Bizarre. Jerry Rice walks through the Broncos’ spring locker room, courteously introducing himself to teammates who were second-graders when he won the first of his three Super Bowl rings. It’s like Bruce Springsteen falling by to trade riffs with your kid’s garage band. Surreal. Rice announces, “Hi, I’m Jerry Rice”…
Hick Up Bore no more: Patricia Calhoun, why don’t you leave the city? Westword has a number of fine writers on staff, chiefly Michael Roberts, Adam Cayton-Holland, Jason Sheehan and Dave Herrera, but your own column is the most boring, predictable and vitriolic part of the paper. Your June 2…
He slams into the practice mat for the eighty-ninth time. An integral part of Aikido training is ukemi, learning how to receive a blow and take a fall. So Jason Austad gets up for the eighty-ninth time and faces his attacker — who slams him to the ground again. Then…
Has there been pressure put on Barbara Inman Beall, Ph.D., to take down her website, www.jamesdeanadventures.com? Of course. When you dedicate an entire site to the wacky photo-adventures of Hollywood’s most famous rebel without a cause using your enormous doll collection to advance the plots, you’re inevitably going to ruffle…
Fetish-party promoter Christiaan Howard is suddenly without a location for his seventh annual Erotik-a, which had been scheduled for July 1 at the Gothic Theatre but was canceled by the venue’s owner, Steve Schalk. “The event definitely dabbles in the gray area when it comes to nudity and all those…
Tosh Berman knew that running Donkey Den, which opened just last month at 1109 Lincoln Street, would be a kick. He just didn’t know that protesters would kick back, right in his assets. They’ve lined up outside for the past two weekends, urging customers to boycott a place they claim…
Look, What’s So Funny had a pretty busy weekend, okay? First there was our birthday party, which was a total mess. Melo showed up and we had to be like, “You know the rules, Melo. If you wanted to come, you should have invited us to your party. We thought…
A couple of weeks ago, Stephen Meade, who’s known to listeners of hard-rocking KBPI-FM as Willie B. , received a complaint call about afternoon jock Greg “Uncle Nasty” Stone. “This lady said, ‘Let me speak to the program director,’ and I said, ‘This is Willie,'” he recalls. “She said, ‘Willie…
Chunk Foster graduated more than a decade ago from the University of Wyoming with a degree in communications, and when a friend jokingly recommended that they head to Florida to caddy for a season, he signed on without a second thought. It was just the sort of half-work, half-goof gig…
Girl, Interrupted Society’s child: I’m not a big fan of Westword, and I’m not a big fan of stories that are written about people who are down and out for the exclusive purpose of advancing a political agenda. That said, I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed reading…
Baby Girl got deep into the game. She calls the women who bought crack from her “mommies”; the homeless men on the corners are “uncles.” Everyone on the lookout for crack along Colfax knows Baby G, everyone from the dope man to the hustlers, the hookers, the crackheads and the…
The Chrysalis Project is the latest in a long line of innovative city programs designed to deal more effectively with miscreants, and at the same time de-clutter courtrooms and free up jail space. Denver was the first jurisdiction in the country to devote a courtroom to domestic-violence restraining orders, and…
Perky right-wing pinup Ann Coulter – seen on the cover of Time the same week the mag named John Hickenlooper one of the country’s top five mayors — is now pushing Jon Caldara. A recent pitch letter from the Independence Institute came with a return envelope boasting a Ronald Reagan…
For the most part, What’s So Funny is content to leave the reporting to the reporters. While seasoned journalists here like to go out on “assignment,” track down “leads” and “avoid plagiarism,” What’s So Funny is content to just hang around the office, popping painkillers and teasing the kids at…
While the media’s rules of engagement aren’t set in stone, there is general agreement among journalists that story subjects shouldn’t be allowed to see any portion of an article prior to publication. But with “Early Exit: Denver’s Graduation Gap,” a sprawling series that ran from May 16 to 20, the…
It had to compete for face time with the Indy 500, a Cubs-Rockies slugfest at Wrigley Field and the Memorial Day cookout in Uncle Elmer’s back yard. But the Colorado Crush’s first-ever home playoff game, against the San Jose SaberCats, drew a big enough (and loud enough) crowd Sunday afternoon…
Dream Team Face it: I am very grateful to Patricia Calhoun for bringing some sanity to the controversy over illegal immigration with “Names and Faces,” her column in the May 26 issue. Pablo is just the sort of person we should want in this country. He may not be an…
Mike first began experiencing symptoms within months of returning from the first Gulf War in 1992. They started with the headaches, then muscle cramps and diarrhea — each one debilitating, together pure hell. As an athlete and health nut, he wasn’t used to feeling so sick, so depleted. After all,…
In Legal Muscle, his self-published book about steroids and the law, attorney Rick Collins points out that one sign of law enforcement’s ignorance of steroids can be found in the text of the Anabolic Steroid Control Act, which misspells several anabolic compounds in places and lists others twice under different…
You’d have to have been blind and deaf over the past year to miss what is clearly an epidemic of anabolic steroid use among a certain elite segment of this country’s population. Steroids make their users faster, stronger and bigger — all clear advantages in a line of work that…
As the three skaters crested the hill behind the rec center at 104th Avenue and Sheridan Boulevard, they caught their first view of the newly completed Westminster Skate Park. Immediately they sensed that something was amiss. “Goddamn it,” one sighed. “Aw, man,” lamented another, throwing his board in the dirt…
Joseph Richardson, an investigator with Denver’s parking management division, was patrolling 25th Street in Curtis Park last month when he noticed a green 1993 Suburu Impreza with Texas license plates that he’d immobilized with a parking boot two days earlier. Only now the vehicle was parked five spaces up the…
