Dastardly Mr. Spacky

“Sometimes,” observes Sara Horle, “the people who you trust the most are trying to kill you.” That’s her short synopsis of Mr. Spacky…The Man Who Was Continuously Followed by Wolves, the inaugural effort (produced by Horle) of the Catamounts, a Boulder-based performance group founded by Amanda Berg-Wilson, freshly back in…

Raise a Glass to Colorado Beer Week

Colorado Beer Week, a new eight-day celebration of the state’s craft brewers, began on April 8, but there are still plenty of events left, even if the details of some of them may change up until the last minute (keep an eye on the event website). Today’s $150 Birdies &…

Groovy Gravy

The ice cream flavor that Ben & Jerry’s famously named after hippie icon Wavy Gravy provides a surprisingly apt simile for Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie, last year’s documentary about the Woodstock-era activist: Both are sweet, both are full of nuts (wokka-wokka) and neither has a lick of substance…

Get Twisted With Spike and Mike

Spike and Mike’s Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation has been impressing, enlightening and grossing out audiences for 21 years, but that doesn’t mean it has run out of steam. While the early days of the festival were marked by the talents of Bill Plympton, Mike Judge, Matt Stone and…

Lady Parts

Some might say that feminism is dead, but the Museum of Contemporary Art’s annual lecture series, Feminism & Co., says otherwise. The semi-regular examinations of art, culture, sex and politics delve into issues relating to women and gender using film, creative performances, discussions and more. This season, Feminism & Co…

Very Young Girls

Tonight at Bindery|space, the at-risk-youth outreach organization Prax(us) will screen Very Young Girls, a film documenting the lives of teenage girls who have fallen victim to forced domestic labor and sex trafficking — with the result often being that they are tried in criminal court as adults for prostitution. The…

All Hail the Tartan!

Rob Roy is about as Scottish as they come. For one thing, there’s actual bagpipe music playing in the background when he talks on the phone. For another, he shares a name with one of the most famous Scotsmen of all time (famous enough, anyway, to have a cocktail named…

Eating, Drinking and Giving

Six years ago, Paul Reilly, executive chef/owner of Encore on Colfax, and his wife, Shannon, had triplet boys, all of whom were born prematurely and, sadly, passed away from complications. To pay homage to their boys, Paul and Shannon, along with several of Denver’s top chefs – Matt Selby (Vesta…

Gettin’ Snuggied

Nothing assuages the guilt of getting inappropriately hammered more than doing it for a cause – and at the third annual Snuggie Pub Crawl, you’ll be helping the Multiple Sclerosis Society and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Denver. “If there’s a cause to rally around and some free beer, people…

Taste of Vail

Vail is renowned for its snow bunnies, air kissing, celeb-spotting on the slopes and star chef Kelly Liken, a Season 7 contestant on Bravo’s Top Chef and this year’s headliner for Taste of Vail, a three-day culinary orgy of food and wine that uncorks today in Vail Village. The festival…

Tune In, Turn On, Share the Link

The TED Talks date back to the 1984 international Technology, Entertainment, Design conference; these days they’re viral-media gold, thanks to the widespread sharing of the brief “ideas worth spreading” lectures online, and they’re also moving from global to local appeal with independently organized events like today’s TEDxMileHigh. “When TED started…

Very Hungry Bookworms

Don’t be late for this very important date: The twelfth annual International Edible Book Festival & Tea starts today at 4 p.m. at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and the featured authors will be eating their words within the hour. “All the entries are edible books, and for good…

The Numbers Game

You might not think that a particle physicist would be the best person to write a novel about damaged children and the friendship that grows between them over 25 years, but that’s exactly what Paolo Giordano did with The Solitude of Prime Numbers. The story follows Alice and Mattia through…

And the Pitch

“I’m on a crusade,” Jenny Shank admits. “There are a lot of great writers here, but they set their books elsewhere. I’m on a crusade to have them write about Denver. It’s a great city.” And now she’s written a great book set in this city: The Ringer. The novel…

Glenn Beck and Charlie Sheen: Too weird to live, too rare to die

Somewhere in the last couple of years, so gradually it was hard to notice at first, Glenn Beck went from annoying and somewhat menacing to hilarious. While watching Bill O’Reilly remains basically like watching a talk show with the evil trees from The Wizard of Oz except the trees have…

The Phantom Tron Menace Legacy: It’s the same movie

Tron: Legacy, hittin’ the streets on DVD and bluray yesterday, was supposed to be a coup of geekery. A sequel no one really wanted but diehard fans of a box office flop from 1982; it got made anyway — and against all odds, it looked like awesome 3D geeknip. Jeff…

Gratuitous randomness: F*ck!

It’s an interesting little fun fact that the most versatile and flexible word in the English language is also the most obscene; what that says about the culture we live in is an entirely different matter, but we’re going to assert that it’s probably an indication of our collective sexual…

Browser game of the week: Osada

This week’s browser game isn’t really much of a game in a traditional sense, it’s more of an experience. Okay, that sounds really stupid and you can punch us for saying it, but there isn’t a better way to describe Osada. Maybe you could call it an interactive music video,…

Comment of the day: “Do you read? Do you comprehend?”

Whatever your opinions about him — and don’t lie; you have some opinions about him — there’s no doubt that Barry Bonds is one of the most polarizing figures in modern sports, almost universally either revered or reviled. The thing that polarizes people about him is his use of steroids,…