This was better than sending out a cheery Christmas letter: So you believe in mandatory sentencing. By Saturday evening, my voice mail was full of messages from people across the country, friends and former colleagues who’d crowded into showings of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 — which, at most theaters, is…
Denver’s dailies and newscasts love to localize any story they can — if a plane crashes in India, a victim’s second cousin is found grieving in Longmont — but even with all the ink and airtime devoted to the passing of Ronald Reagan, they’ve overlooked Colorado’s connections to the fortieth…
Colorado has taken a serious beating in public print recently, with the Columbine High School massacre, the football rapes in Boulder, the Jon-Benet Ramsey case, and the repulsive police corruption that stains Denver’s once proud image. Denver has never pretended to be a civilized place. When you think of Denver,…
So, did you hear the one about how the commission investigating the University of Colorado recruiting program hung on every word of testimony…from an official at the Air Force Academy, the institution that raised the bar for sex-assault scandals? But Colonel Debra Gray’s appearance Tuesday before the Independent Investigative Commission…
The Columbine collection at the Colorado Historical Society stretches across fifteen linear feet. And this is just the paper collection. The three-dimensional items — the T-shirts, the teddy bears, the beanie babies, the banner from a Texas church — are kept in secured storage in two more departments in the…
Gary Barnett, the still-on-paid-leave-for-two-more-weeks coach of the University of Colorado football team, finally got to sing Tuesday before the panel investigating whether CU used alcohol or sex (as if the two were ever independent of each other) in the Buffs’ recruiting program. “There is no question in my mind that…
All of Denver’s panhandlers must be over at the State Capitol, lobbying to make marriage legal only when the two participants are not of the same sex, but of the same religion and, probably, on the same page of the hymnal. This week they sure weren’t hanging out along the…
“Democracy is not a spectator sport,” says Wes McKinley. The rancher/math teacher/trail-ride wrangler/cowboy poet has been an active participant in democracy for close to six decades, since he first learned all about his civic duty in a one-room schoolhouse in that dusty corner of southeastern Colorado where he still lives…
Welcome to Colorado, the sex-assault capital of the world, where our governor goes on national TV to talk not about snow falling over the Rockies, but fallout over the University of Colorado’s recruiting scandal — and the rape charges that initially got buried in a CU snow job. Eighteen months…
Like 89 million other people, Daniel Weiss was watching the Super Bowl, sitting at home in Colorado Springs and minding his own business — which, since he’s the full-time media and sexuality analyst for Focus on the Family, usually means minding everyone else’s business — when out popped Janet Jackson’s…
“Get your ass in here.” It’s another day at the Arapahoe County Clerk and Recorder’s Office — January 23, 2002, if you want to get picky — and Leesa Sale needs to talk to her boss, clerk Tracy Baker. “Get your ass in here,” she says. Almost every American worker…
Today, Castle Rock. Tomorrow, the world. Watch out, Michael Powell. This past June, Daniel Lewis, a twenty-year-old singer with the band Dysarranged, grabbed a mike and uttered these timeless words: “I want to dedicate this song to the Castle Rock police. I hate you fucking pigs.” The pigs never got…
One hot day this past summer, an owner of King’s Land Seafood, the dim sum mecca at Alameda Square, called in a panic after she spotted a utility truck cutting into the pavement right outside her place. This was it, she said. They were seizing her property. The city was…
The windows by the entry are still painted with evergreen and holly, but this building hasn’t seen a very merry Christmas for many, many years. The onetime True Value store stands empty, and beside the faux holly is a notice that the former occupant owes $11,376 in property taxes. The…
The bad news came not in a front-page story or on a TV broadcast. It arrived in a letter from the principal of Denver’s Fairview Elementary School. “I am very sad and regret to inform you of the death of one of our Fairview students,” Kathy Wiemer wrote to Fairview…
Welcome to Ver, Colorado. That’s the economical, creative side of the Mile High City. While Den is all about Cherry Creek and fur coats and sleepy thinking and SUVs that never go anywhere near the mountains, Ver is the edgy end of Denver. The place where necessity is the mother…
There’s no place like homeless for the holidays. At the initial meeting of the city’s new task force on homelessness, more than two dozen representatives of social-service organizations, the private sector and public office debated what to do with the residence-challenged folks who hang out on the 16th Street Mall,…
On Monday evening, there wasn’t a city booster in sight at the Diamond Cabaret & Steakhouse, the strip club that had just landed Denver all over the national press. No Angela Baier, Denver’s first-ever director of marketing. No Tom Clark, who heads the Metro Denver Network, the eco-devo branch of…
Pleased to Greet You While marketeers float puffy, potential slogans far above the Mile High City, one new program will take Denver’s message straight to the streets. Make that street — specifically, the 16th Street Mall. The Business Improvement District that stretches along the mall, both monitoring and funding its…
Hey, whined the city booster who’d just read my cheap shot at “Downtown Denver: A Great Place to Live, Work and Visit, or Dangerous Urban Jungle?,” the downtown residents’ forum held Tuesday night at — where else? — the Wynkoop Brewing Co., the restaurant founded by John Hickenlooper, now king…
“Meeting in fifteen minutes, people,” shouted the newspaper editor before slamming the door of his office. “That means everybody.” The water-cooler conversation started gushing. Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon. So the rumors were true: The paper was being sold. Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon. The paper being sold was not Westword, but the Denver…
“Shall the voters for the City and County of Denver adopt an Initiated Ordinance to require the city to help ensure public safety by increasing peacefulness — that is, by defusing political, religious and ethnic tensions, both locally and globally — through the identification and implementation of any systematic, stress-reducing…
