Writing about writing is precisely what gets writers in trouble, but I can’t resist. In fact, I can’t avoid it: There is no other way to explain how I embarked on a 200-mile drive around Denver, stumbled across both a snowboard angel and a crumpet, and discovered that a house,…
After all of the hullabaloo over media behemoth Clear Channel’s acquisition of competitor AMFM in March — not to mention the predictions of chaos the move was likely to inflict on the Denver radio scene — news that the Federal Communication Commission had signed off on the deal prompted the…
If Tiger Woods knows what’s good for him, he’ll keep an eye on the Wongluekiet twins. That’s because ten, twelve, maybe fifteen years from now, Aree Song Wongluekiet or his brother, Naree Song, might sneak up on Tiger and snatch away first-place money at, say, the $35 million Arnold Palmer…
The Mother Country Parent trap: The next time a state or county child-welfare official piously proclaims that they only take away children in cases of severe abuse, the next time they say they only do it when there is absolutely no alternative, the next time they say they wouldn’t even…
Ponciano Lazaro-Avina is a shy 26-year-old with a soft smile and an even softer voice. He works six days a week mowing grass, trimming hedges and planting flowers so that other people’s lawns will look nice. In the winter he shovels walks, blows snow and rakes away the soggy leaves…
Robert Iron needed to hit a wall. He was sitting in the passenger seat of a Suzuki Samurai cruising north up Federal Boulevard one Friday night last fall, and he wanted out. So the Samurai’s driver abruptly veered from the slow-moving parade of cars, pulling into a Circle K parking…
There were a lot of long faces dragging around the parking lot outside Bare Essence on August 18. One hundred and fifty dudes, ages eighteen through twenty, were surprised to learn that the age requirement to get into the Federal Heights strip joint had been jacked up to 21 overnight…
A key defendant in the bizarre Aspen crime spree of last summer, the first to take his case to trial, has been found guilty on two felony counts and now faces at least a ten-year prison sentence. And for two other suspects in the resort town’s violent youthquake who are…
Michael Carrier knows that asking politicians to be civil with one another is like asking lions not to chase zebras. But he just can’t help himself: His vision of politics is one with fewer carcasses on the Serengeti. That’s why Carrier, who is president of the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado,…
More than three and a half years after her murder, JonBenét Ramsey continues to make news from coast to coast. The August 28 edition of NBC’s Today opened with hype about her parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, preparing to speak with Boulder police, and the subsequent decision by the Ramseys’…
To an outsider looking in, Shane Swartz was on top of the world in the spring of 1997. Twenty-one years-old, handsome, polite, a servant of God with a body as tight as a drum skin, he was living the life he’d always been instructed to envision for himself. He’d begun…
Village Idiots Last, but not East: The first few paragraphs of T.R. Witcher’s “This Old Housing Project,” in the August 31 issue, left me confused. Was the author trying to gain sympathy for the plight of the residents by illustrating their squalid living conditions? If so, he failed. I wondered…
Oscar Paniagua is charming, articulate and personable, an immaculate dresser, the consummate salesman. Even the police say so. And over the past year, investigators estimate, the Venezuela-born Paniagua used that charisma to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars from clients who came seeking advice on marital, financial and health problems,…
As soon as Charmaine Barros enters her daughter’s vacant East Village apartment, in the shadows of downtown Denver, the smell of decay overwhelms her. She futilely opens the windows and the patio door leading to the second-floor balcony. Her daughter moved from the federally subsidized apartment a month ago, though…
Ollette Omedelena loves the two gurgling fountains in the backyard of her Washington Park home, even though listening to them sometimes makes her cry. For ten years, Omedelena cared for two women with severe developmental disabilities. One of them, a blind woman in her sixties named Jim Anna, would sit…
The Community College of Denver doesn’t worry too much about admission standards. Just about any potential student who wants to take a class there knows that he can probably get in. Unfortunately, that same approach seems to have been taken by computer hackers. CCD’s home page, at ccd.rightchoice.org, has been…
East High Farmer’s Market Under the orange and yellow tent, a man with an Australian accent looks at the drawing on the Big Mike’s Original Barbecue Sauce label, then looks at Mike. “Are you the Big Mike?” he finally asks. Mike McCrea looks down at his impressive belly. “Looks like…
Once upon a time, George Carlin was able to say with little fear of contradiction that his famous seven dirty words — shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits — couldn’t be heard on radio or television. But that was a long time ago, and today there’s little doubt…
Qwest for Ire Stall in the family: Thanks for keeping the name of Qwest in the spotlight with Patricia Calhoun’s “Life’s Bitter Here,” in the August 24 issue. Needless to say, they are not making friends by undoing the good that US West has done for the community. What Qwest…
Summer, Hygiene to Platteville Eight in the morning, and already the day promises to be another hot one as the men climb down from their pickups and clomp up the stairs of the Hygiene Cafe. There’s not a cloud in the bright-blue sky, not a hint of an afternoon storm…
Rocky Mountain News society scribe Dahlia Jean Weinstein recently made a discovery that doubtlessly caused followers of the lively local electronic dance music scene to accidentally let the baby pacifiers in their mouths drop to the floor along with their jaws: Apparently, Weinstein reported in a full-color spread in the…
Maybe law enforcement’s resistance to the idea of increased rave activity on the Front Range is due to a simple matter of taste (and a generation gap). After all, sheriffs are people, too, and they just might find the events less threatening if the music wasn’t so strange. (Arapahoe County…
