“Today we are trying for the Mount Everest of hamburgers,” says Steve Bigari, aiming a confident smile at a TV camera. Bigari is standing in the middle of a drive-thru lane scrubbed so clean the asphalt shines in the morning sunlight. High above, a giant yellow M — the fabled…
Jack Preiss stands outside his McDonald’s in southern Cheyenne, looking up in the air. “What are you doing?” asks a man driving a pickup through a nearby drive-thru lane. “Waiting for hamburgers to fall out of the sky?” Almost. The burgers won’t really be falling from the sky — more…
At 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Friday, October 21, Sherri Daye Scott, editor of QSR Magazine, the trade journal for the quick-service-restaurant industry, and a panel of fast-food luminaries start a much-anticipated webcast. Across the country, executives at Dunkin’ Donuts, Dairy Queen, Steak ‘N Shake, Taco Bell and other…
Peggy Jo Freeman puffs her cigarette to the butt and lights up another as she talks about her four incarcerated sons. She chain-smokes when she’s mad, and right now she’s irate about the state penal system’s latest decision. On November 1, the Colorado Department of Corrections changed the way people…
The flier said 10 p.m. sharp, but by 10 p.m. sharp last Friday, only a handful of pillow fighters had taken up positions on opposite sides of 13th Avenue at Washington Street, in front of Wax Trax. The trash-talking had begun in earnest, though, as the north-siders and south-siders prepared…
There comes a point in everyone’s life when you realize you’ve made it. I recently experienced such a moment. In a scene my future biographers will no doubt reconstruct in the glorious colors of autumn, I found myself standing in Kiki Vandeweghe’s kitchen, swigging cold Pabst Blue Ribbon with Ernie…
“New Owner for Westword.” That was the headline over an October 24 Denver Business Journal item about plans to merge New Times Media, the parent company of this newspaper, with Village Voice Media. And while an argument could be made that the banner wasn’t technically wrong, it’s certainly misleading, as…
Cure for the Common Coal Temperature’s rising: Alan Prendergast’s “Carbon Loading,” in the October 27 issue, was informed and intelligent. It’s good to see an in-depth article on energy issues. We’re all so dependent on fossil fuels, yet their effects are largely invisible, so we ignore the problem. We simply…
It’s an annual rite of fall, right up there with hot cider, Columbus Day trash-talking and Mike Shanahan’s vow to take one game at a time. Between the time the first aspen turns and the probable Halloween slush storm, you can count on Xcel Energy to announce a humongous hike…
The drive for wind power in Colorado got an unexpected boost this month after Xcel Energy announced it was seeking 30 percent hikes in electricity rates because of higher prices for natural gas. (This week, Xcel stated it would seek only a 19 percent increase.) For the first time, the…
“For those of you who made it into Colubrae House, congratulations,” says stone-faced Professor Bloodthorne, head of Colubrae, as he begins his lecture on potions. “For those of you who didn’t, well, nobody’s perfect.” This snide comment wouldn’t seem out of place coming from Professor Severus Snape, the dubious Harry…
All eyes were on Mike Hoover. The 33-year-old autistic man had a typing machine propped in front of him and his mother at his side. The room was silent as Hoover reached his left arm toward his mother’s right hand and pulled it to the keyboard. Leaving his thumb and…
You recognize their stiff shuffle, their coated eyes. The oozing and groaning. You’re paralyzed by the realization that you are in lower downtown — and it’s after last call! You begin to sweat, searching for an escape. But it’s too late. They lurch out from the doorways of Polly Esther’s,…
Looks like you were right about me, Old Man Abernathy, you toothless son of a bitch. I am no farmer. My potato gleaning yielded but ten sickly spuds; my wheat fields were disastrous. My innumerable rows of corn served not as a promising tract of bountiful maize, but as a…
Channel 9 investigative reporter Deborah Sherman knows that complaints come with the territory. But even though she’s spent the past sixteen years as a journalist, and nearly two as a member of the 9News I-Team, she’s never experienced anything quite like a state official’s reaction to her recent piece about…
Mall in the Family Governmess: Many thanks for Jared Jacang Maher’s timely “Malled,” in the October 20 issue. The fierce competition between cities for sales-tax revenue is not confined to the northern metro area, however, as my city, Lakewood, tries to steal shopper dollars from Wheat Ridge, Golden, Arvada and…
“I at least thought we were going to get a couple of down votes,” says Eric Rieken, one of hundreds of residents who packed a Westminster City Council meeting to protest a proposed 200,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter. “But they pretty much discounted everything we said.” Like many newcomers to Colorado, Rieken…
After half a decade of triumphs and tribulations, Breakdown Book Collective is closing up shop. A fluctuating stream of funding and volunteers sustained the activist group’s space for radical literature, lectures, music and community, but there are pitfalls to organizing anarchists and running an anti-capitalist business. The irony isn’t lost…
Last Saturday, New Mexico artist Luis Jimenez was supposed to install his monumental “Mustang” outside the Jeppesen Terminal at Denver International Airport — just eleven years after the sculpture was originally slated to be stabled there. But that deadline, like so many, came and went. “It’s close; progress has been…
Mother of pearl, it’s been one shitstorm after another this week at What’s So Funny. Seems like I can’t even blink without some player from the Nuggets blowing up my cell, begging for tips for the upcoming season. I just have to be like, “K-Mart, listen, you’re so money and…
Most of Gabriel Elizondo’s colleagues at KMGH-TV/Channel 7, where he served as an assignment editor, were supportive when they learned last May that he’d taken a job as a programming producer with Al-Jazeera International, a spinoff of the controversial Arabic network. Still, he concedes, “When an e-mail came out in…
What a Croc! Unsafe at any speed: Regarding Alan Prendergast’s “A Really Big Shoe,” in the October 13 issue: We have seen the future, and it’s cheap, ugly, and insanely popular — but there was one adjective missing from the cover headline: “dangerous.” I was a reluctant fan of Crocs…
