These are not good times for patients who depend on Denver Health Medical Center. Because of bad economic times, more people are without insurance, which means more people rely on Denver Health, whose primary responsibility is to provide health care to Denver’s poor and uninsured residents. But because of increased…
In his Saturday, June 22, column, Rocky Mountain News editor/publisher/ president John Temple pronounced, “The front page is our newspaper’s face” — an unfortunately timed metaphor, given that just two days later, a News cover photo of a fire victim appeared to put a testicle right in readers’ faces. The…
Newspapers love advertising — that’s a universal publishing truth. But Out Front Colorado, Denver’s best-known gay-oriented newspaper, was far from thrilled with an ad submitted by the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) committee of the National Lawyers Guild — so much so that the biweekly refused to print it. In…
The crowd didn’t riot. No one set himself on fire in the parking lot. There wasn’t a speck of angry talk about hiring a hit man to whack out Claudio Reyna or Clint Mathis. In fact, as the biggest game in the history of U.S. men’s soccer came to its…
Lots of Luck His passion is in tents: Regarding Laura Bond’s Backwash in the June 20 issue: Who thought a DIA-looking tent plopped in the middle of a parking lot next to the highway was a good idea? Who decided to pitch the Cirque du Soleil tent right next to…
This fall, the Jefferson County School District will open a new academy. Even with all the variations that public schools have seen in recent years, this one should be unusual. “It will be a unique program,” promises John Adsit, director of alternative schools for the district. “We’re inventing it. We…
May 28 was a classic Memorial Day-weekend Saturday in the metro area. It was a day to spend time with the family in the park or take in a Rockies game at Coors Field. It certainly wasn’t a day to be inside a stuffy second-floor office in Aurora, waiting for…
Tim Seastedt had a feeling about bugs. Under the proper conditions — and given enough time — perhaps insects could succeed where farmers, ranchers and biologists have been failing for decades: at beating back diffuse knapweed, one of the nastiest, most invasive plants in the West. Five years after Seastedt…
The tourism-and-hospitality industry didn’t stay angry at Governor Bill “Nuclear Winter” Owens for long. On Monday night — just eight days after Owens told the nation that “all of Colorado is on fire” — HOSTPAC, the Colorado Restaurant Association’s political action committee, held a reception in the governor’s honor to…
If a company can be said to have reached the big-time when it becomes the subject of jokes, then Clear Channel, the largest owner of radio stations in the known universe, has truly arrived. Here’s an Internet favorite that needles the San Antonio-based enterprise for its aggressive use of voicetracking,…
There’s an even-money chance that the next Oscar de la Hoya was somewhere in the building Monday night — shadow-boxing in a back hall, sleeping in the snack bar or telling his friends in the bleachers that his time had come, that he’s just gotta win the tournament this time…
Fanning the Flames Hot scoop: I want to thank you for Michael Roberts’s excellent article regarding the lack of media coverage during the recent outbreak of wildfires across the state (“Hot Spots,” June 13). A friend and I traveled to Glenwood Springs the weekend of June 8 and 9 and…
Friday, May 3, 7:15 p.m., 13th Avenue and Pennsylvania Street Six men and six women are gathered across the street from a coffee shop, listening to Denver police officer Stacey Goss lay the ground rules for the night. “If I have to take my gun out, get behind me,” she…
Brian and Carmela Giovanetti were the first visitors to arrive at the Children’s Museum on Saturday, April 6. They had come early to prepare for their daughter’s fifth birthday party, and their prudence paid off. Because the parking lot was nearly empty, they were able to get one of the…
Since he moved to the village of Louviers 35 years ago, Jaime Smith has often stood in his back yard, surveyed the rolling grasslands behind his home and imagined the herds of buffalo that once roamed there. But lately, Smith has begun imagining something else on the horizon: bulldozers. Smith…
Jefferson County takes its self-appointed role as “gateway to the Rockies” seriously — so seriously that it’s created a Jeffco wildfire-prevention campaign, complete with a jingle contest based on the humorous rhyming roadside signs that made Burma-Shave famous from the 1920s to the early 1960s. And while no one’s finding…
You don’t have to be a soothsayer to realize that wildfires will be the biggest story in Colorado for months to come. Remember the so-called Summer of Violence? With apologies to Tennessee Williams, this will be the Summer of Smoke. The tale has been building since earlier this year, when…
Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) and Charlie Burns (Myron McCormick) enter the Ames Billiard Hall, a seedy New York City pool establishment. Burns (reverently): It’s quiet. Felson: Yeah, like a church. Church of the Good Hustler. Burns: It looks more like a morgue to me. Those tables are the slabs where…
The Meter’s Still Running A monumental mistake: I think Patricia Calhoun’s “The Big Cheese,” in the June 6 issue, was a great article. The recent city obsession with monuments to Mayor Wellington Webb is premature with thirteen months of his administration left to go. A lot can happen in thirteen…
Marcus didn’t feel at all like an aristocrat when he woke up next to his wife in their room at the Aristocrat Motel. He felt like a 27-year-old recently laid-off motor-home mechanic from Thornton. He felt like a guy with an eviction notice in the back pocket of his jeans…
The first annual Erickson Scott commemorative Italian scooter rally began the morning of June 2 with a festive Sunday brunch of powdered doughnuts, pizza, and Red Bull on the rocks, splash of vodka optional. The gathering point for the mass ride was Soulflower, a club-culture clothing and record boutique on…
Apparently no one ever taught Thomas Jefferson High School geography teacher Alan Chimento not to bite the hand that feeds him — or provides him with soda pop. Because despite a 1998 contract granting Pepsi exclusive rights to sell its products in Denver Public Schools, Chimento tried to run a…
