It’s not that Jack Pappalardo means to be a party pooper, but a year ago, a river of booze was running through the monthly First Friday celebration at Denver’s ArtDistrict on Santa Fe, and the district’s 55 members finally stopped serving free drinks in order to reverse what had become…
White guilt is a funny thing. On the one hand, it can inspire you to altruistic heights as you plant bulbs in the community garden, tutor bilingual elementary-school children or, at the very least, tone down your hurling of racial slurs. But on the other hand, it can be used…
The Mountain Regional Barista Competition champion will be someone who is a master of their coffee,” says Mike Strumpf. He’s standing authoritatively on a stack of empty wooden pallets in Solé Roasters’ cavernous coffee-roasting facility in Boulder as roughly two dozen local baristas and other coffee professionals listen in. The…
I never really had any intention of leaving,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jim Sheeler, who recently resigned from the Rocky Mountain News in order to take a position at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “The Rocky’s been a great place for me, and the staff is incredibly friendly.” After…
The State of Colorado has managed to execute one murderer in the past forty years. Its death row, current population one, is among the smallest in the country. For four years after a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision threw out the state’s system of having three judges decide whether an…
Technically speaking, Colorado hasn’t had a death row for several years — not since officials at the Colorado State Penitentiary stopped housing the prisoners awaiting execution all in one place and reassigned them to different tiers. The notion became even more elusive after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that juries,…
Slide Show So, Knight Rider is back. Which is one of those sentences that most people don’t want to hear, like “Your check engine light is on,” or “Hey, look, circus clowns!” But honestly, KITT and company aren’t the worst things that could come back from ’80s TV…
The Avalanche have been very good to us. When the team arrived from Quebec in 1996, they showed up with a pair of first ballot hall-of-famers, almost immediately traded for another, won us our first major sports championship and galvanized a latent hockey base that has since become one of…
View larger specimen In order to make more sense of the world around us, illustrator and public house naturalist Nate Stone is compiling here a taxonomy of different barflies. While you’re out and about in Denver, if you spot any of these specimens please add your observations about their habitat…
CU student and inveterate controversy magnet Max Karson has made plenty of headlines in recent years for his satirical writings and attention-getting stunts, as this February 21 More Messages blog outlines. However, his latest contretemps, spurred by a piece entitled “If It’s War the Asians Want…” that ran in CU’s…
Back in the dark ages of television (i.e., the mid-20th century), the term “breaking news” was typically reserved for the biggest stories — incidents so important that viewers needed to be informed about them immediately, regardless of the regular newscast schedule. In recent years, innovations like the bottom-of-the-screen video crawl…
Crepes ‘n Crepes is uncompromisingly, unabashedly and unstintingly French. The cooks are French. Owners Kathy Knight and Alain Veratti have imported all their iron crepe griddles from France. The ingredients and preparations — the Camembert and Chambord, ratatouille and sauce aux champignons — are French. And the space itself –…
The letter, received by fax last week, read like countless others before it. “ATTENTION: Director/CEO,” it began. “I write, asking for your indulgence in re-profiling funds to the tune of Twelve Million, Eight Hundred Thousand United States Dollars (US$12.8m) which we want to keep safely overseas under your supervision.” The…
After a winter of hibernating, the Denver Kickball Coalition (DKBC) is rinsing up with mouthwash, wiping that crusty green shit from its eyes and slicking back its unwashed hair with a fresh coat of pomade in anticipation of its eighth season as the Front Range’s most dynamic coed kickball league…
The February 14 Message column examined the problems local media types have had of late getting their hands on Denver Police Department reports, as well as a new high-tech system designed to address the difficulties. Since then, the DPD has done a decent job of e-mailing lists of offenses to…
The state Senate approved a bill last week that would finally allow liquor sales on Sundays, and the measure will now move to the House. But that might not be the biggest change for one of the Denver area’s largest spirits superstores. Applejack Wine & Spirits in Wheat Ridge is…
View larger image Nevada Total Number of Delegates: 33 Pledged: 25 Unpledged: 8 How to Recognize a Nevada Delegate: Nevadans like to claim that their state was named for the Spanish word that means “covered in snow.” This, of course, seems deliberately misleading to anyone who has visited Las Vegas…
In “Leadville ‘Disaster’ Declaration Releases Cascade of Dissent,” published by the Rocky Mountain News on February 25, staffer Todd Hartman reports that a recent announcement about the dangers of toxic water collected in a closed mine tunnel near Leadville was a carefully orchestrated affair conducted by Lake County commissioners and…
Our favorite winner from Westword’s twenty-third Best of Denver Awards has to be that for “Best (Very) Late-Night People Watching,” the Ramada Inn on Colfax: The Ramada Inn Downtown Denver is like a rock-and-roll RV park on weekend nights, when tour buses crowd the parking lot and bleary-eyed musicians trickle…
As reported in this story, Life Skills Center of Denver is the last chance at a high school diploma for many Denver dropouts. And now, thanks to the board of Denver Public Schools, the charter school is getting one last chance of its own…
Several years ago I was invited by the attorney for the Colorado Bikers Association to screen the film Unconstitutional: The War On Our Civil Liberties at their monthly meeting. I agreed and when I arrived there were around 150 diverse bikers at the VFW. Many were brandishing evangelical Christian and…
Hate it or love it, the Ultimate Fighting Championship is making its Denver homecoming. After the UFC was born in Denver in 1993, and returned to the city for its second bout in 1994, UFC matches began to spread to other states. And after 1995, when the UFC’s Ultimate Ultimate…
