Although Sunday’s preseason pairing between the Denver Broncos and the Houston Texans aired locally on Channel 31, coverage was actually provided by the NFL Network, a venture owned and operated by the National Football League. This fiduciary relationship may explain why the broadcast team of Spero Dedes and Sterling Sharpe…
Many mistakes in newspaper stories are minor: misspelled words, transposed numbers on an address, etc. Others rise to a more elevated level — but precious few scale the heights of unfortunateness reached by an item in the August 24 Rocky Mountain News. The gaffe in question was contained in a…
John Mark Karr finally made it to Colorado yesterday, thanks to a Beech King Air turboprop that Governor Bill Owens sometimes uses — and for connoisseurs of foolish media behavior, the way he got here was half the fun. As documented in this amusing Rocky Mountain News article, much of…
The JonBenet Ramsey-obsessed Denver dailies have spilled more ink about handwriting in the past three days than they probably did in the previous three years. On August 22, the Rocky Mountain News published a piece that ballyhooed Texas-based handwriting pro Curt Baggett’s near-certainty that suspect John Mark Karr had penned…
Rory Vaden does not believe in luck. More than anything else, he believes in discipline. It’s his mantra, his ethos, the single factor responsible for everything that he has achieved so far in his young life, and for everything that he will achieve. In a blog entry on www.disciplinedynamic.com, his…
You might think it’s hard for a 24-year-old who doesn’t binge-drink or do drugs and is staying celibate until marriage to relate to the rest of Gen Y. But Rory Vaden is down, as evidenced by this April 12 entry on his blog, titled “Discipline of Rap”: Believe it or…
There was never any danger of the Rocky Mountain News underplaying the August 16 arrest of alleged child-porn fan John Mark Karr in the 1996 slaying of JonBenét Ramsey. After all, the paper’s previous coverage of this tragic episode had exhibited all the quiet subtlety of Celine Dion at a…
As the rest of the country watched Last Comic Standing, fell in love with Josh Blue and on August 9 voted him the winner, the people of Denver thought one thing: “Isn’t that the same Josh Blue who appeared on the cover of Westword a year ago?” Trust me, that’s…
Viva La Slammer Although the folks at ManiaTV! haven’t stopped inviting guests to appear on their Internet-television station, no one would blame them if they did. On August 14, the Denver-based outfit abruptly canceled a telethon with former Saved by the Bell oddball Dustin “Screech” Diamond; ManiaTV! reps had been…
“That was a perfect ball!” exclaims Steve Bigari as his bowling ball, customized in orange flames, rockets up his lane and sends all ten of his pins pirouetting through the air with a satisfying crack. “There’s a lot of move to it, man!!” Bigari’s eyes gleam, just like they used…
Slam Bam It was the ultimate steel-cage death match — but with performance poetry. “It’s all these eccentric artists that get together, and a lot of times there are some pretty big egos that get involved,” explains Ebony “Isis” Booth, one of the five members of the Denver Slam Team…
Ziggy the Pinhead Marley’s ghost: In the cover blurb for Joel Warner’s Evan Hecox story (“On Target,” August 17), you list several people who’ve recently inked deals with Target. But you forgot the most offensive one. As anyone who is forced to listen to KBCO knows, the money-grubbing, talentless son…
Yesterday’s More Messages blog focused on a Rocky Mountain News article that ballyhooed a statement by handwriting pro Curt Baggett, who claimed to be “99.9 percent certain” that John Mark Karr, the main suspect in the JonBenet Ramsey murder case, had penned a ransom note found in the Ramsey’s home…
As noted in an August 21 blog, the Rocky Mountain News doesn’t seem terribly interested in evenhandedness when it comes to its current coverage of the JonBenet Ramsey case, and suspect John Mark Karr’s alleged involvement. Today’s edition adds more evidence to support this opinion, thanks to a prominently featured…
The first time around, much of the reportage the Rocky Mountain News lavished upon the JonBenet Ramsey murder was cringe-inducing — and so it goes again. In the early years of the investigation, the paper was criticized in many quarters for kowtowing to John and Patsy Ramsey, JonBenet’s under-the-umbrella-of-suspicion parents,…
Turns out that John Mark Karr wasn’t the first person to be fingered by CU prof Michael Tracey in connection with the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. And as this report from New Times, our partner paper in Broward/Palm Beach, Florida, shows, Tracey’s identification of that suspect was even more suspect…
Is the John Mark Karr case headed for a ditch? That’s hard to say — especially for those of us who actually see avoiding a rush to judgment as a good idea, rather than a slogan to cover up, well, a rush to judgment about Karr’s guilt or innocence in…
The concert business in Denver just got a hell of a lot more interesting. After last month’s announcement that Live Nation planned to acquire House of Blues, things had calmed down — but now a tidal wave looks to be forming on the horizon, one that could have epochal implications…
Just back from Boulder district attorney Mary Lacy’s press conference, which was hurriedly scheduled following the arrest in Bangkok, Thailand, of John Mark Karr, who’s been identified as a suspect in the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey. The scene itself was quite comic, and I plan to write more about…
As noted in this June blog item, Patsy Ramsey’s death a couple of months back, and the press coverage that followed it, seemed more like a temporary flashback to the first generation of tabloid-TV stories than a full-scale revival of interest in the 1996 death of Boulder tot JonBenet Ramsey,…
Evan Hecox looks a little lost standing in the red-and-white-hued world of the Arvada South SuperTarget, amid aisle after aisle of Jimi Hendrix beach towels, seventeen-piece kitchen sets, Lean Cuisine ice cream flavors, cashmere turtlenecks, HD-ready LCD TVs, iPod Nanos and Captain Morgan board shorts. He’s looking for a lamp,…
“I guarantee you, if we don’t get our liquor licenses because of anything you write, not only will your fucking paper be sued, but you will be sued personally. Everything you own will be gone.” Thus began my strange trip into the many worlds of Scottie Ewing. The former professional…
