Colorado Gives Day, the 24-hour online charity blitz that won Best Philanthropic Endeavor in our 2011 Best of Denver contest, raised a total of $12.7 million for 928 local nonprofits on December 6 and 7 of this year. So which nonprofits garnered the most donations?…
On December 23, Occupy Denver quietly celebrated three months of loud, tense and occasionally fiery statements downtown. In that time span, the local chapter of the national movement has kept busy — and kept Westword busy — with stories that change not just daily, but hourly. If you’ve been following…
Three Denver Broncos will be going to the Pro Bowl this year — the NFL’s annual all-star game in Hawaii, and all of them, cornerback Champ Baily, defensive end Elvis Dumervil and rookie linebacker Vonn Miller, are deserving of the honor. They’ve been highlight films into themselves, providing defensive sparks…
A former warden at the highest-security prison in the country — the federal supermax prison outside Florence — has some intriguing advice for fixing the nation’s troubled, budget-draining corrections system in the coming year. Intriguing, in part, because some of the changes Robert Hood urges (apparently with a straight face)…
After Occupy Boulder pressured the city for weeks to deny its newly proposed park closure rule, Boulder’s City Council Agenda Committee has opened the issue for a public hearing on January 3. If passed, the proposal will enforce a curfew similar to that of Denver, requiring city parks and recreation…
Geese seem to have become as common in Denver’s winter months as Suburus with ski racks, a situation that Westword’s Kelsey Whipple decided to look into. What she found is that there is a population of Canada geese here who have never even been to their namesake country. They don’t…
An adult goose releases approximately one pound of poop every single day. This fact stays relatively unnoticed until wintertime, when thousands of Canada geese — seemingly overnight — come out of the woodwork and waddle onto your property and into your parking spot. Why are there so many? The truth…
Colorado certainly withstood its share of shmucks, scoundrels and scumbags in 2011, from poorly-behaved celebrities to douchebags in parking lots to public servants and politicians who made us cringe. And you can find their stories in our Shmuck of the Week archives. But the lowest of the low are inducted…
In late November, in the midst of his amazing run of fourth-quarter comebacks, Tim Tebow and Sports Authority Field at Mile High graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, in what we figured would be would be a horrendous continuation of the famed SI curse; in fact, we laid out five…
Environmental leaders who ardently supported Barack Obama in 2008 haven’t had much to celebrate in the past three years, as key pieces of legislation dealing with climate change and controls on the energy industry have been scuttled, diluted or delayed — by a bad economy, an increasingly intransigent Congress, and…
Whether the neighborhood is Highlands Ranch or Highland, nothing causes more talk among the neighbors than a proposal for a big new building — and the plan for a major complex in northwest Denver that will include a five-story “high-rise” has created a veritable tower of babble…
Patrick J. Sullivan Some men take up golf when they retire. Others collect model trains or travel the world. Patrick J. Sullivan, the well-respected, longtime Arapahoe County sheriff, apparently chose another hobby: buying meth and smoking it with men whom he’d bonded out of jail in return for sex. In…
Behaving badly It takes extra effort to get initiated into Westword’s annual Hall of Shame, and not everyone who acts like a shmuck over the course of the year makes the final cut. But some came very, very close. Here’s a list of our Hall of Shame runners-up. (View the…
“Card-Headed,” Kenny Be, December 22 Knit Wits Kenny Be’s holiday greeting cards in the last issue were laugh-out-loud funny. And the cover with Kenny in a Christmas sweater was creative genius! I love it when Westword “needles” the powers-that-be. Dawn Solomon Denver “Dust-Up!,” Patricia Calhoun, December 22 Dust to Dust…
This dispensary has closed. Two years ago, I visited the Greenest Green in Boulder, and my review at the time was what most people would consider less than favorable. So when I heard Greenest Green had opened in Denver, I put it on my must-visit list…
The holiday season is a time of giving, kindness, harmony and joy — or at least, that’s what it should be. But these days, the true essence of the holidays seems to be overwhelmed by crazy amounts of traffic, ridiculous lines at stores, people beating each other over toys, dwindling…
Neighbors surrounding the proposed site of three, five-story apartment towers just north of 32nd Avenue and Lowell Boulevard have made their opposition to the project clear. RedPeak Properties, the developer planning to build the structures, and Tom Wootten, the head of a group that owns the property, have been equally…
We would present this without comment, but we’re not ready for the repercussions. It has been a busy December for Occupy Denver, whose three-month anniversary is tomorrow: thirteen arrests in Loveland, nine at Civic Center Park, fires, Tebowing, a fake death, homeless heckling and a (failed) attempt at a federal…
If you’re not a hardcore NBA fan in Denver you might not have noticed that the league hasn’t played any games yet. There was this whole thing about millionaires and billionaires arguing about how to chop up a few billion dollars. A quick synopsis: it was boring and tedious and…
The conviction of controversy magnet Douglas Bruce on tax evasion charges has touched off some high-pitched gloating on liberal-leaning political websites, as well as the expected musings on the irony of the Taxpayer Bill of Rights godfather getting busted by the tax man. For those who hate TABOR, it’s apparently…
Gerardo Noriega, a 21-year-old Smoky Hill High School graduate, now knows he won’t be deported to Mexico in the near future, but his future is still in limbo. As part of the immigration review pilot program currently underway in Denver, Noriega was granted administrative closure on his immigration case last…
One of the absolute best things to come out of ganja’s quasi-legalized status here in Colorado and other medical marijuana states is the abundance of concentrates now available. It used to be that getting hash in Colorado meant knowing the grower or running into just the right person in the…
