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The nifty ads are hard not to notice, boldly proclaiming: The Cigarette is Dead. They’ve popped up alongside buildings, buses and billboards, directing people to www.QuitDoingIt.com, where smokers can find tools to help them quit. Commissioned by the State Tobacco Education & Prevention Partnership (STEPP), a division of the Colorado…

  The holidays are nearly over, but your state government remembered to renew its annual gift to Colorado taxpayers: furniture made by prisoners. By law, all state agencies, from the Community College of Denver to the unemployment department, are required to buy office furniture from Colorado’s homegrown sweatshops, otherwise known…

Dear Governor Bill, I hear the clamor over who gets to replace Senator Ken Salazar, and I feel your pain. Opportunists are crawling out of the rich woodwork at the statehouse, stumbling off the barstools on Wazee and emerging from lavatories at truckstops, hands still moist from underpowered hot-air dryers,…

Like most Denver football fans, I found the Broncos’ humiliating defeat to the San Diego Chargers last night to be painful in the extreme. But there’s an additional reason why I’m in agony this morning — and it centers on Denver Post editorial page editor Dan Haley, pictured here. Back…

Once upon a time, Anna Hansen was your average blond, pretty, sorta-outdoorsy Colorado girl working as a waitress at Rio Grande in Boulder while attending CU. Four years later, after living abroad for a spell, she gets a job with a non-profit in Vail, takes up competitive mountain biking, starts…

Transubstantiation was what did it for Nate Lappegaard. Raised within the strict dogma of the Catholic Church, Lappegaard was fifteen years old when he argued with a priest over whether he was really consuming the body and blood of Christ during Communion rather than just downing wafers and wine. “I…

“Moovers & Shakers 2008,” Backbeat, December 18 Vocal About Locals Despite the fact that I have been notably critical in the past of some of the local bands that Westword’s music department has deemed worthy of praise, the fact remains that the paper has played a pronounced role in the…

I would like to suggest you report on the inability of Colorado’s unemployed to receive their benefits due to a ‘busy signal’ when trying to call,” Anonymous User wrote Off Limits. “I’ve called over 500 times!” Off Limits limited its attempts to just five, and never got anything other than…

That’s all for us. We’ll take tomorrow to silently lament our families’ sub-par gift-giving efforts (or, in the case of our Jewish colleagues, to mob on some Kung Pow Chicken). We’ll be back in sort-of-full-force on Monday. — Joe Tone…

Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, you have to admit that there’s something lovely about a story of two wanderers seeking shelter and an innkeeper offering up the only space he has left — in his stable, where a woman soon gives birth to a special baby boy. Every year,…

Diana DeGette wants to be Colorado’s first female Senator – maybe – but Denver’s U.S. Representative has gone about making that known in a strangely blunt and abrasive way, namely by calling out Governor Bill Ritter, who will choose a a new one, and by bashing the “chattering class.” In…

New Year’s Eve is almost upon us, which means it’s time for you and all your friends to argue endlessly about what to do, building the night up so much that it can only turn into a major letdown. But! It doesn’t have to be that way. Here, 10 events…

Journalists are an unusual bunch. We complain about our godawful pay and long hours, but we also live for such things. We make fun of all the self-indulgent and pointless press awards we constantly bestow upon each other, but if we don’t get any ourselves, we quietly mope for weeks…

It will be time to start looking forward soon, but first we’ll take one last look back at all the looking back we’ve been doing, with a roundup of our year-end coverage. It was a strange and wonderful and absolutely dogshit year. Let’s relive it…

You’ve read all about Basil the robot and his fancy cybernetic brain; now see him in action. To prove that their mechanical friend is actually capable of delivering delicious liquids (a feat Basil failed to accomplish at his coming-out party at the Wynkoop Brewery, solely because the stupid humans let…

We’ve long known people love the iconic big blue bear that peeks into the Colorado Convention Center (it’s officially titled “I See What You Mean”). Blue bear miniatures have been selling like hotcakes, and, as we uncovered in a tell-all interview, the big blue bear even recently appeared on Good…

Gas is less than half what it was a few months ago, and Xcel is actually planning to lower rates after the new year. But savor those cheap energy prices while you can. Like Santa Claus, painful new hikes are coming to town, probably sooner than later.  One lump of coal…

It’s time to count birds again, and we don’t mean your Thanksgiving and Christmas turkey dinners. The Audubon Society of Greater Denver, in conjunction with local Audubon groups around the nation, is asking its members to count the birds they see in their back yards on New Year’s Day -…

Rocky Mountain PBS said Tuesday it has hired Doug Price as its new president and chief executive officer. He replaces James Morgese, who explained to Westword’s Michael Roberts in August why he was leaving the public television service after fifteen years. A former top executive with First Bank of Colorado…

Is there anything Lance Armstrong can’t do? Not only has the 37-year-old cyclist won the Tour de France a gazillion times, but now CNN is reporting that his steady girlfriend, Anna Hansen, is pregnant without the involvement of medical fertility procedures. Quite a feat for the testicular cancer survivor who…