readers know, James DiGiovanna is the Weekly's former film critic who won so many awards that he was the consensus pick as the best film critic in an Arizona newspaper.

But a year or two ago, the selfish bastard retired his reviewing pen to focus on his "career." He wanted to do something that "paid well." He wanted a "life."

Pfft.

Anyway, he just wrote a film review, after a bunch of his friends asked him for his thoughts on Prometheus.

It’s loaded with ridiculous bad science like the dumbest of low-brow sci-fi, but it keeps hitting you with high-brow visuals. It’s an incomprehensible amalgam only because it’s such an unprecedented conglomeration of high and low. It’s also, for my money, tremendously entertaining. It’s the rare movie that you laugh at while simultaneously admiring. It’s a, I dunno, horror-comedy-art film-bad movie?

Meanwhile, I will continue my quest to get James to abandon his philosophy career and return to low-wage film freelancing. Wish me luck.

Image courtesy of earthobservatory.nasa.gov

If you thought, between sudden rain showers, this July was insanely hot this year, you'd have something in common with climate scientists.

That chart up top is heatmap of last month's temperature anomalies compared to the combined average July temps from 1951 through 1980.

The conclusion? Things have been getting pretty toasty lately, which what NASA blames for why the world's weather has gone wacky.

“‘Climate dice,’ describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons, have become more and more ‘loaded’ in the past 30 years, coincident with rapid global warming,” [NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies director] James Hansen and colleagues wrote. “The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased....We can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.”

Interestingly, it appears that temperatures in Southern Arizona didn't deviate too much from the norm — maybe an average increase of a degree, at most — but the weather continues to be scorching, both here and in Phoenix.