Newt Gingrich is still hunting that giraffe. Three hours each week, the smug Speaker of the House pops up on Knowledge TV–the former Mind Extension University on cable–touting his own peculiar view of history in what is surely the country’s most tedious infomercial (no miracle car wax, no hair extensions,…

When last we heard from Marshall Kaplan, the embattled dean of the Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado at Denver was hinting that the public might not have him to kick around for much longer. No more big community confabs, no more big community controversies fueled…

As homeless go, the folks living along the banks of the South Platte River just west of downtown were never going to be poster children inspiring donations of holiday turkeys. They were hardly the stuff of weepy newspaper columns or wrenching TV news footage, far from the sad families trotted…

Beverly Beuster thought she was set for life. Transferred by Martin Marietta Corp.–now Lockheed Martin–from her hometown of New Orleans to Colorado in 1984, “I planned to be with them until I decided to retire at sixty-five or seventy years of age,” Beuster says. That was another twenty years or…

Get real: If Channel 7 had given it some thought–a commodity as rare as a newscast without a promotional puff piece–the station wouldn’t have mentioned that “pitbull” tag so proudly worn by its new mascot, Natalie Pujo. After all, the last time a local television reporter tangled with pitbulls, she…

Enough. By the time he was on the homestretch of his 1,200-mile tour of the Fourth Congressional District, independent candidate Wes McKinley had had enough of Marvin the mule. Especially since the Greeley Tribune had passed over both the name-party candidates–Democrat Guy Kelley and Republican victor Bob Schaefer–in order to…

Be careful what you wish for. You may get it. On October 1, five years to the day after gambling became legal in three Colorado mining towns whose finances were as shaky as the abandoned houses that dotted their hillsides, the city council of Central City convened in its new…

“A miserable yellow melancholy stream”–that’s how Mark Twain saw the Platte River. In his book Roughing It, Twain described his first encounter with the pathetic little trickle, which fellow travelers had the nerve to say was “up.” If that was so, Twain replied, he’d hate to see it when it…

A gentleman entered a busy florist shop that displayed a large sign that read, “Say it with flowers.” “Wrap up one rose,” he told the florist. “Only one?” asked the florist. “Just one,” the customer replied. “I’m a man of few words.” The laughs are few and far between these…

The Colorado Rockies protect their turf–both on and off the field. When fans trying to avoid opening-day traffic bicycled to Coors Field, the team called the cops, and the bikes–which had been chained to the stadium built with taxpayer money–were impounded. When vendors outside Coors Field began cutting into the…

Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years, give or take an eon. The saga of Colorado special grand jury 89-2 could stretch almost as long. On August 1, 1989, Judge Sherman Finesilver impaneled the state’s first-ever special grand jury, charged with evaluating the evidence seized when the FBI raided the…

At midnight last Thursday, I was on the outside looking in, peering through the windows of the Palm, an establishment that now occupies the old home of Hooters just off the 16th Street Mall. For voyeurs, the scenery tops even that offered by the previous, tight-T-shirt-obsessed tenant: 200 cleaned-up (no…

There’s an ominous shadow hanging over Washington, D.C., and it’s no alien spaceship. The threat to the political status quo springs from a spot much more down-to-earth: Colorado, where third-party challenges are taking off faster than the grosses of this summer’s cinematic blockbuster. On Tuesday, former Governor Richard Lamm ended…

I am sitting in a local bar, and I am thinking that I would like to punch Bruce Willis in the nose. The bar is a block from where the world’s billionth Planet Hollywood will make its debut next year. The 33rd opened in Seattle this past weekend, and according…

You think the Avalanche won big Monday night? The real game begins when the triumphant hockey team’s owner, Ascent Entertainment Group, tries to have its cake and ice it, too, by freezing out any objections to its revamped plans for the Pepsi Center. But if this city’s track record is…

This is Historic Denver Week, which neatly overlaps with National Historic Preservation Week. And so on Thursday, Mayor Wellington Webb is scheduled to speak on the “importance of preserving, renovating and reusing Denver’s historic structures.” He will do so at the newly refurbished Holtze Executive Place on 17th Street. No…

You are at a formal event, in heels and a sequined gown, when nature calls. Does the fact that you have a penis prevent you from using the ladies’ room? Not in Denver, it shouldn’t. But apparently it’s easier to dance backward in a tight dress and high heels than…

In the fall of 1988, life in Denver was anything but a Rocky Mountain high. The economy had been down so long that replacing a perfectly fine airport with a giant public-works project half an hour from downtown seemed like a swell idea. Houses were selling–when they were selling at…

Black Hawk boasts more violent crimes per capita than any other community in Colorado. But the caper the town contemplated last Saturday was completely bloodless. It set out to hijack Central City’s train. Like almost everything else that’s happened to these two adjacent mountain towns since gambling was legalized five…

Rodney Long was at the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., when the spirit “hit” him. It stayed with him on the trip back to Denver, and it’s with him still. “If you go by your heart, you go with your spirit,” he says. “You go in the right direction.”…

When Spicer Breeden crashed into Greg Lopez on March 17, two worlds collided. The ironies piled up quickly. Just a year separated Lopez and Breeden in age; the two had grown up mere miles from each other. And both men were familiar faces in Lower Downtown hangouts–although Breeden frequented the…

Colorado’s political caucuses are often dull affairs–neighborly barn-raising reminders of our state’s origins, when the real action now takes place in banks and boardrooms across town. But the gathering next Tuesday at Loveland’s Monroe Elementary promises to be a true barn-burner. That’s the caucus where Democratic precinct committeeman Tony Brown…