Glendale is a desert, and the man in battered denim is a wandering Jew, identifiable by the fringes hanging below his T-shirt. “I’ve spent a couple thousand hours studying Torah,” he confirms. “It keeps me focused on something other than this pain of mine. Don’t use my name.” His hair…
Despite the deadly hits that dot-com stocks have taken of late, no one’s ready to declare the Internet revolution an overhyped flop — if only because the basic technology works. Nevertheless, it is easier to create a whiz-bang site these days than it is to make money from it, as…
Turn on the television, open the paper or click on the radio, and you’d be hard pressed to avoid seeing/reading about/listening to some athlete selling something. Companies will use jocks to hawk just about anything these days (Ed McCaffrey is an expert on mattresses why?), no matter their age (Dick…
Job Insecurity Kitty letter: Meow! Judging from the depths of the claw marks in her January 11 “The Basement Tapes,” Patricia Calhoun was envious that Linda Chavez, a real columnist (with national credentials), got nominated for a Cabinet position. But Ms. Calhoun needn’t worry about any Guatemalans in her basement:…
Tom Leask waited patiently for years, biding his time, waiting for the word. The folks in the tiny mountain town of Alma, where he lived, didn’t know that Leask was waiting, but they knew he was “off.” An oddball in a place populated with eccentrics, he was the town crazy,…
The state’s insanity cases have involved a range of inviduals who have invoked the defense with varying results. Among them: • Jeffrey Miller, Byers. Killed his newborn son in 1997 by hurling him against the walls and ceiling of his trailer. Claimed “intermittent explosive disorder.” Found guilty, sentenced to life…
Rich Navarro never fought in a war, but he sure knows what it’s like to be in the middle of a dogfight. Navarro enlisted in the Air Force on February 9, 1955 — more than a year and a half after the Korean War ended, and nine days after the…
On January 2, the day after Mayor Wellington Webb said he was looking for a corporate sponsor to partner with the city on next year’s New Year’s Eve bash (conveniently overlooking the fact that one of the obstacles faced by the Mayor’s Millennium Commission in its 2000 fundraising efforts was…
No Denver event in recent memory has received the sort of unleavened media praise that was heaped upon the New Year’s party staged at the 16th Street Mall as 2000 turned to 2001. Even afterward, the press was so eager to please that it happily discarded initial crowd figures from…
No wonder Nolan Ryan is doing painkiller commercials on the boob tube. He’s hurting. After all, in his waning playing days back in the 1980s, the poor guy had to scrape by on a couple million bucks a year and live in a place with just nine bedrooms. Think of…
The Big Bang Theory Happy goo year: The city of Denver may not have collapsed into a “jellylike mass” at midnight on December 31, but it looks like Patricia Calhoun herself turned into a pile of goo. I always enjoy her columns poking fun (or worse) at Wellington Webb and…
The students stand around the steel tables of the Cooking School of the Rockies’ professional kitchen. Before them are rows of plates containing the preliminary versions of dishes that will be served at the school’s biannual gala — designed as both a fundraiser for Boulder’s Community Food Share and a…
For the most part, the mood at the Colorado State Board of Education’s last work session of 2000 is polite, collegial, even chummy. Until the end, that is. The change takes place with the final item on the December 13 agenda, a typically offbeat resolution proposal by Patti Johnson, whose…
INCOMING Evie Hudak: As a teacher with about two decades of experience, Hudak, a Democrat from Arvada who will fill the seat vacated by Patti Johnson, has spent plenty of time in the educational trenches — and rather than getting away from this subject during her off hours, she’s regularly…
It’s still possible to see justice done — as long as somebody pays the attorneys. Coloradans who spent weeks, sometimes months, sometimes even years waiting for US West to install new telephone lines will soon be eligible for credits on their telephone bills, thanks to a class-action lawsuit filed back…
Left for Dead, Jailed for Good Sharon Conner found her eighteen-year-old son, Alan, shot dead in the parking lot of an Aurora King Soopers on October 15, 1998. Two years and two months later, she told an Arapahoe County jury what she’d seen that morning. She didn’t look at her…
Had the Rocky Mountain Arsenal produced a 2001 version of the slick, award-winning wildlife calendar that it’s published since the late 1980s, it would have been appropriate to feature a different sarin gas bomblet every month instead of the usual pictures of deer, foxes and eagles. After all, over the…
The Days of Whine and Poses Eve us alone: Well, well. With “2001: A Spaced Odyssey,” in the December 21 issue, once again Crusadin’ Calhoun comes out of her corner swinging with another whining diatribe about the fact that last New Year’s Eve, Mayor Wellington Webb had the Denver police…
Mile High bigwigs like to think of Denver as “the city that has reinvented itself for the 21st century.” At least, that’s how they touted it in a 24-page, $370,000 ad supplement in the September edition of Forbes ASAP magazine. Headlined “Convergence Corridor: Technology With Altitude,” the insert was part…
Willie B. The “B” in Willie B. Hung must stand for “butthead,” because the KBPI morning DJ, whose real name is Stephen Meade, can’t seem to stop doing idiotic things. He and fellow DJs Darren McKee (D-Mak) and Marc Stout made a big splash in September when they led an…
Rolling Down the River Rod and real: Steve Jackson’s “The River’s Edge,” the December 21 conclusion of his “River” series, was a good article, about real problems of real people. Is Westword becoming a real publication? Yes, this is meant as a compliment: I really do appreciate non-weird and non-sordid…
DON’T FEED THE ANIMALS In July, the Boulder City Council approved an ordinance substituting the term “pet guardian” for “pet owner” in the city’s books. The change, which carries no legal value, was made at the request of the Humane Society of Boulder Valley, whose members believe it will foster…
