I’ve never been a good test-taker. I get nervous during an exam, overthinking the simple questions and replaying entire episodes of DuckTales in my head during the difficult ones. Sometimes, for no real reason, I’ll just have a good cry. In high school, when the AP tests fell on top…
When longtime newspaperman Randy Miller took over the Colorado Daily in 2001, the venerable Boulder publication was in shaky financial shape — but what a difference four years make. Today’s Daily is a much more mainstream paper than it was during its radical ’70s and ’80s heyday, and a more…
On a Monday afternoon in early March, the Johnson & Wales University athletic department buzzed with activity. Tom Pancoe, assistant athletic director, sports information director and sole team trainer, shoved Ace wraps, bandages and athletic tape into a boxy black travel bag. “I have to call the airlines to make…
Alma Mutter Course correction: In her March 3 “Collision Course,” Patricia Calhoun neatly skewers the University of Colorado from all directions, and rightly so, I suppose. But at a certain point, I guess I start to feel a little sympathy for my poor beleaguered alma mater. Okay, I admit it:…
If it was 11 p.m. instead of 11 a.m. and the students were toting keg cups of Icehouse rather than buckets of cleaning solution, the scene could have been mistaken for a total rager. Two hundred college kids packed the old Sigma Pi house, everyone sweaty, spilling out on the…
Last week, in a splendid illustration of the intertwined relationship between booze and campus life, the University of Colorado hosted an alcohol-education program at Coors Events Center. When a speaker asked how many people had attended an anti-binge drinking presentation before, everyone in the audience of roughly 700 students raised…
Commerce City is a strange place to go in search of your identity. Last fall, Yvonne Lucero was driving north on Brighton Boulevard, past the rendering-plant spires leaking steam and stench, thinking about how to confront her impersonator. Are you Yvonne Lucero? she would ask. The 26-year-old nursing student wondered…
It looked like eight angels had descended from heaven and landed in front of the Beauvallon, of all places. For a week, the eight-foot-tall Carrera marble sculptures gazed upon the fancy loft/retail project and all the traffic passing by on Lincoln Street, plucking their lyres and waiting for rapture. Meanwhile,…
Back before What’s So Funny was able to parlay writing C- comedy into a regular paying gig, this savant scribe of the nation’s finest dick jokes was a substitute teacher for Denver Public Schools. It was while subbing for a class of Spanish-speaking first-graders that I was asked a baffling…
Another big-league baseball season is all but upon us, and the prelude is decorated with the usual fond hopes — even in Denver and Tampa. But the game seems more deeply troubled than ever. Players shooting steroids. Barry Bonds on the verge of murder at a press conference. The Damn…
It was a bad week for Adrienne Anderson. On February 3, the environmental-studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she’s taught for eleven years, was informed that she wouldn’t be reappointed to her post. The following morning, after a night during which Anderson says “I was unable…
The Big Boom Theory Hunter drops Dobson: I have never paid a lot of attention to The City, by Derf, before, but the March 3 comic about how Hunter S. Thompson really died was perfect. If only it were true! RIP, HST. Brian Moriarty Aurora The Mystery of Pi Frat…
Terry Graham arrived at the immigration-reform forum late, when things were already heating up. She slid into the back row of seats in the North High School auditorium and listened as a man in the audience charged that the panel was skewed with open-border activists. The man was invited up…
The torrential downpour has slowed to a wet murmur, but Haylar Garcia doesn’t trust that the storm’s really over. He’s calling from inside a 1983 Toyota RV, which he and his crew — Damon Scott and Jeff Deel — have nicknamed “The Turtle.” At the moment, the reptilian vehicle is…
Not long after David Mallamo arrived at Mount View Detention Center last August, he made lists of weapons he wanted to build into an arsenal and lists of people he wanted to kill. He wrote a letter instructing a staff member to go to his parents’ house, “cut all phone…
“The Gates” are now closed in New York City, where for sixteen days in February, Central Park was adorned with 7,500 saffron-colored panels by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. That leaves just one “artworks in progress” on the artists’ website (www.christojeanneclaude.net): the long-promised “Over the River,” which proposes to drape fabric panels…
Any Denverite worth his weight in infrequently used outdoor-adventure gear was at the first Colorado Rockies home game on April 9, 1993. If your parents were too lazy to get tickets or too strict to pull you out of school that afternoon, you’re allowed to do something to punish them,…
Tony Marquette says he grew up listening to Tom Martino on Denver radio. So when it came time to choose a contractor to install new flooring and tile in his Centennial house last year, he selected one from Martino’s website, www. roubleshooter.com, which charges businesses sizable sums to be on…
A few years ago, I started to notice clumps of scruffy-looking young men loitering around the parking lot of my favorite snowboarding hill, Loveland. Their arrival was in synch with my departure: My weekend strategy had been to arrive early and then leave after four good hours, hoping to beat…
Funky, Funky Broadway Street dreams: The February 17 “Give Our Regards to Broadway,” put forth by a staff of fine writers, was great. We live in old Englewood and can enjoy firsthand the variety that the boulevard offers in just a five-minute walk. One slowly comes to appreciate what relatively…
By the time Arvada native Christine Pomponio-Pate arrives at the prestigious Arnold bodybuilding show in Columbus, Ohio, in early March, she’ll have been intensively preparing her physique for close to four months. Her body-fat percentage will be near 9 percent — between a half and a third of that of…
Bosses pick up Juan Lopez Gutierrez for quick jobs. He landscapes or builds houses. He paints walls and lays floors. Different men pick him up in different trucks for different gigs every week. He tries to avoid getting stiffed his pay. He looks for the company’s name, the business address…
